AI is coming for agriculture, but farmers aren’t convinced

Scope and Framing of the Article

• Several comments criticize the article’s headline for generalizing from a small sample of Australian livestock producers to “farmers” and “agriculture” as a whole.
• Others point out that livestock is formally part of agriculture, but agree that crops and livestock have very different tech needs and adoption patterns, so broad claims feel misleading.

Existing Automation and “AI” in Agriculture

• Commenters note that advanced tech is already used: GPS-guided, mostly self-driving planters and harvesters; variable-rate seeding and fertilization; drones for spraying; robotic milking; and sophisticated slaughterhouse automation in some countries.
• On large livestock operations, wearable sensors on cattle track health and behavior and can automatically trigger vet visits.
• Some say big operations even run on-prem server racks and sensor networks; others are skeptical this is common outside very large agribusinesses.

Labor, Costs, and Incentives

• Multiple threads stress that agriculture is low-margin and politically constrained: food prices are kept low, making it hard to raise wages or fund high-tech systems.
• Disagreement over how “large” farm subsidies really are and whether they “scale,” but broad agreement that cheap or precarious labor (e.g., migrant/undocumented workers) is central to current economics.
• Rural areas struggle to attract professionals (teachers, doctors); debate centers on whether this is a “labor shortage” or simply salaries and living conditions not meeting the true market price.

Monoculture vs Polyculture and the Robot Future

• One vision: small, plant-level robots enable high-yield polycultures, reduced pesticides, better soil health, and more resilience.
• Counterview: economies of scale and current machinery economics strongly favor ever-larger monocultures; automation will mostly mean driverless combines and synchronized fleets rather than diverse plantings.
• There’s detailed debate about intercropping corn and beans, harvesting logistics, soil degradation under monoculture, and whether polyculture could become profitable per acre if robotics matures.

Farmer Priorities and Agtech Hype

• Farmers are portrayed as wanting simple, robust tools that reliably remove specific tasks, not flashy “AI.”
• A field robotics engineer describes repeated hype cycles in ag robotics (e.g., strawberry picking): technically hard, economically marginal, companies overpromise, fail, and leave farmers more skeptical.

Ethics, Safety, and Labels

• Some are disturbed by hyper-optimized livestock systems and hope synthetic meat or “AI‑free” / “human-made” food labels will gain traction.
• Others worry about pairing fallible AI systems with dangerous farm equipment, given already high rates of injury.
• In developing countries, commenters link poor farming practices to poverty and incentives, not lack of information, noting widespread mobile phone access.