Farms Are Electrifying With Seeding & Spraying Drones Flying In Advance
Farming equipment will all end up with batteries and grid-ties just like everything else
As we electrify everything all at once to address global warming, a big question that arises is about vehicles that don’t run on roads near cities. What will we do with them?
In this series on the big subset of everything that is transportation, we’ve already looked at cars, buses, trucking and railroads. The reasons why they will all be battery electric or tied directly to overhead wires, fully powered by decarbonized electricity, are laid out there. There’s no room for hydrogen, synthetic fuels or biofuels for anything that runs on pavement or rails. But what about off of the paved road?
Let’s first categorize farm equipment a bit. It’s more sophisticated than you’d think. For this purpose it’s worth thinking about stationary equipment, light utility vehicles, airborne vehicles or services and heavy farming equipment.
For stationary equipment, whether it milks cows or smokes peppers, that’s all trivial to plug into electricity, and increasingly it already is. Just like the big cranes in ports, if it doesn’t move around, it gets plugged in. Anything that’s currently burning propane will burn electrons…