Finding this channel was a thunderbolt. In a world where its profitable to foam at the maw and warn everyone how shit things are going to be in the indeterminate future, hearing someone enthuse and extol about what our future holds is a tonic.
The future possibilities are great. however the chances of anyone choosing reason and progress over self destruction and societal regression are next to nothing.
As a 5th generation farmer in Nebraska, I love your perspective! Optimism for the future of farming is abundant, but often not grounded in reality. We will always need farmers- even if they are commanding a fleet of drones.
@@virutech32 Post biological is the only way I see it. The kind of 'fully automated' you'd need to get rid of any generic type of 'farmer' job is so advanced AI as to replace humans entirely. Even if the 'farmer' is spending his days monitoring and adjusting complex biosphere balances across an entire garden world that's subject to vast automated farming to feed an interstellar empire, he'll still be a farmer.
@@colinsmith1495 this is assuming that farming requires general intelligence which seems like a big assumption. not sure where that assumption is coming from. making minute adjustments to large complex systems like u said would seem to be the perfect situation to employ simple narrow AI like we already have. fact is most every aspect of farming, when broken down & with decent machine vission/locomotion in play, isn't much more complicated than keeping certain levels of chemical concentration, humidity, temperature, etc. within predefined levels. The only part of that i can see requiring general intelligence is the part where ur doing the basic research to find those levels & even that is mostly just about repetitively growing things under varying conditions to find the maximum yield which is also pretty automatable.
Just something else I wanted to input, is that I think why a lot of farmers are older than 50 is that farms usually require a lot of investment. Typically, it's only until your late 30s or 40s where adults have not just a stable income, but be MORE than stable, as in, having much more money due to Roth IRA, investments in stocks and bonds, and personal relationships with businesmen.
@@colinsmith1495 why complicate things though. god created a world that gives up food. Farming was invented to get power and control, thats all. Like Jesus said... The sparrows and whatnot... the lilies....
Hardly something you can live off on. I believe in grown meat, because meat is a good way to biologically compress nutrients. We will never bypass plants and vegetables, but we don't need to bring animals to life only to turn them into food either. Also it's wasteful in both resources and time. Dandelions, however, is a red alert scenario on a space station. Like Dead Space, but it's also The Happening.
I use them sometimes in salads still, as my mom always liked to harvest them, and if you can bring the bitterness down a bit, but as other mentioned they're nutritionally weak, and there's many different salads greens, many less bitter. Beets is a favorite, since I can eat the beet too :)
@@gandalf8216 speak for yourself - I've lived off dandelions many times in my life. They're pretty nutritious, being high in vitamin k - I feel the leaves are the most nutritious, but I bet to get a complete diet, the entire plant (minus the latexy stem) should be eaten.
I know lots of farmers in Ohio, but there are less than when I was a kid. Only like half the farm kids I went to school with stayed farmers. My parents let our land go natural. And lots of land went to building homes. I haven't been back to Defiance County in a long time, but I hear it looks different. An odd combination of more sprawl and less people and less farms. My dad worked for General motors and let neighbor farmers use out land and keep the crop and my dad took the tax incentive. Later he took a tax incentive to let the land go to Forrest. I am sure it's totally back to Forrest now as it was close 20 years ago
@@isaacarthurSFIA Funny farming story. They rotated between corn and soy as crops, but I didn't know soy was edible as a plant to I went to a sushi restaurant for the first time after I left Ohio. They put a bowl of edime on the table and I was like omg people eat this? Mind blown.
@@oliviamaynard9372 Possibly worse, my county mostly grows grapes, corn, and soy, with grapes closest to where I lived and soy furthest, so I usually only saw soy when moving about 60 mph down the road and I thought they were strawberries or nut bushes :) I'd heard folks say they were soy but assumed they were jsut wrong since no one ever sold it at the farmer's markets like they did corn and everything else.
I miss that homegrown sweet corn from the farmers markets and roadside stands, and heirloom tomatoes that are almost unimaginably sweet, reminding you that tomatoes are indeed a fruit. Thank the glaciers for that fine Ohio soil!
Huh, I never realized or even really considered that Isaac Arthur lived in a rural area or be engaged in farming and/or gardening. I guess I always imagined him as some sort of professor at some university somewhere. i think its really cool that the same person who pretty much shaped my vision of humanities future with things like space habitats and Dyson swarms and such does things like farming or beekeeping as a job/hobby.
there's no science fiction departments in universities. Isaac Arthur has a breadth of knowledge about theoretical ideas. Academics go much deeper into the specifics of how things work.
@@dansmith1661 no it wasn't there's literally no signs of genetic engineering SARS cov2. In fact, the protein binding domain It's completely outside the computational biology predictions for efficient Ace receptor binding protein. What that means is we couldn't have made it even if we want to. If it was engineered there would be marks all over it and we would have a good grasp on how that protein binding domain works
@@Cameronmid1 You are either terribly disinformed or lying. The Fauci e-mails prove that COVID 19 is known to use a process to infect humans that has never been seen in nature.
I'd like to see how the bees' navigation skills cope with living in a cylindrical environment where they can loop around and return to where they started.
Can't wait for more action in the Agri-voltaic space. As solar panels get cheaper to match the rock bottom in Ultra violet LED, 1-10 acre farms will have far more variety than they do now. One person managing an installation will be far more common than one person being a combine operator.
Cellular agriculture and fully or partially automated greenhouses are probably going to be major game-changers in the industry. I for one am one of those folk getting increasingly interested in agriculture as a profession! :)
This was definitely my favorite video, out of everything you've done. I'm an aspiring agronomist, (1.5 more years to go!) - at 28 I was a system admin for a small local agricultural company, and saw how much data and technology we were starting to do. I dropped everything to go back to school, because I could foresee a lot of the things you mentioned in this video. I'm hoping to be part of the next big agricultural revolution. I would not be surprised if fully automated farms happen in my lifetime.
There's been a drive lately on some reservations to try and favor indigenous bees. While they aren't as efficient and don't produce honey. The diversity of species keeps certain diseases from spreading.
Farming is such a fundamental topic that any small improvement to one of it's many aspects can indeed have huge consequences. What i mean by that: water, soil quality, land, weather, light, seeds, techniques used to grow and harvest, etc. every change to one of these can be BIG. Nobody knows what the future of farming will bring, but i'm overall very optimistic.
Isaac, I really appreciated this video. As a small farmer, diversified fruit and veg, who also does a lot of teaching on ag, I am very interested in this issue. I agree with nearly everything you say in this issue. And like you I am optimistic about farming. I see a lot of young people expanding what farming means right now, whether that is front yard farming, podponics, or using fungi and other microbes. I personally think fungi will be used for a lot of fiber products in construction and clothing. The complementary issue that needs to be including in any discussion of food is nutrients. Just like you talk about one of the major issues for cities is the need to dissipate heat, the same goes for waste nutrients. Disposing of waste without wrecking the environment is a really big issue. The other end of the nutrient pipe is the farm and the need for more sustainable sources of nitrogen and phosphorus. As our population urbanizes and we try to clean up the environment we will need to close the loop on poop and other forms of waste. This may mean creating rings of farms around cities to recycle the nutrients and provide some of the food and fiber the people in those cities need. In some case the farms may be land extensive and in others they may be in warehouse and greenhouse structures knit into the fabric of the cities.
My future is watching my sheep and cattle eat grass, my chickens produce eggs, my berry bushes provide berries and my vegetable gardens grow. Ok so I will have to buy many staples but producing a good portion of your own food is so rewarding.
Regarding smart farming: I have a 73 yo farming client with approximately the acres you suggested. He owns a Smart Tractor, with a Smart Seeder, and a Smart Combine. Claims to only work he has to do now is load to seeder, and haul the harvest away. Everything else is programmed and GPS, including emails from the equipment about maintenance. Now, this is really fancy considering I'm probably in a more Rural area than you. Anyways, technology has vastly improved farming, since my days in fostercare driving a old Case Tractor with a plow and seeder. Happy Farming!
I've gone non-cow for a while, there are some things I miss, but non-dairy ice cream is often just better than cow titty ice cream. It's also fun to enjoy different plants as the basis for different ice creams, like coconut milk ice creams are very distinct and mix with flavors differently than a nut milk ice cream.
This was a super extensive show, may have to watch again. But so well done!! I am fascinated by the future of agriculture, so this was a great joy to watch! And thanks for the subtitles, makes it easier for a foreigner (Dutch) like me, sometimes your accent is a tiny bit challenging to me. Other than that, really love this channel!!
My university (QUT) is big on robotics. One of the robots is using machine vision to pick fruit by colour. Another group is using a small robot to deliver targeted herbicide to weeds. It also uses machine vision and is using much less herbicide than otherwise.
I love the after-Christmas seed catalogs. Of course, it's all too easy to buy more than you can plant and take care of in the available time. But there's nothing like growing your own fresh food. It's interesting how some people have gotten used to the commercial stuff, and aren't interested in real food. For example, my wife likes her peaches kinda crunchy, while I like to pick them off the tree when they are dead ripe. We have chickens running about the yard. While we didn't save any money by raising hens, I love watching them run around the yard. Most animals don't run unless they have a good reason, but the chickens joyfully scatter when we open the door to the coop in the morning. Sometimes, we watch them running from one place to the other during the day. Is it anthropomorphizing to describe them as joyful? Contrary to popular opinion, those little dinosaurs are relatively intelligent. In the future? Considering the size of the industry that supports home gardeners, I expect that they will sell automatic weeders and the like. They are already experimenting on using image recognition and lasers to weed fields. Once the neural links have been trained, making them the same size and cost of a good rototiller will be possible. I still want to pluck the tomatoes straight off the vine and eat them, but picking several bushels to can is something that I would happily relegate to my gardening robot.
15:21 I think it also depends on how much we've already produced as well as what we utilize from what's been produced. So if I need furniture normally, if I use my grandparent's, I don't need one more for me. If it's unusable, then I do. If I make it usable, then I don't need another.
Isaac, It’s important to think of farming as a water as well as land usage endeavor. We can’t grow without space and we can’t grow without water. Water is universal to life as we know it and is a limited commodity that varies with droughts and floods. What is your take on water management in the coming decades?
There's a category of farm you missed: those producing prestige goods for export. Irish dairy and meat are an example of this where the exports command a premium abroad due to their quality, which means it's practical to have smaller farms, though most farmers will double-job anyway. I suspect one of the things skewing the age numbers high is that "beginner farmer" include those inheriting the farm from their parents, even if they've spent their youth and middle ages doing as much work, if not more, on the farm as their parents. That's generally been the case here for a long time, and I expect the same is the case elsewhere.
As a GMO opponent, one of my big problems is not the technology per se, but it's current use: most modifications are meant to make plants more resistant to pesticides, in order to allow more pesticides being sprayed and more environmental harm being done. At the same time, farmers become dependent on the GMO companies to provide them with seeds, creating monopolies and fragile supply chains in the most important industry of all.
I agree. I am perfectly on board with genetically engineered plants in principle, since I was thirteen and read the Swamp Thing origin story where Dr Alec Holland is dreaming of giant tomatoes growing in the Sahara. We could really use some species designed to revert desertification, store carbon underground and provide nutritious food. But that is not what biotech corporations are using genetic engineering to do. Instead they do almost exclusively what Chris describes. I suspect that the current business model of genetic copywright laws, giant distributor oligarchies and stockholders demanding revenue is inherently hostile to universally beneficial use of genetic engineering.
why not say you're a gmo specific application opponent? You're just confusing people how you put it. I'm pro-GMO as a technology, but not for certain applications and means (like let's not sue everyone over cross-contamination) too. I just don't call myself anti-GMO, as I'm not and neither are you. And the issue you have is with the farming industry relying on seeds to where they screw themselves over by allowing gmo companies to take advantage of them like that - so put the blame where it belongs: with seed-relying, outdoor farmers. That's why I like indoor farming - allows for non-gmo (if ppl want that).
My dad has a non honey producing native beehive that's super Frost resistant. He just brings the colony inside the garage during the winter to help em along a little bit.
I do automation in varying parts of the nursery industry. Farming in Space? I don't think the horticulturist, geneticist and greenhouse managers I work with would have any trouble at all. We are really good at this.
14:41 Population 20 Billion by 2121 is an estimate which doesn't take into account the 'Demographic Transition' & the dire ecological overshoot we are facing now. Please don't over look the fact that across ALL cultures its a truism that when child-bearing aged women (not minors) have adequate education, running water & consistent access to birth control women ALWAYS choose to have replacement level numbers of children w/in 2 generations. 10+ Billion demographics is the part of the Expanse universe which COMPLETELY breaks w/hard science fiction... because its a fantasy.
Good video, still I'm a little disappointed you didn't mention weeding robots, as this is a new technology that promises much in the future. Particularly in the context of the historical trend of reducing labor per calorie produced.
Thank you. This was interesting. I now have a strong mental image of a vast Agricultural Space Castle taking in relevant fertilizer, soil, water, etc. It sells produce and other food, along its trans orbital course. It could adjust its purchasing accordingly and sustain a population in the process. (Edit Genetically engineered Maple Tree Bacon is superior to my previous statement.)
@@realityisenough I think they said that to make a sarcastic point - we'll just go from regular milk to potato milk, same plastic jug. The milk where I live comes in glass, cartons, plastic, nothing (I bring my own), etc.
NGL if I could part “own” a “smart allotment” for specific crops and items with an option to buy off others for other specialised or less common items then have that delivered I would sign up immediately. I can easily see rooftops and balcony squares blooming with auto-crop “greenhouses”, car parks, shopping malls and supermarkets set up with on demand “fresh” herb/speciality gardens that you can order for pick-up as you do your daily/regular amble. Bit of green, no hassle way more economised foods, yeah I could see the supply and demand for items that need to be fresh spiking with that sort of ease becoming available.
I wish you'd covered food forests a lot more instead of just very briefly mentioning polyculture. Since I believe that without a dependency on large and dumb machines for harvesting, food forests would be the most efficient, ecological, and lowest maintenance option just as they'd been prior to the invention of those machines. Some of the oldest food forests are several millennia old and require little to no maintenance aside from still requiring manual harvesting. Another thing worth mentioning is that plants need more than just raw chemicals or red/blue light. For instance, some proteins need UV light to fold properly and plants are able to absorb soil bacteria made molecules (amino acids and proteins) up to around a 1000 molar mass through their roots. All of this is rarely considered in hydroponic setups which just focus on common chemical nutrients and providing plants with red/blue light. Similarly, greenhouses, despite using the sun for lighting, use glass that blocks most of the sun's UV light. Furthermore, herbicides, pesticides, and fungicides damage the symbiotic microbiome which provide plants with premade molecules in exchange for some glucose. By limiting a plant's nutrients and removing any symbiotic biology, plants cannot reach their genetic potential and become susceptible to diseases and pests in addition to producing lower quality food. Measuring the sugar concentration in a plant's sap with a brix refractometer is a way of measuring it's health with anything above a 12 being very healthy, 6ish to 12 being okayish with the produced food at least being tasty even if insects can still attack the plant and anything below a 6 is pretty bad with high pest susceptibility and the food produced being tasteless, bland, and just generally unfit for human consumption despite it being what tends to be available at the supermarket. Sources: ruclips.net/video/NKIgqa49rMc/видео.html modernfarmer.com/2017/02/plant-food-forest-winter/ www.startafoodforest.com/ ruclips.net/video/D1wJefaFrVI/видео.html ruclips.net/video/bnNOvA3diDU/видео.html
As for lactose in milk, that's already dealt with cheaply in lactose free milk that only uses a naturally occurring enzyme lactase, naturally found in people that can metabolise lactose to glucose, it is simply added to milk to convert lactose to glucose, that is why lactose free milk tastes so nice
We can already artificially produce honey. High fructose corn syrup gets you 99.9% of the way there. Add some caramel coloring and artificial flavoring and you have something that you need a spectrograph to differentiate.
The waggle dance isn't actually necessary to bee foraging! It turns out that the waggle dance behavior is vestigial for wide open spaces where navigation is easy, it only improves bee performance in the honeybee's native habitat of thick jungle.
I considered it, but I've never been able to find any discussion of that approach in terms of higher net productivity unfortunately, I suspect its just not be done enough to get a good data pool or no one's collected that pool.
@@isaacarthurSFIA true - I bet it would be more efficient to grab electricity from plant versions of neurons than something that blocks the sunlight from plant growth.
20:40 what you need is some kind of special berry or vegetable (aka. the magic money tree) which could be specially engineered, grown in greenhouses or even completely artificial environments in LED lit warehouses, marketed at the very rich, and farmed largely by people who want to shelter money from tax by investing it in magic money tree farms.
you don't need to specially engineer one - there're ornamental pepper plants that're perfect! Also bonsai trees are pretty small and they grow berries. This really shouldn't be hard to do. Also many green veggies grow in greenhouses/artificial environments really well, especially herbs which have some of the most nutrients of any food.
@@AKUJIVALDO no. Ornamental peppers are only a few dollars at home depot. Maybe bonsai are expensive, but I'm just saying it's pretty cheap and small to get a lot and in the future, if people can get bioreactors of their own microbes - it'll be even smaller and cheaper yet. I guess you'll need 'money', but that money would come out of the supermarket budget, so it pays for itself and thensome.
That statistic about the average age of new farmers being so high really caught my attention. I have two theories. 1. Farming suffers as a societal burnout profession. People get tired of the rat race and start farming as an escape. 2. People inherit the family farm after their parents pass away or become too old to keep up with the labor. One of the guys I worked with in the military might be a solid example of this. He technically had a conflict of interest because of the net worth of his stake in the family farm, and he knew how to run a farm, but he wasn't technically a "Farmer".
My theories: - the agricultural industry used to be larger, so those who worked or lived in that time would be wanting to or at least know how to farm - farming takes skill, so older people have the time and skill to do it (idk how to run a large farm, even with automation - I'm younger)
Theory Number 1 sort of fits, my mom works at General Motors now, but plans to buy a small farm to retire to, and already keeps chickens in her backyard.
When people usually talk about feeding the world they forget about logistics and nutrition in favor of talking about keeping everyone satiated. As someone who is active i can tell you there's just no practical way to get enough nutrition from just plant based foods and in fact it's a bad thing to be easily satiated by a food when you need to cram down enough nutrients & calories to not fatigue at the worst moment, besides if you prefer a plant diet over a balanced one you'll get hungry far faster & who knows when the next time you get to enjoy a proper meal might be. To truly feed the world algae and soylent really wont be enough, although the consequences such diet might have on the body might make for a spooky subplot in a novel.
@@nenmaster5218 the issue is it's a politicised topic so you get textbook idiots bickering over what is and isn't right based on what they feel is true. Since this requires considerably less effort than using empirical evidence everybody does it that way except for a minority and as such "facts" are made up and inconvenient truths are forgotten. That's what I think might be the case here
Dairy lies about how hard they have it. The difficulties come from all the government subsidies, not in spite of it. Canada's dairy farmers do just fine thank to supply side controls
Once I mentioned agriculture at my country is ripe for modernization (automation, sensors, machines, etc.) considering pandemic, part-timer wage below minimum... and got response akin to "Ya didn't ever worked by hands, mate.". I had several summer part-time jobs as a teenager in agriculture, worse jobs than driving a jackhammer horizontally (harder and more itching than that). Gardening has been in our family as a hobby for generations. I know there are all kinds of Open Source projects for farming. I keep hearing about aqua-cultures starting up, which isn't that different from plugging fishtank filter into pots with herbs or vegetables (just on a large scale). The latter is something I'm considering doing. Heck, lot of countries are investing already into automation and IT in agriculture.
Don't forget that the land used for pasture of beef cattle is usually unsuitable for growing anything but grass unless you apply a great deal of assistance in the form of irrigation and fertilizer. The only reason these grass-fed cattle are then shipped to feed lots and fattened on grain is because the USDA's grading system favors cattle with the fat content only possible by doing that before slaughter.
We already have soylent green, atleast a natural real life versions. For example, if you're old enough, we're present on the eastern seaboard around the mid 20th century when you partook of seafood you may have consumed something that fed on some of the microorganisms that broke down the remains of those who died on the titanic
the issue to me is more that they're carnivorous and so eating something that ate other animals isn't vegan to me. It's like carnivorous plants - are they vegan?
Veganism is about refraining from exploiting sentient beings. Seas sponges are technically animals, but they hardly even have differentiated cells/tissues, let alone a brain so I don't think there is an ethical problem with killing them. It is not about arbitrary classifications, unlike the moral framework that leads most people to be okay with killing and eating animals but not okay with killing or eating humans. There are no consistent categorical classification systems in the messy world we live in, which is why it doesn't make any sense to be repulsed by the murder of humans and not other animals which probably have subjective experiences nearly as rich as those of humans.
I think greenhouses are going to be much more common in the near future. In much of our country, water is an issue, and irrigation from wells is not permitted unless your property claim, and thus your water claim, is one of the oldest in the area. Rain is inconstant. Rains at the wrong time can be as damaging for a crop as no rain, but the sun is regular in its schedule, if sometimes attenuated by clouds. The same can be said for heat waves and cold snaps. In combination, I see greenhouses as being the answer. You can precisely control watering, and somewhat control the temperature, while still using the free sunlight, and also minimize evaporation and subsequent loss of irrigation water to the environment. In the past, the cost of building a greenhouse, and the size of the equipment involved in farming, has mitigated against widespread adoption of greenhouses, but costs have come down noticeably, and robotic garden tenders means that one person doesn' need to sit six feet up on the top of a tractor, that by itself hogs two lanes of highway, before counting the implement it's pulling. Instead, a swarm of dog-sized robots can amble between the plants doing all the work, picking bugs and weeds until it is time for the harvest. It also means that if a grasshopper swarm comes in, they'll largely be stopped by the glass, (well, "glass"), walls, and even if they get in, the damage can potentially be contained to a single section, all without having to buy expensive patented seed, again, that lock you in to only selling your resulting crop to the company you bought it from, again. I also think the future will move away from cereals. As you point out, cereals are popular because they're easy, but take the human labor part out of the cost of intensive farming, and I think the future will have a much more varied diet of vegetables, with bread being only one option rather than a necessity. Another point in the favor of greenhouses are the laws that make it difficult to bust sod for farming, and may consider long-fallow fields as now "native" and thus off limits to cultivation, but it's seemingly easy to throw up a building.
this was a really well-made video that touched on a lot in a short time and probably could've gone on longer, but I covered the remaining details in the comments section (helps the yt algorithm anyway).
It's worth noting that things like biofuels would also increase farming for example 35% of the US supply of corn is being used as ethanol feedstock and it could go up by more
You can buy Soylent at most Walmarts. The green version is mint flavor and pretty good. The Banana and Strawberry flavors of soylent aren't bad but they do taste like your generic artificial banana/strawberry flavors not like actual banana's or strawberries.
Not sure if I understood you correctly on this part, but I like that idea of fooling my senses that I am eating my favorite meat dish when I am actually eating veggies
I have two years of bucket gardening under my belt and haven't managed to keep a single plant alive. So yeah, in a SHTF scenario I'm plant food. I need those robot farmers pronto!
We already Have experienced that food shortage issue due to biofuel food overproduction. Ethanol is a form of biofuel. During the 0bama admin, one reason we suddenly had gas climb from $2s to >$4 was the govt requirement for year round ethanol additive in gas. Many Corn farms were shifted from food to fuel. Many other crops were taken out of production and corn planted for fuel. Due to this intervention, gas nearly doubled in price, food prices soared - a typical loaf of bread doubled -and many foods dramatically increased in prices. The cost to transport most goods increased nationwide, as trucking fuels cost increased. Eventually a new administration unlocked oil exploration & drilling contracts & gas went below $2 again, but the high costs for foods & transportation prices remained long term.
Personally I can see that being a strategy for food security... in some countries. Corn is usually fed to humans and animals (if not converted to biofuel), so without such a gov policy, market economy would make farmers grow just about as much food as human and animals need to eat. This would be a problem if a really bad drought hits and food production drops unexpectedly -- people would pay as high as they can to not starve to death, and famine would hit the poor people. So instead the admin can use "ethanol requirement" to jack up the demand for corn, so there would be more corn produced than corn eaten in most years; and if corn production drops, the admin can just roll back the requirement to release a lot of ethanol corn into the food market, potentially saving lots of people from starvation. Well at least that's how I understand why some corn importers (like China and Japan) have such a policy--food security. The US exports a lot of corn, and if corn production drops the country can just export less, so they might not really need this policy for food security.
- that's why you need locally grown food - forget the transportation part of the supply chain - cut out the middleman! - you also forgot the part about how the corn genes to make the cellulose break down quicker could ruin the corn crops designed for food consumption. - You have to realize so much corn goes to feeding livestock - if we remove that from the equation, we'll have more corn than we ever need! All this is because of inefficiencies due to an unsustainable food system. Making it even more unsustainable iwth oil drilling doesn't make sense.
@@extropiantranshuman we already produce enough food for 10 Billion humans and it’s ever increasing. This Video is about making unlimited supplies for multiple times more humans into the future. Food scarcity is a myth. Transporting it efficiently to those who don’t grow enough locally highlights two sides of that coin. Being #SolutionOriented, I just joined Isaac in buying my own small farm to grow more for myself. With vertical farming & aquaculture there’s no reason we can’t feed 20+ Billion on Earth.
@@michealnelson5179 I think you wrote in an example of what I was thinking - if transportation's an issue, you just grow your own stuff - and with vertical farming (which can include aquaponics), you can grow anywhere - even in space. Transporting is just a waste of resources. It's really strange how we subsidize food we don't even eat. That's why we can change that, so that we can make however much we need - then we can have food for way more than 10 bil.
@@extropiantranshuman About the "removing feeding livestock from the equation"... I think that is much harder than you think politically (to pass an order) and logistically (to enforce it). Cutting international export is (relatively) easy, since it is only an executive order or a tariff bill away and most people hurt by the move are overseas, compared to cutting animal feed, in which case lots of domestic animal farmers would be on the stake and will certainly fight against it. Then about the "locally grown food" IMO that's just impractical for many places and impossible in some regions for now. Inherent differences in climate and geography dictates that some land are better than others for growing crops, and it is just more economical to ship more corn to Alaska or Hawaii than to grow more corn there locally. Nonetheless, at the country level, this is already done in some countries (for example, China has a country-wide minimum requirement for agricultural land, so local governors can't take away agricultural land for other uses without approval.) As for the cellulose part, interesting point. I have no argument against it as I am not a chemist/biologist. I assumed that if one ignores flavor and texture and only considers raw calories, today's corn intended for biofuel are not too inferior from those for human consumption--correct me if I am wrong.
The only thing I hate about GMO's is that their patented by a corporation and near by farmers can be sued by the corporation if their plants get mixed together.
Monsanto has done more to ruin the reputation of GMO's then all fear mongers combined. Its hard for me not to associate GMO's with dead babies. Which I know logically isn't GMO's fault, just Monsanto's fault.
local seeds outperform GMO’s. They work in labs, they work where they where tested and designed - they barely can compete with local varieties. We don’t need mono-crop worlds of soil depletion and ecosystem collapse. GMO’s may be the future - but they sure as fuck ain’t the present. Its a failure that they push on us because they need to recuperate their garbage investment. Their safe, as healthy as the rest, but their not good for our planet. Its just more of the same mono-crop pesticide and herbicide intensive farming that destroys ecosystems, water, insect and animal life.
@@spoonikle I do wish people were more willing to grow and eat "odd" plants that rarely reach the supermarket simply because IDK the bandana is purple or something. and I do hope your right about local farms being stronger in outperforming.
now milk does contain lactase enzymes but the pasteurisation heating denatures them. Although I was looking at milk borne diseases and they are nasty things. When I used to milk cows, I'd wash their teats with a damp rag, that was it.
![I.N "HALLUCINATION" | [Stray Kids : SKZ-PLAYER]](http://i.ytimg.com/vi/n5B5q1Hwt_U/mqdefault.jpg)
Space farmer: lives in O'Neill colony. Still complains about the weather.
If you don't like the weather, move to a different rotating habitat
it would be worse, because the weather would be decided by committee and satisfy precisely no-one
there's always space weather to worry about
@@Drew_McTygue the grass is always greener in somebody else's cylinder!
@Nicholas Carlough Sure, there would. There would be entire ones with no other purpose then farming.
Finding this channel was a thunderbolt.
In a world where its profitable to foam at the maw and warn everyone how shit things are going to be in the indeterminate future, hearing someone enthuse and extol about what our future holds is a tonic.
The future possibilities are great. however the chances of anyone choosing reason and progress over self destruction and societal regression are next to nothing.
As a 5th generation farmer in Nebraska, I love your perspective! Optimism for the future of farming is abundant, but often not grounded in reality. We will always need farmers- even if they are commanding a fleet of drones.
well not always. specially not if that's fully automated or after we go post biological.
@@virutech32 Post biological is the only way I see it. The kind of 'fully automated' you'd need to get rid of any generic type of 'farmer' job is so advanced AI as to replace humans entirely.
Even if the 'farmer' is spending his days monitoring and adjusting complex biosphere balances across an entire garden world that's subject to vast automated farming to feed an interstellar empire, he'll still be a farmer.
@@colinsmith1495 this is assuming that farming requires general intelligence which seems like a big assumption. not sure where that assumption is coming from. making minute adjustments to large complex systems like u said would seem to be the perfect situation to employ simple narrow AI like we already have. fact is most every aspect of farming, when broken down & with decent machine vission/locomotion in play, isn't much more complicated than keeping certain levels of chemical concentration, humidity, temperature, etc. within predefined levels. The only part of that i can see requiring general intelligence is the part where ur doing the basic research to find those levels & even that is mostly just about repetitively growing things under varying conditions to find the maximum yield which is also pretty automatable.
Just something else I wanted to input, is that I think why a lot of farmers are older than 50 is that farms usually require a lot of investment. Typically, it's only until your late 30s or 40s where adults have not just a stable income, but be MORE than stable, as in, having much more money due to Roth IRA, investments in stocks and bonds, and personal relationships with businesmen.
@@colinsmith1495 why complicate things though. god created a world that gives up food. Farming was invented to get power and control, thats all. Like Jesus said... The sparrows and whatnot... the lilies....
I like the addition of personal footage.
Me too it adds alot.
Bro, you had me rolling with that deadpan delivery answer to the opening question!
“Probably yes.”
"a crop so strong and abundant it starts growing in every nook and cranny" so dandelions. Yes they are edible.
Hardly something you can live off on. I believe in grown meat, because meat is a good way to biologically compress nutrients. We will never bypass plants and vegetables, but we don't need to bring animals to life only to turn them into food either. Also it's wasteful in both resources and time. Dandelions, however, is a red alert scenario on a space station. Like Dead Space, but it's also The Happening.
IIRC dandelions can also produce latex and medicine and the dried roots have been used as coffee substitute during war rationing.
Eh. Marginally edible. Really bitter, and limited in nutrients.
I use them sometimes in salads still, as my mom always liked to harvest them, and if you can bring the bitterness down a bit, but as other mentioned they're nutritionally weak, and there's many different salads greens, many less bitter. Beets is a favorite, since I can eat the beet too :)
@@gandalf8216 speak for yourself - I've lived off dandelions many times in my life. They're pretty nutritious, being high in vitamin k - I feel the leaves are the most nutritious, but I bet to get a complete diet, the entire plant (minus the latexy stem) should be eaten.
I know lots of farmers in Ohio, but there are less than when I was a kid. Only like half the farm kids I went to school with stayed farmers.
My parents let our land go natural. And lots of land went to building homes.
I haven't been back to Defiance County in a long time, but I hear it looks different. An odd combination of more sprawl and less people and less farms.
My dad worked for General motors and let neighbor farmers use out land and keep the crop and my dad took the tax incentive.
Later he took a tax incentive to let the land go to Forrest. I am sure it's totally back to Forrest now as it was close 20 years ago
I've not been there recently either but I've heard similar
@@isaacarthurSFIA Funny farming story. They rotated between corn and soy as crops, but I didn't know soy was edible as a plant to I went to a sushi restaurant for the first time after I left Ohio.
They put a bowl of edime on the table and I was like omg people eat this?
Mind blown.
@@oliviamaynard9372 Possibly worse, my county mostly grows grapes, corn, and soy, with grapes closest to where I lived and soy furthest, so I usually only saw soy when moving about 60 mph down the road and I thought they were strawberries or nut bushes :) I'd heard folks say they were soy but assumed they were jsut wrong since no one ever sold it at the farmer's markets like they did corn and everything else.
@@isaacarthurSFIA Food is weird
I miss that homegrown sweet corn from the farmers markets and roadside stands, and heirloom tomatoes that are almost unimaginably sweet, reminding you that tomatoes are indeed a fruit. Thank the glaciers for that fine Ohio soil!
Huh, I never realized or even really considered that Isaac Arthur lived in a rural area or be engaged in farming and/or gardening. I guess I always imagined him as some sort of professor at some university somewhere. i think its really cool that the same person who pretty much shaped my vision of humanities future with things like space habitats and Dyson swarms and such does things like farming or beekeeping as a job/hobby.
there's no science fiction departments in universities. Isaac Arthur has a breadth of knowledge about theoretical ideas. Academics go much deeper into the specifics of how things work.
Bats pollinate and eat vast quantities of insects at night when bees sleep.
Bats are also cute
Then someone eats a bat in the 3020s. And we have a solar-system spanning Covid19k.
@@iainballas Boo. It was manufactured in a lab.
@@dansmith1661 no it wasn't there's literally no signs of genetic engineering SARS cov2. In fact, the protein binding domain It's completely outside the computational biology predictions for efficient Ace receptor binding protein. What that means is we couldn't have made it even if we want to. If it was engineered there would be marks all over it and we would have a good grasp on how that protein binding domain works
@@Cameronmid1
You are either terribly disinformed or lying.
The Fauci e-mails prove that COVID 19 is known to use a process to infect humans that has never been seen in nature.
"We just made our first super high tech space habitat!"
"Did you put bees in it?"
"Eh... what?"
Person under 70 years old: "What are bees?"
Do you mean beebots?
"Not the bees!"
Nope, but we brought mosquitoes.
I'd like to see how the bees' navigation skills cope with living in a cylindrical environment where they can loop around and return to where they started.
Nothing like some SFIA after my Jiu Jitsu class. Would love to hear you talk about Krasnikov tubes at some point in the FTL series.
I like that thought!
Can't wait for more action in the Agri-voltaic space. As solar panels get cheaper to match the rock bottom in Ultra violet LED, 1-10 acre farms will have far more variety than they do now. One person managing an installation will be far more common than one person being a combine operator.
Cellular agriculture and fully or partially automated greenhouses are probably going to be major game-changers in the industry. I for one am one of those folk getting increasingly interested in agriculture as a profession! :)
me too! You can own your own vertical farm for $150k with foundation farms even - it seems so tangible now.
This was definitely my favorite video, out of everything you've done. I'm an aspiring agronomist, (1.5 more years to go!) - at 28 I was a system admin for a small local agricultural company, and saw how much data and technology we were starting to do. I dropped everything to go back to school, because I could foresee a lot of the things you mentioned in this video. I'm hoping to be part of the next big agricultural revolution. I would not be surprised if fully automated farms happen in my lifetime.
There's been a drive lately on some reservations to try and favor indigenous bees. While they aren't as efficient and don't produce honey. The diversity of species keeps certain diseases from spreading.
Episode about the future of farming.
RUclips algorithm: "Cat detected!"
How's the Isaac Arthur farm/greenhouse coming along?
Pretty good though somewhat slow in progress :)
@@isaacarthurSFIA nice! Slow progress is better than no progress. Congrats to you and your wife.
Farming is such a fundamental topic that any small improvement to one of it's many aspects can indeed have huge consequences.
What i mean by that: water, soil quality, land, weather, light, seeds, techniques used to grow and harvest, etc. every change to one of these can be BIG. Nobody knows what the future of farming will bring, but i'm overall very optimistic.
Isaac, I really appreciated this video. As a small farmer, diversified fruit and veg, who also does a lot of teaching on ag, I am very interested in this issue. I agree with nearly everything you say in this issue. And like you I am optimistic about farming. I see a lot of young people expanding what farming means right now, whether that is front yard farming, podponics, or using fungi and other microbes. I personally think fungi will be used for a lot of fiber products in construction and clothing. The complementary issue that needs to be including in any discussion of food is nutrients. Just like you talk about one of the major issues for cities is the need to dissipate heat, the same goes for waste nutrients. Disposing of waste without wrecking the environment is a really big issue. The other end of the nutrient pipe is the farm and the need for more sustainable sources of nitrogen and phosphorus. As our population urbanizes and we try to clean up the environment we will need to close the loop on poop and other forms of waste. This may mean creating rings of farms around cities to recycle the nutrients and provide some of the food and fiber the people in those cities need. In some case the farms may be land extensive and in others they may be in warehouse and greenhouse structures knit into the fabric of the cities.
My future is watching my sheep and cattle eat grass, my chickens produce eggs, my berry bushes provide berries and my vegetable gardens grow. Ok so I will have to buy many staples but producing a good portion of your own food is so rewarding.
Ok, but where are Lasers and the Future of Science on all this?
Regarding smart farming: I have a 73 yo farming client with approximately the acres you suggested. He owns a Smart Tractor, with a Smart Seeder, and a Smart Combine. Claims to only work he has to do now is load to seeder, and haul the harvest away. Everything else is programmed and GPS, including emails from the equipment about maintenance.
Now, this is really fancy considering I'm probably in a more Rural area than you. Anyways, technology has vastly improved farming, since my days in fostercare driving a old Case Tractor with a plow and seeder. Happy Farming!
Isaac: "... my seven-toed mutant cat..."
Me: _it has begun_
I've gone non-cow for a while, there are some things I miss, but non-dairy ice cream is often just better than cow titty ice cream. It's also fun to enjoy different plants as the basis for different ice creams, like coconut milk ice creams are very distinct and mix with flavors differently than a nut milk ice cream.
Question: Seen my comment?
@@nenmaster5218 no
Non dairy ice cream. I eat cow derived vegetables. There is nothing better than vegetables made of animals.
This was a super extensive show, may have to watch again. But so well done!! I am fascinated by the future of agriculture, so this was a great joy to watch! And thanks for the subtitles, makes it easier for a foreigner (Dutch) like me, sometimes your accent is a tiny bit challenging to me. Other than that, really love this channel!!
These videos are both informative and inspiring for working both in real-life science and also for science fiction ideas. Keep up the great work!
To be clear, this is not how farming futures work. That's a totally different thing.
My university (QUT) is big on robotics. One of the robots is using machine vision to pick fruit by colour.
Another group is using a small robot to deliver targeted herbicide to weeds. It also uses machine vision and is using much less herbicide than otherwise.
I love the after-Christmas seed catalogs. Of course, it's all too easy to buy more than you can plant and take care of in the available time. But there's nothing like growing your own fresh food.
It's interesting how some people have gotten used to the commercial stuff, and aren't interested in real food. For example, my wife likes her peaches kinda crunchy, while I like to pick them off the tree when they are dead ripe.
We have chickens running about the yard. While we didn't save any money by raising hens, I love watching them run around the yard. Most animals don't run unless they have a good reason, but the chickens joyfully scatter when we open the door to the coop in the morning. Sometimes, we watch them running from one place to the other during the day. Is it anthropomorphizing to describe them as joyful? Contrary to popular opinion, those little dinosaurs are relatively intelligent.
In the future? Considering the size of the industry that supports home gardeners, I expect that they will sell automatic weeders and the like. They are already experimenting on using image recognition and lasers to weed fields. Once the neural links have been trained, making them the same size and cost of a good rototiller will be possible.
I still want to pluck the tomatoes straight off the vine and eat them, but picking several bushels to can is something that I would happily relegate to my gardening robot.
Being from Illinois, a state well known for its agriculture, I'm intrigued by this topic.
15:21 I think it also depends on how much we've already produced as well as what we utilize from what's been produced. So if I need furniture normally, if I use my grandparent's, I don't need one more for me. If it's unusable, then I do. If I make it usable, then I don't need another.
Yay for arthursday! Been stuck at home waiting for covid results definitely needed this
I have been waiting for a year and they still won't admit I have the antibodies for it. They lose money if I don't have reason to take a shot.
Isaac,
It’s important to think of farming as a water as well as land usage endeavor. We can’t grow without space and we can’t grow without water. Water is universal to life as we know it and is a limited commodity that varies with droughts and floods. What is your take on water management in the coming decades?
I think it would be really neat for us to have a bunch of O'Neill cylinders in lagrangian points orbits specifically just for farming.
There's a category of farm you missed: those producing prestige goods for export. Irish dairy and meat are an example of this where the exports command a premium abroad due to their quality, which means it's practical to have smaller farms, though most farmers will double-job anyway.
I suspect one of the things skewing the age numbers high is that "beginner farmer" include those inheriting the farm from their parents, even if they've spent their youth and middle ages doing as much work, if not more, on the farm as their parents. That's generally been the case here for a long time, and I expect the same is the case elsewhere.
My (arguably silly) hobby is to
recommend science-channel and education-channel. Can i maybe?
As a GMO opponent, one of my big problems is not the technology per se, but it's current use: most modifications are meant to make plants more resistant to pesticides, in order to allow more pesticides being sprayed and more environmental harm being done. At the same time, farmers become dependent on the GMO companies to provide them with seeds, creating monopolies and fragile supply chains in the most important industry of all.
i feel this is a reasonable worry, but you could also just be against monopolization or patenting seed's
I agree. I am perfectly on board with genetically engineered plants in principle, since I was thirteen and read the Swamp Thing origin story where Dr Alec Holland is dreaming of giant tomatoes growing in the Sahara. We could really use some species designed to revert desertification, store carbon underground and provide nutritious food.
But that is not what biotech corporations are using genetic engineering to do. Instead they do almost exclusively what Chris describes.
I suspect that the current business model of genetic copywright laws, giant distributor oligarchies and stockholders demanding revenue is inherently hostile to universally beneficial use of genetic engineering.
why not say you're a gmo specific application opponent? You're just confusing people how you put it. I'm pro-GMO as a technology, but not for certain applications and means (like let's not sue everyone over cross-contamination) too. I just don't call myself anti-GMO, as I'm not and neither are you.
And the issue you have is with the farming industry relying on seeds to where they screw themselves over by allowing gmo companies to take advantage of them like that - so put the blame where it belongs: with seed-relying, outdoor farmers. That's why I like indoor farming - allows for non-gmo (if ppl want that).
@@danguillou713 seems like you didn't watch the joe scott video on superchad - sometimes things are built a certain way for a reason.
This
My dad has a non honey producing native beehive that's super Frost resistant. He just brings the colony inside the garage during the winter to help em along a little bit.
Seeing a new Isaac Arthur video pop up in my feed makes my day!
I do automation in varying parts of the nursery industry. Farming in Space? I don't think the horticulturist, geneticist and greenhouse managers I work with would have any trouble at all. We are really good at this.
yay!
Oh man. You just keep getting better. At last a video that combines my two loves of farming and futurism
14:41 Population 20 Billion by 2121 is an estimate which doesn't take into account the 'Demographic Transition' & the dire ecological overshoot we are facing now. Please don't over look the fact that across ALL cultures its a truism that when child-bearing aged women (not minors) have adequate education, running water & consistent access to birth control women ALWAYS choose to have replacement level numbers of children w/in 2 generations. 10+ Billion demographics is the part of the Expanse universe which COMPLETELY breaks w/hard science fiction... because its a fantasy.
Good video, still I'm a little disappointed you didn't mention weeding robots, as this is a new technology that promises much in the future. Particularly in the context of the historical trend of reducing labor per calorie produced.
Excellent video! Disappointed you made no mention of the idea of agrisolar though.
The problem is limited for crops like tomatoes.
maybe in another video - he can't put everything in at one time.
8:16 love how you get on your phone to avoid getting stun by the bees. Smart
"Desperation and hunger are the best sauce" WTF!!!!!!! Damn, so true
If I had to make any predictions, they would be depressing. “Bug biscuits” for common people, while the grand men eat steak and fresh greens.
ew bug biscuits - never
@@extropiantranshuman Better than 3-D printed bio gel with artificial flavors
Thank you. This was interesting. I now have a strong mental image of a vast Agricultural Space Castle taking in relevant fertilizer, soil, water, etc. It sells produce and other food, along its trans orbital course. It could adjust its purchasing accordingly and sustain a population in the process. (Edit Genetically engineered Maple Tree Bacon is superior to my previous statement.)
Isaac was the first man whom i heard a balanced and logical perspective on animal vs plant farming from.
I just finished watching Clarksons Farm. Good stuff, agriculture. Loving learning more about the process.
Future farming, "Just two words - Potato Milk.
Shipped in PLASTICS jugs... correction six words."
we need to 3d print milk from potato powder and water lol :)
"Isn't that just Vodka?"
(I wonder if anyone will get that reference?)
Milk is already in plastic jugs tho right? Do they still use glass or cartons whre you are
@@realityisenough I think they said that to make a sarcastic point - we'll just go from regular milk to potato milk, same plastic jug. The milk where I live comes in glass, cartons, plastic, nothing (I bring my own), etc.
This is a great video I love listening to this while I drive
I'm homesteading desert land for the reasons Isaac describes. Solid, well-researched video.
NGL if I could part “own” a “smart allotment” for specific crops and items with an option to buy off others for other specialised or less common items then have that delivered I would sign up immediately.
I can easily see rooftops and balcony squares blooming with auto-crop “greenhouses”, car parks, shopping malls and supermarkets set up with on demand “fresh” herb/speciality gardens that you can order for pick-up as you do your daily/regular amble.
Bit of green, no hassle way more economised foods, yeah I could see the supply and demand for items that need to be fresh spiking with that sort of ease becoming available.
I wish you'd covered food forests a lot more instead of just very briefly mentioning polyculture. Since I believe that without a dependency on large and dumb machines for harvesting, food forests would be the most efficient, ecological, and lowest maintenance option just as they'd been prior to the invention of those machines. Some of the oldest food forests are several millennia old and require little to no maintenance aside from still requiring manual harvesting.
Another thing worth mentioning is that plants need more than just raw chemicals or red/blue light. For instance, some proteins need UV light to fold properly and plants are able to absorb soil bacteria made molecules (amino acids and proteins) up to around a 1000 molar mass through their roots. All of this is rarely considered in hydroponic setups which just focus on common chemical nutrients and providing plants with red/blue light. Similarly, greenhouses, despite using the sun for lighting, use glass that blocks most of the sun's UV light. Furthermore, herbicides, pesticides, and fungicides damage the symbiotic microbiome which provide plants with premade molecules in exchange for some glucose.
By limiting a plant's nutrients and removing any symbiotic biology, plants cannot reach their genetic potential and become susceptible to diseases and pests in addition to producing lower quality food. Measuring the sugar concentration in a plant's sap with a brix refractometer is a way of measuring it's health with anything above a 12 being very healthy, 6ish to 12 being okayish with the produced food at least being tasty even if insects can still attack the plant and anything below a 6 is pretty bad with high pest susceptibility and the food produced being tasteless, bland, and just generally unfit for human consumption despite it being what tends to be available at the supermarket.
Sources:
ruclips.net/video/NKIgqa49rMc/видео.html
modernfarmer.com/2017/02/plant-food-forest-winter/
www.startafoodforest.com/
ruclips.net/video/D1wJefaFrVI/видео.html
ruclips.net/video/bnNOvA3diDU/видео.html
One of my favorite videos of yours ever. Good job man
Thank you for making these great videos for us, Issac!
Nope you're 3rd
I'll never understand why this achievement appeals people.
@@LarsRyeJeppesen I think you reply to the wrong person by mistake. I have no idea what you are talking about.
@@TrueMathSquare lol ok mr "first" :)
As for lactose in milk, that's already dealt with cheaply in lactose free milk that only uses a naturally occurring enzyme lactase, naturally found in people that can metabolise lactose to glucose, it is simply added to milk to convert lactose to glucose, that is why lactose free milk tastes so nice
"Desperation and hunger are the best sauce" my grandmother who lived through the depression would attest to this statements authenticity
We can already artificially produce honey. High fructose corn syrup gets you 99.9% of the way there. Add some caramel coloring and artificial flavoring and you have something that you need a spectrograph to differentiate.
Very informative, Coach
What? The title? Or the thumbnail? This was loaded up like a minute ago
@@adnanshoukat1793 It's just to go before those moronic "first" posts.
Yeah those are stupid
I’ve been waiting for this episode. As a mini farmer myself that wants to break into technology sector, I’m Interested to hear what you might say
Thank you. Very nice to hear the narration.
The waggle dance isn't actually necessary to bee foraging! It turns out that the waggle dance behavior is vestigial for wide open spaces where navigation is easy, it only improves bee performance in the honeybee's native habitat of thick jungle.
Cool to see so much of you!
I plan to operate a ranch on my O'Neil cylinder.
Install a trampoline/pogo stick combination to jump from one side of the cylinder to the other quickly
Sign me up. I promise I'll keep out of your way
@@bernardtaylor7768 keep an eye out for us when we launch the first orbital ring in 10 to 15 years. Then we'll start looking to build space habitats.
I was surprised you did not delve into duel use farming more, E.G. solar above and plants/ grassing below on some of the variation on that theme.
I considered it, but I've never been able to find any discussion of that approach in terms of higher net productivity unfortunately, I suspect its just not be done enough to get a good data pool or no one's collected that pool.
@@isaacarthurSFIA true - I bet it would be more efficient to grab electricity from plant versions of neurons than something that blocks the sunlight from plant growth.
Farming is still humanities future. Decentralizing farming from agribusiness would be a revolution
"May the forks be with you", Very humorous.
20:40 what you need is some kind of special berry or vegetable (aka. the magic money tree) which could be specially engineered, grown in greenhouses or even completely artificial environments in LED lit warehouses, marketed at the very rich, and farmed largely by people who want to shelter money from tax by investing it in magic money tree farms.
In theory it should be possible to genetically engineer trees to grow actual paper money. Or to mine Bitcoin.
you don't need to specially engineer one - there're ornamental pepper plants that're perfect! Also bonsai trees are pretty small and they grow berries. This really shouldn't be hard to do. Also many green veggies grow in greenhouses/artificial environments really well, especially herbs which have some of the most nutrients of any food.
@@andrasbiro3007 Geothermal powered bitcoin mining.
You mean super-rich who will have gardens and their countryside mansions?
@@AKUJIVALDO no. Ornamental peppers are only a few dollars at home depot. Maybe bonsai are expensive, but I'm just saying it's pretty cheap and small to get a lot and in the future, if people can get bioreactors of their own microbes - it'll be even smaller and cheaper yet. I guess you'll need 'money', but that money would come out of the supermarket budget, so it pays for itself and thensome.
I think you could combine rooftop solar panels and gardens with panels that are transparent to the specific wavelengths that plants use.
why do that? You can have shade plants that don't mind that it's not transparent.
ok I get the part about being transparent except for the wavelengths plants use now! Maybe solarwindow got that?
You two are my new heroes, you're where I want to be in regards to getting back to nature.
Yet another informative video, liked the personal anecdotes and footage as well. Added a nice personal touch to an already excellent video.
That statistic about the average age of new farmers being so high really caught my attention. I have two theories.
1. Farming suffers as a societal burnout profession. People get tired of the rat race and start farming as an escape.
2. People inherit the family farm after their parents pass away or become too old to keep up with the labor. One of the guys I worked with in the military might be a solid example of this. He technically had a conflict of interest because of the net worth of his stake in the family farm, and he knew how to run a farm, but he wasn't technically a "Farmer".
My theories:
- the agricultural industry used to be larger, so those who worked or lived in that time would be wanting to or at least know how to farm
- farming takes skill, so older people have the time and skill to do it (idk how to run a large farm, even with automation - I'm younger)
Theory Number 1 sort of fits, my mom works at General Motors now, but plans to buy a small farm to retire to, and already keeps chickens in her backyard.
When people usually talk about feeding the world they forget about logistics and nutrition in favor of talking about keeping everyone satiated. As someone who is active i can tell you there's just no practical way to get enough nutrition from just plant based foods and in fact it's a bad thing to be easily satiated by a food when you need to cram down enough nutrients & calories to not fatigue at the worst moment, besides if you prefer a plant diet over a balanced one you'll get hungry far faster & who knows when the next time you get to enjoy a proper meal might be.
To truly feed the world algae and soylent really wont be enough, although the consequences such diet might have on the body might make for a spooky subplot in a novel.
My (arguably silly) hobby is to
recommend science-channel and education-channel. Can i maybe?
@@nenmaster5218 the issue is it's a politicised topic so you get textbook idiots bickering over what is and isn't right based on what they feel is true. Since this requires considerably less effort than using empirical evidence everybody does it that way except for a minority and as such "facts" are made up and inconvenient truths are forgotten.
That's what I think might be the case here
Dairy lies about how hard they have it.
The difficulties come from all the government subsidies, not in spite of it. Canada's dairy farmers do just fine thank to supply side controls
0:15 aaaand were done, no need to grab a snack nice and short, for everybody that has work to do !
6:38 not so fast!
@@MarkusAldawn he he heee, fack !
Once I mentioned agriculture at my country is ripe for modernization (automation, sensors, machines, etc.) considering pandemic, part-timer wage below minimum... and got response akin to "Ya didn't ever worked by hands, mate.".
I had several summer part-time jobs as a teenager in agriculture, worse jobs than driving a jackhammer horizontally (harder and more itching than that). Gardening has been in our family as a hobby for generations. I know there are all kinds of Open Source projects for farming. I keep hearing about aqua-cultures starting up, which isn't that different from plugging fishtank filter into pots with herbs or vegetables (just on a large scale). The latter is something I'm considering doing. Heck, lot of countries are investing already into automation and IT in agriculture.
Don't forget that the land used for pasture of beef cattle is usually unsuitable for growing anything but grass unless you apply a great deal of assistance in the form of irrigation and fertilizer. The only reason these grass-fed cattle are then shipped to feed lots and fattened on grain is because the USDA's grading system favors cattle with the fat content only possible by doing that before slaughter.
in Brazil, there's a really small & cute hiney-making bee (Tetragonisca angustula) that has no sting & is really tame.
We already have soylent green, atleast a natural real life versions. For example, if you're old enough, we're present on the eastern seaboard around the mid 20th century when you partook of seafood you may have consumed something that fed on some of the microorganisms that broke down the remains of those who died on the titanic
The thumbnail is funny AF. A robot arm fighting a motile bush monster with a laser.
Gotta love those engine block cooking sessions... man, I don't miss those!
I imagine that botany and generic engineering will have a great deal to do with our ability to terraform a planet.
Finally an episode about my field of work! 😁
Not sure if you can include mushrooms in a vegan diet, considering they are more closely related to animals than to plants. 🤔
But mushrooms cannot feel pain like animals do they? ^_^
the issue to me is more that they're carnivorous and so eating something that ate other animals isn't vegan to me. It's like carnivorous plants - are they vegan?
@@extropiantranshuman You can solve that issue by manning up and eating what is available.
Veganism is about refraining from exploiting sentient beings. Seas sponges are technically animals, but they hardly even have differentiated cells/tissues, let alone a brain so I don't think there is an ethical problem with killing them. It is not about arbitrary classifications, unlike the moral framework that leads most people to be okay with killing and eating animals but not okay with killing or eating humans. There are no consistent categorical classification systems in the messy world we live in, which is why it doesn't make any sense to be repulsed by the murder of humans and not other animals which probably have subjective experiences nearly as rich as those of humans.
I think greenhouses are going to be much more common in the near future.
In much of our country, water is an issue, and irrigation from wells is not permitted unless your property claim, and thus your water claim, is one of the oldest in the area.
Rain is inconstant. Rains at the wrong time can be as damaging for a crop as no rain, but the sun is regular in its schedule, if sometimes attenuated by clouds. The same can be said for heat waves and cold snaps.
In combination, I see greenhouses as being the answer. You can precisely control watering, and somewhat control the temperature, while still using the free sunlight, and also minimize evaporation and subsequent loss of irrigation water to the environment.
In the past, the cost of building a greenhouse, and the size of the equipment involved in farming, has mitigated against widespread adoption of greenhouses, but costs have come down noticeably, and robotic garden tenders means that one person doesn' need to sit six feet up on the top of a tractor, that by itself hogs two lanes of highway, before counting the implement it's pulling. Instead, a swarm of dog-sized robots can amble between the plants doing all the work, picking bugs and weeds until it is time for the harvest.
It also means that if a grasshopper swarm comes in, they'll largely be stopped by the glass, (well, "glass"), walls, and even if they get in, the damage can potentially be contained to a single section, all without having to buy expensive patented seed, again, that lock you in to only selling your resulting crop to the company you bought it from, again.
I also think the future will move away from cereals. As you point out, cereals are popular because they're easy, but take the human labor part out of the cost of intensive farming, and I think the future will have a much more varied diet of vegetables, with bread being only one option rather than a necessity.
Another point in the favor of greenhouses are the laws that make it difficult to bust sod for farming, and may consider long-fallow fields as now "native" and thus off limits to cultivation, but it's seemingly easy to throw up a building.
Yep, we can do this. Get us out there!
yet another video I've long waited for. Thanks x 1 million!!!!!!!!!
Family farm land in MO mainly producing corn for the subsidized ethanol fuel industry and wheat and soybean for export to China.
this was a really well-made video that touched on a lot in a short time and probably could've gone on longer, but I covered the remaining details in the comments section (helps the yt algorithm anyway).
It's worth noting that things like biofuels would also increase farming for example 35% of the US supply of corn is being used as ethanol feedstock and it could go up by more
You can buy Soylent at most Walmarts. The green version is mint flavor and pretty good. The Banana and Strawberry flavors of soylent aren't bad but they do taste like your generic artificial banana/strawberry flavors not like actual banana's or strawberries.
great video Isaac... looking forward to seeing your bee hives someday
Not sure if I understood you correctly on this part, but I like that idea of fooling my senses that I am eating my favorite meat dish when I am actually eating veggies
I have two years of bucket gardening under my belt and haven't managed to keep a single plant alive. So yeah, in a SHTF scenario I'm plant food. I need those robot farmers pronto!
We already Have experienced that food shortage issue due to biofuel food overproduction.
Ethanol is a form of biofuel.
During the 0bama admin, one reason we suddenly had gas climb from $2s to >$4 was the govt requirement for year round ethanol additive in gas. Many Corn farms were shifted from food to fuel. Many other crops were taken out of production and corn planted for fuel.
Due to this intervention, gas nearly doubled in price, food prices soared - a typical loaf of bread doubled -and many foods dramatically increased in prices. The cost to transport most goods increased nationwide, as trucking fuels cost increased.
Eventually a new administration unlocked oil exploration & drilling contracts & gas went below $2 again, but the high costs for foods & transportation prices remained long term.
Personally I can see that being a strategy for food security... in some countries.
Corn is usually fed to humans and animals (if not converted to biofuel), so without such a gov policy, market economy would make farmers grow just about as much food as human and animals need to eat. This would be a problem if a really bad drought hits and food production drops unexpectedly -- people would pay as high as they can to not starve to death, and famine would hit the poor people.
So instead the admin can use "ethanol requirement" to jack up the demand for corn, so there would be more corn produced than corn eaten in most years; and if corn production drops, the admin can just roll back the requirement to release a lot of ethanol corn into the food market, potentially saving lots of people from starvation.
Well at least that's how I understand why some corn importers (like China and Japan) have such a policy--food security. The US exports a lot of corn, and if corn production drops the country can just export less, so they might not really need this policy for food security.
- that's why you need locally grown food - forget the transportation part of the supply chain - cut out the middleman!
- you also forgot the part about how the corn genes to make the cellulose break down quicker could ruin the corn crops designed for food consumption.
- You have to realize so much corn goes to feeding livestock - if we remove that from the equation, we'll have more corn than we ever need!
All this is because of inefficiencies due to an unsustainable food system. Making it even more unsustainable iwth oil drilling doesn't make sense.
@@extropiantranshuman we already produce enough food for 10 Billion humans and it’s ever increasing.
This Video is about making unlimited supplies for multiple times more humans into the future.
Food scarcity is a myth. Transporting it efficiently to those who don’t grow enough locally highlights two sides of that coin.
Being #SolutionOriented, I just joined Isaac in buying my own small farm to grow more for myself.
With vertical farming & aquaculture there’s no reason we can’t feed 20+ Billion on Earth.
@@michealnelson5179 I think you wrote in an example of what I was thinking - if transportation's an issue, you just grow your own stuff - and with vertical farming (which can include aquaponics), you can grow anywhere - even in space. Transporting is just a waste of resources. It's really strange how we subsidize food we don't even eat. That's why we can change that, so that we can make however much we need - then we can have food for way more than 10 bil.
@@extropiantranshuman About the "removing feeding livestock from the equation"... I think that is much harder than you think politically (to pass an order) and logistically (to enforce it). Cutting international export is (relatively) easy, since it is only an executive order or a tariff bill away and most people hurt by the move are overseas, compared to cutting animal feed, in which case lots of domestic animal farmers would be on the stake and will certainly fight against it.
Then about the "locally grown food" IMO that's just impractical for many places and impossible in some regions for now. Inherent differences in climate and geography dictates that some land are better than others for growing crops, and it is just more economical to ship more corn to Alaska or Hawaii than to grow more corn there locally. Nonetheless, at the country level, this is already done in some countries (for example, China has a country-wide minimum requirement for agricultural land, so local governors can't take away agricultural land for other uses without approval.)
As for the cellulose part, interesting point. I have no argument against it as I am not a chemist/biologist. I assumed that if one ignores flavor and texture and only considers raw calories, today's corn intended for biofuel are not too inferior from those for human consumption--correct me if I am wrong.
I'm really psyched for how atmospheric water harvesting (aka "moisture farming") will affect agriculture, and water scarce areas in general.
The problem is water scarce areas are usually water scarce because there's no water in their local atmosphere.
Nothing to harvest.
@@massimookissed1023 : MOF water harvestors can work in the sahara. it's pretty crazy.
The only thing I hate about GMO's is that their patented by a corporation and near by farmers can be sued by the corporation if their plants get mixed together.
Monsanto has done more to ruin the reputation of GMO's then all fear mongers combined. Its hard for me not to associate GMO's with dead babies. Which I know logically isn't GMO's fault, just Monsanto's fault.
local seeds outperform GMO’s. They work in labs, they work where they where tested and designed - they barely can compete with local varieties.
We don’t need mono-crop worlds of soil depletion and ecosystem collapse.
GMO’s may be the future - but they sure as fuck ain’t the present. Its a failure that they push on us because they need to recuperate their garbage investment.
Their safe, as healthy as the rest, but their not good for our planet. Its just more of the same mono-crop pesticide and herbicide intensive farming that destroys ecosystems, water, insect and animal life.
@@spoonikle I do wish people were more willing to grow and eat "odd" plants that rarely reach the supermarket simply because IDK the bandana is purple or something.
and I do hope your right about local farms being stronger in outperforming.
@@lunaticbz3594 True. I'm okay with GMO's as a way to improve crops and animals, but not as a way to line the pockets of companies like Monsanto.
When I get my house I am looking at having at least a garden in my backyard and possibly some vertical farming in the form of hydroponics in my house.
*Many of the massive farms are actually corporations like Maple leaf farms & Smithfield .*
*Also many grain crops are also produced under cost .*
This was a cool video. How do I get invited to Ranch Isaac for some space/alien talk while doing some bee keeping?
now milk does contain lactase enzymes but the pasteurisation heating denatures them. Although I was looking at milk borne diseases and they are nasty things. When I used to milk cows, I'd wash their teats with a damp rag, that was it.