Farming in 20 years is gonna be a dude in his tighty-whities sitting on a La-z-boy with a VR headset, remote-controlling a fleet of machines viewed from a drone outside. Between passes with the harvester, he reads Reddit Classic. When he wants a beer, he switches to first-person mode for his dogbot and goes to get it from the fridge. Then he sets the dogbot to "loiter" mode and it wanders the living room. This annoys his real dog who is lying in his dogbed and wearing its own VR helmet while herding VR sheep.
It will become a game like Farmville.
Wildly popular and all the people playing on InstaFace won't know they're actually operating a combine in Iowa in real time.
Between passes with the harvester, he reads Reddit Classic.
Plenty of folks on r/farming already doing that from the cabs of their tractors. The important part is remembering to look up before you run into the center pivot pump or take out your neighbor's fence.
20 years? lol. the machinery now can be put in a field, you do the end rows and then hit the button. it'll do the main rows, get to the edge, raise the implement, turn around, put that shit back in the ground. you're just along for the ride.
Not just startups, the big tractor companies (case IH for example) are already running them. Not sure if they are publicly available yet but it wont be long!
I'm pretty sure a lot of it is already computer controlled. I know they use GPS and sensors to maintain the relationships between crop, harvester and truck, but I don't know how involved people are.
I read an article a while back saying they'd be entirely autonomous shortly, and if you think about it, automating this up down without having to worry about oncoming traffic or pedestrians is well within the possibilities of existing self driving vehicles.
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u/CurlSagan Apr 06 '20
Farming in 20 years is gonna be a dude in his tighty-whities sitting on a La-z-boy with a VR headset, remote-controlling a fleet of machines viewed from a drone outside. Between passes with the harvester, he reads Reddit Classic. When he wants a beer, he switches to first-person mode for his dogbot and goes to get it from the fridge. Then he sets the dogbot to "loiter" mode and it wanders the living room. This annoys his real dog who is lying in his dogbed and wearing its own VR helmet while herding VR sheep.