What does society want from agriculture?
Food? Homes? Clothing?
In the beginning it was to survive.
We found as a species we could go further if we learned to feed ourselves in a new way.
Over a few thousand years we got amazingly good at it.
From a society 100% geared for survival to one where less than 1% of the population needs to focus directly on growing food.
Through that same process we have also expanded our desires.
Agriculture is no longer only for survival.
Consumers demand health, longevity, and good vibes.
They want trust, novelty, flavor, and fun.
Scaling one man from growing on one acre to 10,000 we took what we learned in the garden and maximized its efficiency.
To scale manpower we invented horsepower.
To leverage horsepower we invented monocrops.
We invented synthetic fertilizer, modified plants, useful chemistry and an entire ecosystem of education, culture, insurance and lending.
Robotics are the frontier of our battle against the oldest and hardest problem of production.
Labor.
Labor is not a simple numbers game.
What a person does with their lives is deeply ingrained in culture.
It's been a long time since it was considered an upward move in society to start growing food.
What people know how to do is downstream from what they choose to learn or what a society knows how to teach them.
Labor is an incentives issue, a skill issue, and a numbers issue.
But what if we didn’t need to incentivize labor, labor had no skill issues and we had numbers far outstripping that of a new immigration policy or a wartime baby boom?
What would agriculture look like then?
Humanoid robots offer us this future to consider.
They suck today but they are coming.
Single use case agriculture robots will continue to dominate the market and be an important part for our future but they are not the whole future.
The spreadsheet is still the world's most prolific business app because the long tail of valuable tasks is bigger than people think.
If you had a magic wand and wanted to invent something to fundamentally change agriculture it would be low cost, high quality humanoid robots.
For agriculture every task that is not measured in hours behind the wheel can be expected to benefit from mobile robots with useful hands.
Not only can they immediately tackle low skill or dangerous tasks they have a major advantage over traditional ag robots.
The cost of developing humanoid robots gets to be spread over all industries while the development of traditional ag robots gets to be spread across one crop.
The economies of scale we know so well in agriculture production will drive the cost of humanoids down lower than humans in a way we will never see with single purpose robots.
For the rest of your life the cost of humans will go up and the price of humanoids will go down.
Autonomous monocropping is the next tractor.
Humanoid labor is the next electricity.
All the dreams on how to match consumer preference with scaled production will be tested again.
CSA's, farmers markets, even gardening.
All things that provided a rosy picture to consumers but never made a dent could change with humanoids.
While the farms have maximized output, so has the supply chain.
We have rapidly ramped up our production and consumption of processed foods and our health has suffered.
When you want to treat yourself you might go get a warm chef cooked meal.
If you care about your health and in a rush you might grab a Kirkland Protein Bar, a Skinny Latte and buy a plastic wrapped chicken sandwich from a convenience store.
If a delicious, healthy, home cooked meal made from scratch cost you no time, no extra money, and didn't make a pile of dishes to clean we would all do it 3 times a day.
Humanoids will change how we eat.
If a bountiful home garden of fruits, nuts, and vegetables took no time, no effort, and made our homes more beautiful and our meals more enjoyable we would all have them.
If owning and running a small farm to feed your family and make a small profit didn't come at the cost of a whole lifetime in a more prestigious career many would.
When humans can subtract time, incentives, and skills as bottlenecks from being more abundant they do.
If the future is good it could be very good.
Humanoids are our first chance as a species to finally inject the rapid improvements we have experienced from the world of bits into the physical world of atoms that we really live in.
For the first time since the dawn of agriculture, scaling labor doesn't have to come at the cost of ecological diversity, beauty and self sufficiency.
Humanoids are the path to fully autonomous luxury agriculture.