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Environmentalists have it wrong — the economies of scale and inventing the future
By RickMeasham | September 10, 2009
So I’ve been thinking: “Environmentalists” seem to have it a little wrong.
There’s a push on to ‘return’ to the idylic times where a man would work the farm chatting to his cows while his lovely wife baked a loaf of bread (probably with a dab of flour on her nose) while a pail of milk (direct from the aforementioned cows) stands on the bench beside her.
There’s a push on to do-it-yourself. To be handy around the garden and home. To plant one’s own vegetables and to bake one’s own bread.
But is that really good for the environment? I doubt it (though I haven’t done the research to prove it)
See, if I run my oven for long enough to bake a loaf of bread it would use N units-of-energy. But the oven has just a single loaf in it! It’s big enough for four such loaves, and while it will take more than N units-of-energy to bake four loaves, it wont take as much as 4N units-of-energy.
But at the evil factory down town, you can be absolutely certain that they maximise the number of loaves in each oven to reduce (dollar) cost to the lowest possible value. Reducing dollar cost means saving energy where you can, and that’s good for the environment.
Factories are really good at saving costs. The milk factory that takes the raw milk from all today’s cows pastuerises the milk in enourmous vats, again carefully calibrated to steralise the milk at the lowest possible cost. If every farmer was to do their own pastuerisation, the cost would go up. Not to mention the cost if everyone had their own cow and had to do their own pasteurisation, homogenisation, skimming, churning, curdling and every other process milk goes through before we consume it.
Let’s think back to our idylic couple. Was it really that good? Of course not. The guy out in the fields is using a hand-plough behind a couple of flea-bitten old horses that don’t want to work at all, let alone go in straight lines. He’s blistered and tired. He doesn’t come in at the end of the day all pleased with himeself for his “hard day’s work”. He comes in expecting a meal then goes to bed, just to wake up before dawn the next morning just to do it all over again. Day after day.
She’s in the kitchen making bread with one hand while keeping an eye on the boiling kettle full of clothes and nursing the new baby on the other hand.
So where should our environmental desires be focussed if not at the factories?
I’d suggest the farm. While there’s been incredible change on the farm in the past century and even the past hand-full of decades, there’s still a long way to go. Imagine if we brought the full impact of modern technology to the farm rather than praising it for it’s rustic past.
Let me design just a couple of machines that could be used on every farm. Maybe they exist, but somehow I don’t think they do. Or at least they haven’t been taken up yet by farmers. Their sons or their grandsons will be the ones ready for the next major shift in farming.
First invention is the automatic weeder. Think of it as a Rhoomba for the farm. The “Weeda” hangs above a crop, is powered by solar panels and travels up and down the crop day-and-night doing the weeding: removing weeds increases yeilds. However the device doesn’t spray chemicals onto weeds (though it would have the precision to do so) instead it carefully plucks the sprouting weed before it gets a hold. We have this technology. A camera and pincer would travel up and down, back and forth, scouring the ground for weeds. The camera would know what was a sprouting weed and what was a crop. We have this technology already — we use it to stop terrists at airports and known-to-be-felonius-teenagers at shopping centers. So we’ve removed all the weeds, and done so using the power of the sun.
Next invention could even be mounted on the same boom arm, but it does the totally opposite job. This device finds the crop and waters it. At the moment, we water crops using massive irrigation sprinklers that spray water in unmeasured, uncontrolled relatively random patterns. But why not use our recognition systems to identify plants we do care about and use sensors to determine the exact amount of water each-and-every stalk of wheat needs? We can measure the stalk density to determine if the plant is too dry, and check the ground to see what water the plant has available. Now we stop wasting any water whatsoever. Every drop is used to make sure each individual plant is the healthiest it can be. And we stop watering weeds.
One last thought comes to mind:what if we pluck the weeds and put them in a special hopper. As the sun hits the hopper, it bakes the weeds. We then capture the escaping moisture and feed it back to the plants. (OK, I’ll admit that the cost of this reclamation scheme would probably well outweigh the reclaimed moisture, but we do need to kill those weeds somehow, right?)
That’s my two-and-a-half inventions. Have I sparked any in your head? Do you agree that farm life wasn’t to idylic and that baking bread at home isn’t as environmentally responsible as it feels?
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