Does Tuda Syuda propose or predict the replacement of all agriculture with energy-intensive and investment-heavy greenhouse growing?
Cropping in many parts of the world (particularly in the cold reaches of Europe and North America) is already being moved indoors into large-scale climate-controlled environments. Because of both the initial investment and running costs of this infrastructure, they tend to grow high value product (fruit and vegetables); while grains and animal products that require larger swathes of land are still grown by and large in outdoor monocultures and fields.
It is unlikely that an interior form of agriculture will entirely supercede outdoor agriculture (owing to sheer cost) but the consideration of agricultural landscapes as interior spaces allows for the intensification and experimentation with more suitable synthetic products without accidentally experimenting on adjacent sites and biomes at the same time.
The advantage of an AI is that it may be able to substitute hard infrastructural elements such as walls and fans with with adjacency relationships between plants and animals that are mutually beneficial and more efficient. This is already a practice in alternative agriculture movements, but is rarely instituted at large scale because of the sheer cognitive labour required.
What would this kind of agriculture do to the places where it is located? What would it be like to live around there?
It is likely that much of the growing managed by an AI will be automated. There are almost entirely automated industries such as Rotterdam Port and the Lego factory in Denmark. Even the most automated operations like these, however, still require human input for programming, checking, repair and oversight. The experience of working in and living near one of these farms would necessarily involve the experience of a ‘wall’ condition, and the subsequent benefits of this are outlined below.
Tuda syuda proposes the separation of agriculture at scale from other ecologies, including those inhabited by humans, inside and outside of city boundaries. Drawing these boundaries does not prevent the design of thresholds between human living spaces and other ecologies, rather it removes and so allows to interact in better and less harmful ways. It allows for cleaner waterways, lower waste output and the intentional design of urban boundaries.
