Harvest

Specialized harvesting equipment, using conveyor belts for gentle gripping and mass transport, replaces the manual task of removing each seedling by hand.

"Harvest", a noun, came from the Old English word hærf-est (coined before the Angles moved from Angeln to Britain)[4] meaning "autumn" (the season), "harvest-time", or "August".

Crop failures can be caused by catastrophic events such as plant disease outbreaks (such as the Great Famine in Ireland), volcanic eruptions (such as the Year Without a Summer), heavy rainfall, storms, floods, or drought, or by slow, cumulative effects of soil degradation, too-high soil salinity, erosion, desertification, usually as results of drainage, overdrafting (for irrigation), overfertilization, or overexploitation.

The proliferation of industrial monocultures, with their reduction in crop diversity and dependence on heavy use of artificial fertilizers and pesticides, has led to overexploited soils that are nearly incapable of regeneration.

With a steadily-increasing world population and local overpopulation, even slightly diminishing yields are already the equivalent to a partial harvest failure.

Fertilizers obviate the need for soil regeneration in the first place, and international trade prevents local crop failures from developing into famines.