The Future of Farming

The Future of Farming

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This episode is brought to you by Hello Fresh.   Many folks assume the future of farming  is robots, algae vats, and soylent green…   but is this future forecast accurate?   The answer, as we’ll see today, is ‘probably yes’ A few months back we did a number of polls  of some potential topics folks had suggested,   and the winner over on our Reddit group was  “The Future of Farming”. It's an interesting   topic in that until fairly recently, farming  was such a common profession that discussing   its future was the same as discussing  humanity’s future or the future of jobs.   There are some very high-tech options we  will touch on today that might alter farming   drastically, including everything from vertical  farming to growing meat or printing food – or   even turning humans into cyborgs who don’t need  food or who live in pods like in the Matrix, fed   nutrient gruel while living in virtual utopias. But I’d like to keep our main focus on the major   new developments relating to challenges and  opportunities that are likely to arise in the   next generation or so. These include things like  international dietary changes, population growth,  

land repurposing, robots, genetic engineering,  invasive species, and changes to local ecologies   and environments… just to name a few. We also need to keep in mind that farming   is a big blanket term, and most individual  farmers have a single crop they specialize in,   or a small handful. Homesteaders, family farms,  or polyculturists often aim to have several crops   or products in medium production but this  is not the norm and whether or not it could   become the norm economically would be very  technology dependent. As long as it is not,  

someone’s entire livelihood is at stake if  one crop disease sweeps through or even if   the demand in the market just changes and this  year people love broccoli and hate cauliflower.   A single lone technology can obliterate a  market too. For instance we tend to eat a   lot of staple grains – wheat, corn, rice and  so on – not because they are super-nutritious   in every aspect of that word, but because it  stores well and also because a single person   with a tractor can do hundreds of acres of corn.  Indeed in the US the average farm is 444 acres,   or 180 hectares, which is huge by the  size of most local farms in my county.  

For staple crops this is a necessity,  as a single acre might produce less   than 5 tons of corn or grain and not even  a thousand dollars in revenue each year.   Only a fraction of that is profit, necessitating  grain farms of thousands of acres. Hundreds of   acres handled by a single worker on that end  of the spectrum, because it's so easily and   highly automated, on the other end an acre of  strawberries might produce 25 tons of berries   a year and no single person is tending hundreds  of acres of them, indeed farms will often need   dozens of pickers per acre. Needless to say,  a bunch of robots coming by and clearing fruit   from trees or bushes and properly pruning them  for maximum yields is the sort of thing that   would cause a simultaneous boom in production  and crash in prices. Probably akin to what we   saw with the invention of tractors or combine  harvesters for those grain crops, or more.  

It’s easy to forget our ancestors often grew  those grains in part because they could harvest   them fairly easily compared to many plants, more  crop for less work than with many other plants,   rather than always nutrition per acre or  any interest in balanced or flavorful diets.   Livestock usually does even better than  that, as long as you have lots of land,   letting critters eat what grows there without  you needing to farm it much is frequently your   path to most calories per least effort,  and they’re high protein calories at that.   That matters for contemplating the future because  there’s only so much land, for now at least,   there’s also way more people being born  every day than dying, for now at least.   Now strawberries aren’t an ultra high-calorie  crop, 330 calories per kilogram, versus about   960 for corn, so that yield per  acre in tons is a bit misleading,   also that corn silage – the whole plant as opposed  to just the grain – is an excellent food source   for livestock, economically anyway, especially for  dairy cows. Folks often beat up on the amounts of   grain or pasture needed to produce beef compared  to other animals or just eating the vegetables,   and Ranchers often argue that data is cherry  picked, but regardless it also tends to ignore   the dairy aspect which is vastly more  efficient in calories per farmland used.   A modern Holstein cow can literally fill  a tanker truck full of milk each year.  

On the other hand, don’t expect the dairy  industry to survive this century in anything like   its current form. Sarah and I were at the local  Farm Bureau’s Ice Cream social earlier this week   and the main presentation was on dairy and what a  rough time the industry has been having this year,   even compared to the rough time it’s been  having almost every year I can recall.   Incidentally, very good ice cream, and same  the local Cattleman’s Dinner each year which   has the hands-down best prime rib I’ve ever  had so if you live in an even vaguely rural   area these sort of events are common, usually  open to the public for free or quite cheap,   and often are good way for folks to get to  know that part of their community better   or even consider going into it themselves. Which is my little public service shout out  

for Agriculture. Incidentally, since I rarely do  autobiographical commentary, my wife and I co-own   a farm. I’m newer to farming, although I grew  up in the country and have been an avid gardener   since I was a toddler. My wife on the other hand  has been farming her whole life and serves on  

the Agriculture Committee for the Ohio House of  Representatives. So I am no expert on the topic of   farming, or even gardening for that matter, but do  have a pretty solid grounding in the basics, and I   tend to think having a garden or even homestead  or farm is a good hobby or profession for folks   to contemplate even as we get ever more high-tech,  indeed possibly because we are doing so..   I hate to say though that I probably would not  recommend entering the dairy industry. A lot of   the technological improvements are resulting  in a need for very large capital investments,   very big machines for running barns of  many hundreds of cows, not ten or twenty.   At the same time we see a lot of folks switching  to alternatives like soy or almond milk – though   to be fair in many cases this represents someone  who had an allergy or digesting issues with milk   products and wasn’t using them anyway. However, while cows are pretty efficient at  

converting plants into milk, we are already seeing  artificial milk rising in quality and production   in an equal if less loudly broadcast fashion  as artificial meat. Such being the case it is   quite likely we’ll just start growing raw milk  in vats or giant bioreactors, and I’d say that’s   right over the horizon but I would bet on this  being one of those areas where interested parties   try to skew public approval or desire for such  alternatives and get roadblocks and regulations   in the way. It will happen anyway though, there’s  just too many obvious advantages to growing huge   vats of milk in clean sterile and controlled  environments without a cow being involved,   and there’s nothing super-tricky about  the recipe or biological process.   Not everything is bleak for the dairy industry,   improvements in medical science  will probably eventually find some   way to eliminate any lactose issues that  prevent folks from enjoying dairy products,   or mitigate them a great deal, and this would  probably see a disproportionate rise in its use.   Dairy and meat make up a big portion of farming  so I didn’t want to bypass either today,   but we discussed synthetic meat in its own episode  a couple years back so we’ll shift away from   animals with one last exception: Pollinators. It’s pretty easy to forget that bees, butterflies,   ladybugs, and hummingbirds aren’t the  only critters that pollinate plants,   just the prettiest, and out of all of them,  only bees produce a crop of their own for use,   honey, and only honeybees do that, and there  are 20,000 species of bees incidentally. Now  

the super-majority of plants need pollination, and  acreage with lots of pollinators produces vastly   better yields. You can keep any kind of pollinator  around and encourage them to multiply in various   ways, and some are even better at pollinating  than honey bees, but honey bees are the preferred   pollinator, because people like honey. Sarah and I keep some hives and it’s worth   the occasional sting for the sweet, sweet honey  inside, and ironically this is a problem in some   areas. I saw a paper from the Royal Botanic  Gardens that a new fad of beekeeping in London   in the last decade had resulted in too many bees  for the small local garden environment to support   and also that they were getting issues with  bees transmitting disease between hives.  

Diseases have a harder time spreading  between different species, so packing   a lot of the same type of pollinator into a  region can risk high rates of transmission.   We also want to beware of that elsewhere.  With hundreds of thousands of pollinator   species out there, we risk damaging our  biological diversity if we limit ourselves   to only that relative handful of species that are  hyper-efficient pollinators, pretty to look at,   or produce tasty honey. As a counterbalance,  there is a good probability that honey, like milk,   might be something we learn to artificial  produce more efficiently down the road.  

This is also a good place to get into genetic  engineering, because we may also see a lot of   crops genetically modified to be self-pollinators,  or alternatively we might see some lab engineering   honey bees that are twice as efficient at  pollination and nectar gathering, and never sting.   Which would be nice, though this is probably  a case where superior science of knowing what   keeps them from stinging us comes into play,  so you could spray on a pheromone that said   ‘ignore me’ so to speak. So many critters in  nature run in large part on pheromone signals   that the ability to understand and fabricate  those might see huge gains in agriculture.  

This is another area where research is likely  to produce huge changes and gains in farming.   Or other signals too, honey bees for instance have  what’s called the waggle-dance, and really good   internal clocks, sense of gravity, and where  the Sun is, and they can precisely transmit   direction and flight time to their peers  via a carefully coordinated set of waggles.   We may have to adapt them genetically to function  on other worlds or space habitats. However for  

such types of signals, instead of making something  like robotic pollinating bees by the million to do   a farm field, slipping a robot bee into the hive  to waggle-dance the coordinates of the places you   want pollinated most is maybe a better approach. On the genetics end, it is possible this will   lead to vast fields of clear-topped vats of  hyper efficient black algae sucking up every   photon of sunlight and converting it into  genetically perfected blends of high-protein   or high-oil algae, to be used as animal feed  or even human feed in 3D Food Printers. Do   not rule out the possibility that by century’s  end your kitchen might have tanks of printer   feedstock and appliances able to render  those stocks into foods identical in taste,   texture, and appearance to the food they  were mimicking, and be indistinguishable, or   differ only in that they were absent impurities,  toxins, or had a better nutritional breakdown.   Nor do they need to match or surpass  current food to be in wide use,   desperation and hunger are the  best sauce, and for that matter   we might be able to fix the taste and texture  through augmented reality and mind augmentation.   You eat your protein slurry and soylent green  but it tastes like steak and ice cream.   Short term though, genetic engineering brings up  the issue of GMOs. Many folks insist that they  

are dangerous or unnatural – where unnatural is  bad, unless it’s a smart phone of course – many   others are such proponents of the higher yields  of GMOs that they ignore the various problems and   concerns, like accidentally introducing some  crop that’s so strong and abundant it starts   growing in every nook and cranny, which  is a common GMO worry, justified or not.   This is also pretty wrapped up in the Organic  Foods sector, and I would actually guess that   is a fad too, but one that will end with generally  greater scrutiny and quality control of production   and transport of food. In the long term, use  of GMO technology will increase. Learning more   about genetics and utilizing that knowledge  to improve crops is just too useful.   Short term, we’re still novices at it, and it  can have unexpected consequences as a result,   and because genetic engineering permits  much bigger and less probable changes to DNA   than classic means of changing crops over dozens  of generations. Though it appears transgenic   transfer between similar species is more common  than once thought. Genetic engineering, though,   allows radical and hard to react to changes  to local ecologies and economies. So GMOs are  

often seen as more of a higher-risk, high-reward  approach and our goal is to keep learning more so   the risk goes down while the reward goes up. There will be a point where it reaches a place   most folks consider safe enough and a generation  after that I’d expect it to be a dead issue.   That might be 40 years from now or 4000. The more  distant future of farming means millions of alien  

worlds we terraform to various degrees, where  genetic engineering is darn near a necessity for   even the most Earth-like worlds, and for inside  millions of rotating space habitats, each of which   is its own enclosed and quarantined ecology, at  which point experimentation with GMOs inside those   enclosed habitats seems virtually guaranteed.  Closer to now, it is likely we will see more and   bigger greenhouses in decades to come, and this  can serve as a fairly decent quarantine method too   along with producing higher yields per acre,  so might result in more greenhouse grown GMOs,   ditto for vertical farms inside buildings. Two other notes on genetics.   First, while GMOs could cause problems, they also  often solve them even now, a lot of vaccines are   genetically modified for instance, and greater  knowledge on that can let us rapidly counteract   diseases spreading to flora and fauna too. Or for  that matter, crafting our diseases and predators   to carefully and knowledgeably curb  overpopulation of a given species,   or the spread of animals or plants. Tomorrow a lab  might whip up a magnificent GMO algae or fungus   able to produce biofuels at a tenth the cost of  gasoline – causing an unintentional food shortage   as folks race to shift land and production over  to that – or someone might finally convince   folks nuclear reactors are safe, or invent fusion,  freeing all land given over to biofuel production,   or better solar panels might come out, suddenly  requiring new land to put them on or not,   maybe roof-based solar but in doing so replaced  rooftop gardens and much urban agriculture.   Cause, effect, and unintended consequences are  always a huge consideration in contemplating the   future or ecological and agricultural engineering,  doubly so for the future of agriculture.  

Second point on genetics, they can alter our  own needs. Right now there’s a debate on what   our population size will look like in the next  century, for my part I’m going to guess at least   20 billion by 2121 but I might be optimistic. A  lot of folks think it will stop at 9 and begin   contracting. There is no real room for accuracy  on such things though as, for instance, someone   could come out with a fertility extension method  next year that permits women to have children as   easily and safely at 45 as 25, which might result  in a fairly large increase in average family size.   Or on the flip side, a birth control pill so  cheap and effective, with so few side effects,   that accidental pregnancy became a rare anomaly. How much farmland we need depends on how much we  

need to support a person – which can include  land for solar, biofuels, textiles, and lumber,   not just food. However it also depends on how  many folks we have. If the production per unit of   land rises, as it's been doing, but the population  does not, or rises slower, or even falls off, that   price per farmland goes down. Which also means  uses which are less labor or resource intensive   but more land intensive become more economically  viable, such as meat and grains. If the population   rises faster than production increases in land, we  either need to use more land-efficient but labor   or resource intensive methods, like hydroponics or  greenhouses, or we need to make more land – which   is on the table, see our Space Farming and  Seasteading episodes for discussion of that.   Which emphasizes how sensitive all our predictions  on agriculture are, however, it’s another example   of how genetics and medical sciences will play  into an existing problem: the age of farmers.  

In the US for instance, the average farmer  is over 58 years old, and keep in mind it is   frequently a family profession with a lot  of young adults included in that average.   This has been an ongoing trend to, the average of  the ‘principal operator’ of farms was already 50   years old fifty years ago. And while my wife has  been in farming her whole life, I’m new to it,   and yet at the age of 41 I’m actually  younger than the average beginning farmer.   The average beginning farmer, those with less than  5 years experience, is 47 years old. That bit of  

data was decidedly on my mind earlier in the  episode when I none-too-subtly encouraged folks   to consider farming as career or side hustle. I could not find any data on the world at large,   but a few other highly developed countries I  could spot check seem to have parallel numbers.   Of course in developing nations farming  is still often the most common profession,   and yet it would seem likely those lands will  also go the same way with fewer folks doing   most of the farming. Whether or not they’ll  face the same aging issues is harder to say,   aging workforces in an economic sector is  frequently a sign of a contracting economic   sector, but cultural preferences for or against  being a farmer will presumably be specific   to each country or even more zoomed in. Will this trend reverse? No, not a chance,   and again because of genetics and medicine. We  might make it more popular as a profession with  

younger folks but people are also living longer  now and that is a trend I expect to continue.   Indeed I would be surprised if the condition we  call aging and often view as inevitable was not   effectively eliminated by the end of this century.  That often seem extraordinary to folks but disease   was considered a way of life, and regular  cause of death, for most of human history,   and yet Covid hit us so hard because it was the  first big pandemic in a century and even then,   there is just no comparison between how the last  pandemic hit us and the mass death and panic of   prior plagues, which was considered ordinary and  inevitable to those times and cultures. Aging  

will likely be the same and it’s likely to have a  very big impact on land ownership and farming.   We’ll come back to that in a bit but there’s  another major effect of farming in terms of   life extension technologies that should also be  considered. Back in our Future of Pets episode,   I pointed out that while super expensive life  extension serums were the norm in science fiction,   most probable pathways to the real technology  indicate it would be dirt cheap and perfected   on animals first. So longer-lived pets might  result before we ever got clinical testing let   alone FDA approval for human life extension  technologies. But that also opens the door   to hundred-year old cows still producing  thousands of gallons of milk per year.   When we discuss colonizing new worlds on this show  we often point out that your two big options are   terraforming – making a world more like Earth –  and bioforming – adapting the organisms to that   world. So our alternative to genetic engineering  might be widening the area we can use for farms,  

or how well tailored they are for that crop.  We have a lot of tundra and desert we can use,   and plants grown inside greenhouses get much  higher yields per area and allow plants to exist   in dry areas or cold areas, by minimizing loss  of water and heat. I would not be too surprised   if we saw a vast increase in greenhouse usage,  as well as a vast increase in greenhouse sizes,   in the years to come. I could also see potential  subsidies for these options, not just to add   food production capacity, but also as ways to  let new folks into the industry economically   without having to interfere in current land  ownership, which is often generational.   Let’s talk Farm size. I mentioned earlier that  the US average is 444 acres, and that number   has been on the rise. Don’t get the impression  size correlates super-strongly to revenue or  

profitability though, a strawberry farm a tenth  the size of a grain farm or ranch might use ten   times the people and move ten times the revenue.  The other thing is that average is not the same as   median. In the US there’s 900 million acres of  farmland and 2 million farms and ranches, both   numbers have actually been on the decline in the  last decade, while average farm size has risen.  

In the US we currently divide it into 6  categories: farms which generate 1000-10,000   dollars of annual revenue, 10,000 to 100,000, 100  to 250,000, 250 to half a million, half a million   to a million, and those that make more than a  million dollars per year in sales. Many small   farms are hobbies, side incomes, or tax shelters  but it’s a little hard to distinguish those from   small poor farmers, but I do know a fair number  of wealthy professionals in my area who run their   farm as some mix of tax shelter, hobby, or  income diversification. I would guess we would   see more of that in the future too, though it may  fluctuate in time and place a lot in popularity.   Anyway half of those two million farmers fall into  the under $10,000 in sales per year class, and   average 81 acres or 33 hectares of land, meaning  they’re averaging less $100 in revenue from each   acre. I feel obliged to mention that along with  the part-time farming roles because very few of   these folks are farming for a living, and while  there are exceptions, this is not your poorest   class of farmers, it’s the majority of farmers,  accounting for around a tenth of the farmland,   and whether poor or wealthy themselves, most  of their income doesn’t come from farming.  

That second category of 10-100,000 is your  poor farmers category, containing about 600,000   farmers in the US, and averaging 304 acres or  123 hectares, and about a fifth of the farmland   overall. These bottom two categories then make  up 4/5ths of the farmers and less than a third of   the land. I should note that this category also  still includes a lot of part-time farmers too,   so do not get the impression most of  this category is hard-scrabble living,   it could as easily be a doctor or lawyer who  enjoys rural life, likes riding a tractor around,   and has an accountant who is familiar with  various farming tax credits. It includes  

lots of part time farmers keeping up their  inherited land while having a different career.   This can also include a lot of homesteaders, folks  who have opted for the self-subsistence lifestyle   and the farm is their main job and they may have a  part-time job, but the farm revenue is for buying   what they can’t make. This is fundamentally the  category that most folks who self-describe as   farmers fit into, so it’s the biggest spectrum  of reasons and backgrounds, whereas the   category below it is rarely a full-time farmer. The next three categories above this is where we   get into the area of almost exclusively full-time  farming, those generating 6-digits of farm sales a   year, and in those three categories 100-250,000,  250-500,000, and 500,000 to a million dollars in   annual sales, we have 135,000, 89,000, and 71,000  farmers in each respectively averaging 1000, 1500,   and 2000 acres of farmland respectively and fairly  parallel portions of the overall farmland, each   about 15%. The last category of over a million in  annual sales makes up about 4% of farms and 25%   of land. Incidentally we classify something  as a ‘small farm’ in the US if it's under a  

quarter million in income, which is 91% of  all US farms. But keep in mind earlier we   said the average farm was 444 acres, whereas  the median farm size was well under 100.   Fair amount of data, and very US specific I’m  afraid. It is not universal though many of the   trends are common around the world, unfortunately  most countries aren’t as good about churning out   data as the US Department of Agriculture is so we  stick with that today. I think what it tells us  

is that if technology stopped right now, we would  probably see a convergence to 3 camps of farming,   mid-sized operations for folks who wanted it to  be their life and were able to keep it profitable   enough to support a family, large scale corporate  operations, and part time or hobby farming.   Mind you that this also varies by state as much  as nation, and also by crop. The reality is that   growing corn, grapes, blueberries, or trees  for lumber all bear about as much resemblance   to each other sailing a boat, driving a car,  flying a plane, or jumping a pogo stick.   Technology won’t stay the same though so lets ask  what the big shifts there will be. Again robots   are the big obvious one, and we’ll come back to  those in a moment, but anything that helps with   soil erosion, water irrigation or desalination,  weather prediction, and the cost and availability   of nitrogen, potassium, and phosphorus is capable  of totally disrupting the agricultural industry,   mostly positively for the world but in many cases  not so positively for farming. Small things can   have a big impact too, imagine someone manages to  get an operation going that can replace plywood   with a 3D printed hardwood, allowing wooden  furniture and objects to essentially be printed   to shape as though some master carpenter had  selected the finest woods to work with.  

Same, improvements in growing and processing  mushrooms might result in a vegan leather with   all the appeal and durability of normal  leather but much cheaper potentially,   while on the flip side, a civilization which began  favoring synthetic meat or meat alternatives might   see leather become as rare as ivory... or they  could learn to grow ivory without elephants.   Never rule out weird options a century down the  road like a genetically engineered tree that grew   bacon and had sap for blood. Or that someone  might make ultra-cheap electricity allowing   us to just churn out cheap irrigation water and  nitrogen while centrifuging other minerals right   out of the runoff water or oceans, or permit vast  towers or underground caverns made of ultra-cheap   and durable materials lit by LED lamps... see  the arcologies episode or the Earth 2.0 series.   Okay, now let’s talk about  robots before closing out.   No other innovation will alter the agricultural  landscape as much as them and artificial   intelligence, the two are not always identical.  First, all our big farm equipment in modern  

times requires simplicity over detail-oriented  selectivity. Combine Harvesters are simplistic,   but even a berry picker or apple-shaker is  still a brute force approach to harvesting,   compared to some smart drone that could  carefully identify each piece of fruit   at the moment it was ripe or carefully alter  the soil in one specific spot a meter-wide.   Instead of a few soil samples speaking to rough  soil makeup for a large area, you can apply soil   amendments to each plant individually with  least use and waste. Same for watering.   These are all different levels of sophistication  of course but note that we’re not even   contemplating something like a humanoid android  robot in shape or mind yet. Nor would we be,   the future wouldn’t be farming plantations  with androids on them, it would be a bunch of   different specialized equipment, some owned, some  rented probably, doing specific tasks coordinated   by a computer. A Smart Farm or Smart Farming. This is the drone that spots birds and drives   them off, the smart camera near a beehive  that counts where and when the bees are going   or even inside it and analyzes them for parasites  or has fake robot bees infiltrate the hive to do a   waggle-dance to give coordinates to the other  bees where a crop needing pollination is at.  

It’s the one where the weather and markets are  being carefully watched to give everybody a best   guess how much of what they should plant,  or a few best options to pick from,   and is precision coordinating transport and  storage for optimum efficiency. It’s the   one where the tractor drives itself and sends  notes when it needs maintenance and for what.   However I think it’s a future where the spirit  of farming remains intact, on the same farmland   our civilizations have been using since the  height of farming technology was a sharp stick,   but also into the tundras and deserts, up  in vast vertical farms or deep underground,   in vast space farms or on alien worlds. It will be  more automated, so we’ll see a lot more metal and   silicon in the fields, but also more green in the  ecological, environmental, and economical sense.   And as a last prediction, while it was one  of the most common professions of the past,   and now is fairly rare, I personally  think we will see that reverse,   more and smaller farms, as automation  improves, and more folks have a desire   to go beyond the small garden to the small  farm. It’s easier to contemplate having a  

big lawn when you’ve got labor-saving tools  and products for mowing, weeding and watering,   and I think more folks would do more gardening and  farming if similar labor-saving approaches emerge,   the smart home transitions to include the smart  lawn, the smart garden, and eventually the smart   farm, greenhouse, and land management system. There are thousands of major innovations going on   in agricultural all the time, we’ve barely  touched on even a handful of them today,   and the history of agriculture is a fascinating  one too, it's often driven civilizations and I   suspect that will still be as true tomorrow as it  was yesterday and will be a century from now.   As I mentioned one of my hobbies is  gardening and another is cooking,   and there is nothing better than working  with fresh ingredients, and as we discussed   today and in other episodes, getting produce  from the farms to the dinner tables quick,   clean, and safe is going to be critical to that  industry in the near future and I’m happy to   welcome on board our newest show sponsor,  Hello Fresh, who excel at all of the above.   They are a meal delivery kit service that delivers  a series of meals with the ingredients and recipes   in a box, and I thought we’d run a video of  me going from unboxing it, through cooking it,   to eating it, with the assistance of my lovely  wife Sarah and my 7-toed mutant cat Flax.   Hello Fresh delivers all their meals fresh to your  door and you can be eating in about half an hour   or less, but we’ll still accelerate the cooking  process. Today we’ll be cooking White Cheddar  

Wonderburgers & Old Bay Fries, and as a preview  it tasted great, better than take out or delivery,   and much cheaper. Everything is  fresh, you still need to do your prep,   but you cut down on time and waste as they send  you exactly the right amounts for the dish,   resulting in 25% lower carbon footprint than  store-bought groceries, and fresher than them too,   with the produce sourced directly from farmers. I love cooking but I often get interrupted while   doing it, meaning I can’t always give it my full  attention, so it's nice to have everything in the   right quantity and a handy step by step visual  recipe right there. I’ve also got a nice amount   of space to film this in, but I’ve done a lot  of cooking in dormitories, barracks, and even   tents in warzones or over engine blocks before  and so it was nice to see they didn’t require   any elaborate tools or equipment for food prep. I also love the variety and weekly and seasonal   changeups of the menu, to help break  out of a recipe rut and try new things,   plus for when you’re not wanting to spend a  lot of time in the kitchen and don’t have a   fast-forward button, they’ve got 20-minute  meals, easy cleanup, and low prep options.   Hello Fresh has more five star reviews than any  other meal kit, and you can try them out today,   just go to HelloFresh dot com and use  code “ISAACARTHUR14” to get 14 free meals,   plus free shipping! Eat fresh, eat healthy,  eat variety, and eat sustainably, and again   you can try it out for free today, just go to  HelloFresh dot com and use code “ISAACARTHUR14”.  

So that will wrap us up for today, but we’ll  back this weekend for another Scifi Sunday   here on SFIA, to take a look at the concept of  living, Sentient Planets & World Consciousnesses.   As mentioned, this Upcoming Thursday  we’ll be looking at Convergent Evolution,   the notion that certain traits - like eyeballs or  a humanoid form - might tend to be something we   would expect to see out on alien worlds. Then  the week after that we’ll take a look at the   notion of artificial intelligence being used for  crimes, or being criminals themselves. Then we’ll   close the month out with our Livestream  Q&A on Sunday October 31st… Halloween.  

Now if you want to make sure you get  notified when those episodes come out,   make sure subscribe to the channel, and if you  enjoyed the episode, don’t forget to hit the like   button and share it with others. If you’d like to  help support future episodes, you can donate to   us on Patreon, or our website, IsaacArthur.net,  and patreon and our website are linked in the   episode description below, along with all of our  various social media forums where you can get   updates and chat with others about the concepts  in the episodes and many other futuristic ideas.   Until next time, thanks for  watching, and have a great week!   [outro]

2021-10-15 15:53

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