this post was submitted on 05 Jul 2025
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From my perspective this "pinnacle of human ingenuity" is actually a farse, because it relies on a monoculture and is therefore unsustainable in the long term.
Don't get me wrong, the engineering is cool and I understand how important the mass production of food has been up to this point in human history, but there is another side of the story. The advent of machinery like this is part of why modern farmers use so many pesticides, herbicides, and fertilizers - a monoculture depletes the soil of its nutrients and decreases natural pest control, necessitating the use of chemicals. The use of those chemicals has in turn driven huge ecosystem changes that we are only just beginning to understand the impact of (such as mass pollinator die-offs, changes to soil microbiology, pollution of fresh water sources, pollution of cropland soil, and more) as well as impacting humans in ways we don't understand since some of those chemicals make their way into our bodies.
One 4 meter line wheat and the next one a different crop, with 3 or 4 crops alternating, would be fine too. Especially with kilometers long fields.
Edit: sonething like this:
This is not really doable. It may be for small scale production of vegetables, but not for anything that needs great efficency. In the farming sector the trend goes towards bigger machines and bigger fields to increase efficiency and also to eliminate the need for work done by humans through automation. Concepts like this are incredibly hard to adapt, since they significantly increase the amount of work without increasing the profit. Also due to different plants having different needs it becomes significantly harder to actually harvest the needed amounts in order to make a profit.
I mean, one track can be as wide as a field sprayer as well. Not more work then.
For harvesting you would need to change the tool or adjust the machine for every row.
What, why? Barely two cultures have the same harvest time.
You seem to think of a lot of different cultures in rows. What i'm trying to say is, maybe 4 cultures in a field 4 times the size, but alternating rows.
So what if your rows were 1/2 mile wide and 1/2 mile long, and you had dozens of these rows with about 4-6 cultures interspersed amongst them? It would be like a single field with several rows, but at a scale that makes 120' sprayers and 60' combine headers make sense. You know, like a farm.
No, not a half mile wide but a few meters wide.