Wait, the NYT waited twelve years after Sputnik proved them wrong to retract their statement? I thought they were bad today about retractions today, but I guess they were a lot worse back then.

I'm being sarcastic, I know their retraction was a purely symbolic gesture. The point though is that none of the naysayers are degrading the idea of automated farming, but the mechanics in use with this machine have a cost and difficulty of maintenance that scales exponentially to size. While it may be physically possible for a simple three-axis gantry to scale up indefinitely, the costs in using it instead of other more cost efficient methods of automation (autonomous vehicles for instance) make it impractical in the extreme.

An XYZ gantry starts becoming impractical at around 1,000 square feet. That's respectable for a home's floorplan, but miniscule in comparison to a farm.