It requires far more knowledge: an in depth understanding of the agriculture relating sciences. But less pesticides, less fertilizers, no-till certainly reduces the labor.
> But less pesticides, less fertilizers, no-till certainly reduces the labor.
How do you figure? Pesticide, Fertilization, Tilling and Harvesting are precisely the types of labor that has been automated and is now done 60-feet wide by 4 miles an hour.
The automatization is far from being the norm (if you mean autonomous tractor). Then automatization applies to both type of agriculture. But there how do I figure? Not sure to properly understand your question, because less works mean less labors. Automatized or not.
The parent just said "automated". Using a tractor driven by a person to till a field is a vast savings over using a horse or person, as was done previously.
Autonomous vehicles and AI have been vastly oversold as a mean or a source of automation. There's been a huge amount of automation through applying regular machines to things that were previously done by hand and that's still where most labor-saving improvements happen.
They do: less inputs mean that the farmer has to spend less time on the fields. Fertilizer isn't put in one shot. It is done multiple time over the year. Less means it will be done less times.
