From what I recall, it depends on your definition of efficiency. Large farms are more efficient in terms of mass of produce per unit of labour but less efficient in terms of mass of produce per unit area.
Absolutely. Biointensive gardening blows conventional ag out of the water on yield per area, it’s just way more labour involved since you’re companion cropping everything.
But would you get those same efficiency gains with one of these robots? They seem similar to mass farms in how they are laid out, and they also are going to wast some space for the machines to move around. They would need a truly staggering amount of metal and parts compared with a mass farm, and that metal has to come from somewhere which takes up land.
That explains something I was puzzled about recently. How the Amish can keep buying land for their famously many children, while using less modern technology than their competitors.
