Efita Newsletter 1027, dated February 21, 2022

Agtegra harnesses Raven’s OMNiPOWER as driverless equipment becomes reality

In the field, OMNiPOWER is interchangeable among multiple machines and controlled via tablet by an operator. The platform can also send driverless equipment on autonomous tasks, ideally servicing more acres and giving growers the option to automate processes through connected workflow.
See precisionag.com

New Robot Developed for Thinning and Pruning Peaches

The Georgia Tech Research Institute has developed an intelligent robot designed to handle the human-based tasks of thinning and pruning peach trees.
See precisionag.com

New Danforth Center unit aims to launch more agtech companies from the campus, AFN, by Jennifer Marston
.../...
How it works:

- DTC will connect its scientists with investors, entrepreneurs, companies, and tech leaders, providing intellectual property development, licensing, and entrepreneurship. The company’s website says it will also work with early investors to “mitigate technology and investment risk.”

- Tom Laurita, co-founder and former CEO of Danforth-based crop science company NewLeaf Symbiotics, will serve as DTC’s CEO.

- DTC will set up and fund Seed-stage startups working in a number of different areas. Via an email exchange with AFN, Laurita said that Danforth Center has 31 labs working “in a wide variety” of plant science and agriculture areas. “DTC will evaluate each Danforth Center-generated opportunity on its technology and commercial merits,” he added.

- All funding for the startups will come from funds invested by the Danforth Center in DTC.
See agfundernews.com

Agriculture au moyen-âge / Middle age farming

Ceres Imaging Forms Integration Partnership with WiseConn

This partnership will reduce the time switching back and forth between different apps.
See precisionag.com

Trimble Launches Virtual Farm to Help Farmers Find the Right Precision Ag Solutions

The interactive online experience allows farmers across the world to immerse themselves in precision agriculture.
See precisionag.com

Agriculture au moyen-âge / Middle age farming

Here’s how the CEOs of Bayer, Cargill & 2 agtech startups would spend Elon Musk’s $6bn for world hunger, AFN, by Jack Ellis

Food prices hit their highest in a decade by the end of last year. Fertilizer prices, too, saw all-time highs as 2021 turned into 2022, further exacerbating food inflation.

Prices for both sets of commodities have continued to rise this year as supply chain disruption — caused in part by the Covid-19 pandemic — continues.

As pointed out by panelists at the recent Bloomberg New Economy Forum in Singapore, all this is taking place against the backdrop of a longer-term trend towards a larger population demanding more food – with diminishing land and natural resources to produce it.

Panellist Dave MacLennan, CEO of Cargill, argued that the agrifood supply chain has “proven to be surprisingly resilient” amid all the short-term upheaval. But he added that climate change presents a major challenge over the longer term, citing the supply impact of last August’s Hurricane Ida, which took out one of his company’s key grain terminals in Louisiana, US.

“We’ve been able to get food from where it’s produced to where it’s needed, with some exceptions,” he told attendees. “Notwithstanding the inevitable natural disasters coming from climate volatility, the food supply chain has worked relatively well – even amid Covid-19. But that’s not something we can take for granted.”

MacLennan’s co-panelist and counterpart at Bayer, Werner Baumann, offered a cautiously optimistic outlook: while acknowledging the size of the task ahead, he argued that agriculture is going through its most rapid period of technological and scientific advancement in modern times – meaning we already have many of the solutions waiting in the wings.

“Agriculture has become more sustainable. But if you look at the massive impacts that climate change is going to have on all of us […] we have to reduce the footprint that is being used by agriculture while also increasing yields,” he said. “At a minimum, [that means] not increasing acreage, but bringing more intensification on existing acreage – while at the same time freeing up acreage for reforestation and carbon sequestration.”

Baumann also highlighted technologies such as biological nitrogen fixation, which could reduce the environmental costs of fertilizer production and application, as well as selectively-bred crop varieties that can ensure more predictable harvests.
.../...
See agfundernews.com

Big Tech’s Shaky Week, by Parmy Olson

After years of U.S. mega-tech shares propping up pretty much the entire stock market, investors could almost be forgiven for assuming these pillars were indestructible. Then, oops, one of them fell over this week.

Meta Platforms Inc., the company formerly known as Facebook and the “F” in “FAANG,” stunned markets with news its daily user count fell for the first time ever in the latest quarter. The ensuing selloff wiped $250 billion from Meta’s value, pulling down much of the tech sector with it.

This morning, everybody remembered Big Tech was still pretty good at making money. Amazon.com Inc. shares jumped by 15%, and non-FAANGs Pinterest Inc. and Snap Inc. rose by 30% and more than 50%, respectively, on positive quarterly results. Who knew Snap, which makes silly photo filters of people vomiting rainbows, could be profitable?

But wait: Spotify Technology SA said it would probably have fewer subscribers than expected. Cue another selloff, capping a month of management hand-wringing over Joe Rogan. And you thought meme stocks were a wild ride.

Big Tech has for years been traded as a bloc with reliable returns, but maybe that’s changing as episodes of management folly are being exposed. Mark Zuckerberg, for instance, made Facebook the least diversified company in Big Tech and left itself vulnerable to TikTok Inc. — which Bloomberg LP founder Mike Bloomberg writes is doing more to constructively humble the giant than armies of regulators ever could.

Amazon, meanwhile, is reaping the benefits of an early move into cloud computing, and investors cheered its Prime membership fee hike. But Tae Kim notes that won’t be enough to paper over fairly grim e-commerce sales, and Amazon’s stock price is still well off its summer peak. The company also has a talent-retention problem, amid reports of a toxic work culture, writes Sarah Green Carmichael. That’s the sort of thing that corrodes a structure from the ground up, and Facebook has shown even the biggest companies can fall if they’re not careful.

Big Tech can seem monolithic to investors. They all use code, they all use algorithms, they all have Ping-Pong tables in the break room — how different could they be? But humans, not algorithms, run businesses. And humans aren’t invincible, as this week reminded us.
See bloomberg.com ???

Agriculture au moyen-âge / Middle age farming

Would widespread adoption of organic farming practices be a good idea from a climate change perspective? By Steve Savage, February 15, 2022
.../...
Overall, this ground-breaking life cycle analysis has proved enduring and enlightening in shedding light on the ongoing debate over the sustainability impact of organic vs. conventional agriculture. This one study provided data addressing several topics:

- The overall organic “yield gap” was confirmed in this setting

- The “mulching” approach did not represent a viable alternative to organics’ dependency on conventional animal livestock manure for fertilization

- Devoting part of the rotation to biogas production reduces the overall carbon footprint, but that would be possible for conventional as well

- The carbon footprint of organic is only lower on an area basis, not on a more appropriate yield basis, and particularly not if indirect land use is considered

- Overall, organic farming expansion is incompatible with the European Union’s stated ambition to achieve carbon neutrality as a continent.

This is a complex and critically important topic that deserves both high level theoretical assessment and on-the-ground experimentation. The eight year old Knudsen et al paper described here represents a good example of real world data generation, and it’s without ideological spin. EU policy makers should be looking at this sort of data to inform their thinking about how align their agriculture with their overall climate goals.
Optimized conventional systems are a more promising option than pursuit of the speculative, organic-leaning path proposed under Farm to Fork.

See geneticliteracyproject.org

Agriculture au moyen-âge / Middle age farming

The history of the end of poverty has just begun, by Max Roser (Our World in Data)

The decline of global poverty is one of the most important achievements in history, but the end of poverty is still very far away.

Fertility Rate, by Max Roser (Our World in Data)

The global average fertility rate is just below 2.5 children per woman today. Over the last 50 years the global fertility rate has halved. And over the course of the modernization of societies the number of children per woman decreases very substantially. In the pre-modern era fertility rates of 4.5 to 7 children per woman were common. At that time the very high mortality at a young age kept population growth low. As health improves and the mortality in the population decreases we typically saw accelerated population growth. This rapid population growth then comes to an end as the fertility rate declines and approaches 2 children per woman.2

The first section of the entry presents the global empirical perspective on the number of children per woman. The long second section presents the academic research that answers the question why the number of children per woman declined. Particularly important are 1) the empowerment of women in society and in relationships – through education, labor force participation, and strengthened women’s rights – and 2) the increased well-being and status of children.

Pessimism Viewed in Historical Perspective, by Chelsea Follett

Pessimism about potentially life-enhancing technologies is not new.

Pessimism about potentially life-enhancing technologies is not new. The Twitter account Pessimist’s Archive (a favorite of the internet guru Marc Andreessen) chronicles the unending stream of pessimism with old newspaper excerpts.

Pessimistic reactions range from merely doubtful (such as this response to the idea of gas lighting in 1809, or this one to the concept of anesthesia in 1839) to outright alarmist (such as this 1999 warning that e-commerce “threatens to destroy more than it could ever create”).

In some cases, the pessimists insist that an older technology is superior to a new one. Some, for example, claimed that an abacus is superior to a computer and a pocket calculator, while others claimed that horses are longer-lasting than the dangerous “automobile terror.”

Others argue that new technology is damaging existing businesses and customs. One particularly emotional 1918 article described how automobiles are destroying the livery stable business and, together with “the movie show,” changing dating forever by ending the tradition of romantic carriage rides.

Another frequent complaint is that new technology exacerbates inequality, because the wealthy tend to adopt new technologies first. One article from 1914, for example, laments that “wireless telephones” will only ever “be a boon to privileged persons.” The article was referring to the early wireless radiotelephones being developed at that time, which were not lightweight handheld devices. Today, of course, wireless phones can fit in your pocket, have many more capabilities, and are ubiquitous. Eventually, the free market tends to drive down the cost of technologies, making them accessible to more people.

Perhaps what is most remarkable about pessimistic responses to new technology is how often the pessimists successfully use the power of the state to try to halt technological progress.

In the 1930s, pessimists feared that radios were a threat to democracy and worried that the devices were ruining childhood. By 1936, the pessimists had succeeded at banning radios in cars in a number of U.S. cities, arguing that they were distracting and might prevent drivers from hearing fire engine sirens.

Sadly, techno-pessimists have managed to enact bans or partial bans on a great variety of technologies. These include “horseless carriages” (cars), “automatic lifts” (elevators), and bicycles (which are “the most dangerous thing to life and property ever invented” according to an 1881 New York Times article). The list also includes, more recently, video games, headphones, and hover-boards.

As new breakthroughs continue to occur practically every day, looking back at how people decried and fought against progress in the past helps put current technological and scientific debates in perspective.

Chelsea Follett is the managing editor of HumanProgress.org and a policy analyst in the Cato Institute’s Center for Global Liberty and Prosperity.
See humanprogress.org

GOP Donors Seem to be Declaring War on Trump, by Lauren Elizabeth, Feb 9, 2022

The memo’s gone out. A line has been drawn.
.../...
Mike Pence isn’t calling Donald Trump wrong or his ideas un-American because he suddenly found a conscience and can no longer sit idly by. He’s doing it because he got a call from some donors who have decided now is the time to begin shifting the tone against the former President, and Pence is the perfect face for that movement.
Trump’s supporters were looking to murder him after all.
The memo has gone out to FOX News and prominent GOP lawmakers: the idea of him being the Republican nominee again is unacceptable, and you’re going to prevent it from happening.
All that being said, even more interesting is the fact that this phenomenon — while gaining ground in the Senate, isn’t really going anywhere in the House just yet. Again, why?
.../...
See xlauren-mx.medium.com

Izquierda hundida, de Lluís Bassets - 30 ene 2022

Nada sería tan legal y justo como que los ucranios se defendieran ante una invasión y que sus aliados y amigos les ayudaran.
Ver elpais.com