Asking out of genuine curiosity, does it actually matter if harvesting takes 5 or 10 days? If electricity is cheaper, it might make sense for the job to take a bit longer but be cheaper? Human labour is not involved (with automated vehicles) so price should only be dependent on actual power consumption.
Harvesting absolutely matters about time. 1-2 days can make a difference and many farms don't actually own the combines, there are companies (often families) that have fleets of combines and go from farm to farm during harvest season harvesting from sun up til sun down and moving on to the next client as quickly as possible not unlike the companies that do the same with bee hives.
Combines are EXPENSIVE, you can easily drop 600k USD on ONE combine and a class 9 (over 500 hp, basically the biggest) combine with a skilled operator will harvest 10-15 acres an hour depending on the crop, quality of the field, soil moisture etc. With over 900 million acres of active farmland in the U.S. alone...
Yes, something like letting your crops get rained on just before harvest can ruin them and make them rot in storage. Although purposefully planting crops with slightly different yield times could alleviate the problem. Currently though crop harvests are a huge rush to get all of it collected as soon as possible because it all tends to ripen around the same time, if a few plants ripened or finished it usually causes surrounding plants of the same species to ripen too.
I've been wondering recently if there's some way we could "hijack" this sort of signaling mechanisms that plants seem to have... E.g. artificiall encourage the crops to ripen sooner (i.e. when we want them to).
The next step would be, to figure out how to grow just the parts of the plants that we need. I'm guessing internally, plants use some kind of hormone-like signalling mechanism that lets different parts of the plant know what to do. Why do we need a full tree (in particular, bark) when we could just grow apples directly along with a few leaves to "power" them?
I was thinking about this while driving Wednesday. I'm in a strength sport and have lots of friends in strength sports and a recent conversation with someone made me think "hmmm, we need to figure out the AAS for crops, what's the test-e dbol equivalent".
I think the problem is though, plants are pretty damn finicky and have relatively narrow conditions that will result in proper growth and fruit/vegetable production. The tiniest soil imbalance, too much sun, too little sun, too much water, too little water and blah.
The more important task at hand right now though is proper land management, we're quickly headed for another dust bowl, we are heavily relying on groundwater and depleting groundwater sources here in the U.S. (and especially in countries like India) and farmers are killing themselves at record rates.
We're about to be up shit-creek with a hole in our canoe in the next decade or two.
Are you sure about that? Evolution would certainly strive for adaptability... Of course, evolution went through the window when humans started interfering (breeding etc), but still, just looking outside, plants seem to survive (and thrive) in relatively uncontrolled environmental conditions with wild weather swings and varying care (fertilizers, weeding, etc).
On the other hand, I can hardly keep a house plant alive, so there's that.
Yes it most certainly does matter! A crop that's harvested even a few days too late is likely to suffer severe nutrient and quality losses.
eta: Of course this varies per crop, so let me back down just a little, but for most food crops there really is a optimal window outside of which the farmers' rather meagre profits evaporate quite fast.
