[HN Gopher] Agricultural drones are transforming rice farming in...
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Agricultural drones are transforming rice farming in the Mekong
River delta
Author : sohkamyung
Score : 335 points
Date : 2024-06-18 22:32 UTC (2 days ago)
(HTM) web link (hakaimagazine.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (hakaimagazine.com)
| latchkey wrote:
| I'm back in Vietnam (Saigon) for the first time in 4 years and it
| has been like a time machine. Covid definitely left its mark on
| this country due to the severe lockdowns they went through. The
| most interesting change I've noticed is that nearly everyone
| speaks at least a little English now. Attributed to being locked
| inside and a lot of YouTube.
|
| It used to be difficult/expensive to get drones here, but I see
| DJI stores all over town now. Seeing this is super cool and
| speaks towards how innovative and creative Vietnamese get with
| whatever they can get their hands on.
| lmm wrote:
| > I'm back in Vietnam (Saigon) for the first time in 4 years
| and it has been like a time machine. Covid definitely left its
| mark on this country due to the severe lockdowns they went
| through. The most interesting change I've noticed is that
| nearly everyone speaks at least a little English now.
|
| Interesting - here in Japan the consensus is that the level of
| English went _down_ , as we had a few years of no tourists and
| no language assistants.
| latchkey wrote:
| Vietnamese are extremely capitalistic as part of the culture.
| Everything is for sale here.
|
| They realized that they make more money when they speak
| English to foreigners, so they studied up. I'm not even
| making this up, one of the kids I was talking to said that.
| dataviz1000 wrote:
| Today, as a tourist in Japan many restaurants and bars
| outside of Kyoto, Tokyo, and Osaka and some in those places
| will not serve me food or a whiskey highball because I am not
| Japanese. They say "No English" as the reason. Four African
| students who recently graduated from the University of Kyoto
| were refused entry into a bar in Kyoto as I walked by. They
| all speak English and Japanese fluently unlike many of their
| Japanese classmates. This is high contrast to Vietnam where
| people would stop me as I walked down the street offering me
| a beer poured from a pitcher, a seat at their table on the
| sidewalk, or food and they would try to speak English with
| me. I also noticed that there is a lot of cooperation between
| people of different countries in Asia done with English. I
| would not be surprised if the common language of the Chinese
| and Vietnamese people mentioned in the article is English.
|
| Vietnam is my favorite place in Asia. It felt like the
| country is trying very hard to address many of the
| environmental problems like moving from gas powered to
| electric vehicles.
| cageface wrote:
| I've traveled all over Asia and lived in many countries for
| extended periods. It's also been my experience that the
| Vietnamese are the most welcoming and genuinely interested
| in talking to foreigners.
| latchkey wrote:
| > _It felt like the country is trying very hard to address
| many of the environmental problems like moving from gas
| powered to electric vehicles._
|
| This is my favorite IG:
| https://www.instagram.com/sai_gonxanh/
|
| But also SOOO depressing at the same time. The country is
| actually really really bad with trash and waste. The
| culture is literally to just toss trash into gutters. I
| can't tell you how many times on this trip alone that I've
| seen people just toss trash out car windows. Sigh...
|
| Here is what is happening now, due to over farming,
| building dams everywhere and generally poor management...
|
| https://www.instagram.com/p/C8Bk7jgvF65/
| alephnerd wrote:
| > everyone speaks at least a little English now. Attributed to
| being locked inside and a lot of YouTube
|
| There was a push for English fluency in K-12 around 10 years
| ago. Most people you are bumping into are products of that era.
| The non-Saigon/Hanoi/DaNang/DaLat kids who didn't get that
| opportunity attended the hundreds of ESL schools like "Wall
| Street English" and "California English" in town
| latchkey wrote:
| "Hi, what is your name? Where are you from?"
|
| It was pretty mediocre and that was the depth of it.
|
| Unless you're in a private school, my experience is that
| education here is still pretty poorly handled. Kind of "blind
| leading the blind".
|
| What I'm seeing now is that even the older generations are
| speaking some English too now, where previously I would just
| get the infamous jazz hands.
|
| I'm also in a big city... it'll be interesting to see how
| things are when I head out into the country side again.
| alephnerd wrote:
| > that education here is still pretty poorly handled. Kind
| of "blind leading the blind".
|
| It is, but the tourism boom began around sa decade ago as
| well, which pushed (pidgin) English fluency front and
| forward in Tier 1 cities (eg - https://laodong.vn/chinh-
| sach-giao-duc/dieu-kien-lam-giao-vi...).
|
| Most Vietnamese born after 1980 who consume foreign content
| prefer Korean, Chinese, and Japanese content over Western
| (based on my wife and her extended family's experience)
|
| In Saigon at least there was a push for English teaching in
| K-12, and ik international teachers (mostly Pinoy) were
| hired as contractors to teach part time in that initiative.
| latchkey wrote:
| > _Most Vietnamese born after 1980 who consume foreign
| content prefer Korean, Chinese, and Japanese content over
| Western (based on my wife and her extended family 's
| experience)_
|
| Agreed, I've noticed this as well from when I was living
| here before. The difference today is that I'm noticing
| more english youtube content being consumed. I wish we
| could see youtube stats on this.
|
| My partner is 1983... grew up in D3... near perfect
| english... only likes western content. A bit of an
| oddball in that regard, which sets them apart mentally
| from the rest.
| huydotnet wrote:
| In Hoi An, locals are known for their English fluency since
| more than 10 years ago, when I came back there last year, I was
| blown away by so many locals speak Korean just as fluent.
| infecto wrote:
| Money talks. A decade ago a good portion of people could
| speak Russian in Da Nang because of the large number of
| Russian tourists that come to vacation on the beaches.
| latchkey wrote:
| From what I understand, it is more now that the war in
| Ukraine is going on...
| IG_Semmelweiss wrote:
| I dont get it.
|
| I dont farm rice or have experience in vietnam in particular. Yet
| in my experience, pesticide etc has always been done thru the
| already existing irrigation system with a pump.
|
| Of course with advice from a technical person.
|
| The irrigation system requires an upfront investment of course
| but you are already going to irrigate the plot so this is is a no
| brainer. Therefore unless the rice grows without any irrigation
| system, I dont see how drones could be any more cost effective.
|
| I know rice is traditionally grown on flooded plains but that
| seems very risky - you are leaving your harvest in the hands of
| nature. Is Vietnam still growing rice subject to the whims of
| nature?
| kccqzy wrote:
| I'm pretty sure the irrigation system is flooding the plot. You
| set up berms and then periodically flood the entire plot with
| water. This isn't subject to the whims of nature because the
| flooding is done intentionally by farmers.
| joezydeco wrote:
| Rice fields are flooded as a means of weed control, but
| flooded fields also generate a lot of methane. There are
| direct seeded crop variants coming that eliminate the need
| for flooding.
|
| https://www.bayer.com/en/agriculture/rice-practices
| Cthulhu_ wrote:
| > I dont farm rice
|
| > I know rice is traditionally grown on flooded plains but that
| seems very risky
|
| A recurring HN trope is people who don't know about a subject
| feel like they have to have an opinion on it anyway. Why do you
| believe it's very risky / in the hands of nature? Flooded
| plains (aka rice paddies) have been used for thousands of
| years; rice is a semiaquatic plant so it needs to be submerged,
| and paddies are designed to retain water to not be subject to
| the whims of nature.
|
| Anyway, what alternative are you suggesting? Keep in mind it
| has to be scalable to feed billions and affordable.
| IG_Semmelweiss wrote:
| History is also replete with droughts that killed millions of
| people
|
| We are in 2025. We have plastics.
|
| Anyway thats nit my question. My question was simple: how is
| is that continued, ongoing drone expense -into perpetutity-
| was cheaper than a one-time investment in irrigation system
| which can be used for water, pesticide, and even fertilizer?
| stef25 wrote:
| > We are in 2025
| tntxtnt wrote:
| Irrigation pipes have tiny holes which can be blocked by
| calcium deposit in hard water. You'll need filters, a lot
| of filters in order to operate them, and the filters needd
| to change for like every year or so, so it's not a one-time
| investment.
| zdp7 wrote:
| What you are missing is that as it grows most of the rice is
| not underwater. You need pesticides to protect what's above the
| water. Average height is about 4 feet (1.2 meters).
| gojomo wrote:
| Ultimately drones may enable purely-mechanical pesticide-free
| removal of each individual insect/weed.
| vimax wrote:
| Reminds me of the mosquito laser. It would target only female
| mosquitos of the specific breed (they are the malaria
| carriers). It was only prototyped and never commercially
| produced.
|
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mosquito_laser
| redundantly wrote:
| > It was only prototyped and never commercially produced.
|
| aka Vaporware
| tomrod wrote:
| Indeed. These are often predictable outcomes when there is
| lack in economy of scale or scope.
| russell_h wrote:
| I saw a video where this company is doing exactly that for
| weeds:
|
| https://youtube.com/watch?v=V3A6L2Dao6s
|
| Great idea, I hope it works.
| givemeethekeys wrote:
| For weeds, this is already a thing. There are weed bots that
| kill with fire and others that kill with lasers.
| SCUSKU wrote:
| Are drones being used in the US as well? This type of labor
| savings seems like a pretty obvious win. Of course I'm just a
| CRUD monkey living in the city so I have no idea how farmers
| actually operate.
| owlninja wrote:
| Absolutely, and ironically, given recent news, I think DJI is
| one of the top manufacturers used.
| alephnerd wrote:
| VN and China have a FTA (part of the ASEAN FTA)
|
| > Are drones being used in the US as well
|
| Yes. We even funded a couple prominent players in the space
| that got acquired a decade ago.
|
| Chicago, Champaign-Urbana, Pittsburgh, and Ames used to be
| hubs in this niche back then.
| bri3d wrote:
| Yes. Until recently though, spraying by drone was a near
| impossible permitting nightmare (now it's only a minor
| permitting nightmare) and was inefficient because you needed a
| Part 107 pilot and a Visual Observer for each individual drone.
| But, things have gotten better. Before, spray drones over 55lb
| (the limit for a Small UAS in the US) had to go through an
| experimental aircraft registration program and be granted a
| tail number. Now, a select list of drones are authorized for
| spray operations with a special waiver instead, which is way
| easier.
| rukuu001 wrote:
| Interesting!
|
| In Australia we see drones mapping areas that need to be
| sprayed, then that data is downloaded into a tractor which
| traverses the field spraying (or adding nutrient) according
| to data collected by the drone. Haven't heard of spraying
| drones yet
| greenavocado wrote:
| This makes way more sense. Spraying with drones is a huge
| waste of energy.
| Rnonymous wrote:
| But driving a tractor over a field is a huge waste of
| land. Energy can be easily renewable in sunny regions
| such as vietnam.
| thepasswordis wrote:
| Is it possible to buy a piece of land and just get a rule
| that says "I can pretty much fly anything 100 feet up in the
| air above my property"?
|
| It's kindof frustrating that this isn't the case.
|
| If you're a company developing drones, for instance, how do
| you even test them?
| kjkjadksj wrote:
| Just do whatever you want no one patrols for this. Someone
| would have to call it in then a cop would have to show and
| do something about it in a timely manner. Fat chance IMO. I
| see either hobbyist or real estate photography drones
| overhead my property all the time, no way any of that has a
| permit. How would I even report the tresspass? They are
| gone in a few minutes. Cops aren't showing up that fast
| without a body.
| fragmede wrote:
| People are getting away with using drones as you
| mentioned, but the FAA's rules have had a real chilling
| effect on the hobby, which is a problem. Where drone
| piloting is a now a necessary skill for soldiers to have,
| and we're not encouraging the hobby, I think the next few
| decades aren't going to play out as well as they could.
| kjkjadksj wrote:
| The sort of drones the military are going to pilot in the
| next few decades are going to be nothing like what you
| can pilot as a consumer. Either way the youth is trained
| pretty well for electronic warfare. Just mate the drone
| to a video game controller or a mouse and keyboard and
| people will be elite immediately just like they are the
| first day a new video game is released to the world.
| theossuary wrote:
| That's not true. First, many operations the US military
| engages in are with partner nations who only have access
| to commercial drones. The US military is behind them in
| effectively utilizing these drones (commonly DJI, which
| the US military can't even practice with due to the ban).
| Second, there's a huge push to shorten the drone
| procurement process, and reduce the cost of drones. This
| allows them to be used in harsh EW environments as one-
| offs, and allows the operator to be safer (the more
| expensive the drone, the more likely a unit will be sent
| to recover it if it's downed). It also allows for faster
| adaptation to EW and changing circumstances. The US
| military drones of tomorrow will look a lot like Skydio
| drones today, if the US can get it together and update
| their procurement process to the 21st century.
|
| Interesting listen to on the topic:
| https://irregularwarfare.org/podcasts/drones-automation-
| and-...
| dmurray wrote:
| The military doesn't rely heavily on skills developed by
| hobbyists. In the vast majority of cases, you learn to
| shoot a rifle or drive a tracked vehicle or weld a
| nuclear reactor at the military's expense, after
| enlisting, even though you could have learnt those skills
| as a hobbyist. This isn't 15th century England where
| every man was required to keep a longbow and cricket was
| banned because it distracted from archery.
| fragmede wrote:
| Just because you can learn to fly a drone at 18 after
| enlisting doesn't mean you wouldn't have more skilled
| populace to draw from if kids started flying drones at
| 12, every high school had a drone racing team, and there
| was a competitive sport at the level of the Superbowl.
| It's not the 15th century, it's 2024. Even if you don't
| want to call it world war III just yet, there's hot
| conflict in two regions and cold conflict elsewhere.
| dayjaby wrote:
| Conflict in two regions? You live in a dream world.
|
| More like 100: https://geneva-academy.ch/galleries/today-
| s-armed-conflicts
|
| I'd recommend not to rely on media for the topic "war"
| but to educate yourself. Otherwise you end up quickly in
| a war yourself:
|
| > Naturally the common people don't want war . . . but
| after all it is the leaders of a country who determine
| policy, and it is always a simple matter to drag the
| people along, whether it is a democracy, or a fascist
| dictatorship, or parliament or a communist dictatorship
|
| H. Goring
| nradov wrote:
| The Civilian Marksmanship Program begs to differ.
| Congress specifically established that program because
| too many military recruits were showing up without
| knowing even the basics of safe and accurate shooting.
|
| https://www.usar.army.mil/News/News-
| Display/Article/1028255/...
| dmurray wrote:
| ...in 1903.
| fragmede wrote:
| While the world has changed since 1903, the point remains
| that having a more educated population is desirable for a
| country to have.
| quest88 wrote:
| Is above your property in a controlled airspace?
|
| You'd probably get a license to fly drones to test the
| drones. Wouldn't you expect a test driver to have a
| driver's license?
| kbutler wrote:
| In most (many?) US jurisdictions, you don't need a
| driver's license to drive on private property.
| 0xffff2 wrote:
| I would go so far as to claim ALL jurisdictions in the
| US. Does anyone have a counterexample?
| daemonologist wrote:
| You can fly indoors, where the FAA has no jurisdiction
| (probably, ask a lawyer). You can get all kinds of waivers
| as well, but I don't know if there's one for that - they
| tend to be more one-off exemptions from a single
| regulation, type of thing. There are some dedicated test
| sites as well where the FAA might be more relaxed with the
| regulations: https://www.faa.gov/uas/programs_partnerships/
| test_sites/loc...
|
| Most companies though probably have a part 107 pilot on
| staff, or have had some of their employees in other roles
| certified as such.
| 082349872349872 wrote:
| Until recently, we manually checked fields before mowing in
| order to flag fawns.
|
| Now it's done by drone (and IR makes for good contrast).
| SailToSki wrote:
| Yes! I know of at least one instance where a farmer in Colorado
| is using them for seeding and pesticide spray.
| lsllc wrote:
| Glad to see human ingenuity at work here! Pictures in TFA remind
| me of scenes from the movie The Creator.
| 6Az4Mj4D wrote:
| Is there any innovation in sowing rice?
| Cthulhu_ wrote:
| What kind of innovation are you thinking about? They have
| transplanting machines in various sizes if that's what you're
| thinking about:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rice_transplanter.
| shostack wrote:
| What about using drones to spread and plant seeds? Is that
| something being done?
| robbles wrote:
| > The drones can be configured to scatter seed, spray
| pesticide, or spread fertilizer.
|
| It's right there in the article.
| shostack wrote:
| Completely missed that somehow. Thanks!
| dhruvkar wrote:
| >> fly the drone with no physical effort and no direct exposure
| to pesticides--some of which have been associated with diseases
| of the eyes, ears, nose, throat, skin, and gastrointestinal
| tract.
|
| Slightly tangential, but what's the thinking here?
|
| We don't want to get it on us while spraying it, but then we'll
| eat it and it'll be fine?
| ggm wrote:
| Rice grows inside a husk. And, white so-called "polished" rice
| has the outer coat removed. So, insecticide/pesticide residue
| on the surface isn't such a big deal, even for brown rice.
|
| Ingesting and breathing in the concentrations of insecticide
| associated with spraying is orders of magnitude worse risk to
| the farm worker and people around, than incidental food contact
| risk post production/packaging.
|
| Many chemicals are also broken down in sunlight and water, or
| are absorbed into the rootstock, not the fruiting body.
|
| (not an agronomist or food scientist. I too wondered at the
| Merryl Streep ad 30 years ago where she's washing broccoli with
| soap..)
| tucnak wrote:
| > Merryl Streep ad 30 years ago where she's washing broccoli
| with soap..
|
| ???
| ggm wrote:
| https://academic.oup.com/chicago-scholarship-
| online/book/173...
|
| _In 1989, Meryl Streep became the celebrity spokesperson
| for a Natural Resources Defense Council campaign to
| publicize the risks of pesticides and chemicals applied to
| food, especially the danger of Alar-laced apples consumed
| by young children._
| dsign wrote:
| I'm pretty sure you will eat some, yes.
|
| However, irrigation and the rice's own metabolism will remove
| some pesticide. And rice grains have a peel which is later
| removed, often after a drying process at somewhat high
| temperatures, which will further degrade "safe" pesticides.
|
| This is just the best compromise we can make between labor cost
| (both financial and human; I have worked in rice crops and it
| is no joke) and safety, practically speaking. If I had to dream
| a better solution, I would have our crops grow in completely
| artificial environments out of planet, while tended by robots.
| Then insecticides wouldn't be needed, and genetic manipulation
| would be less of an issue. But, as they say, choose your
| dreams.
| Blahah wrote:
| Yes, that's the thinking.
|
| To elaborate that thinking: when absorbed in the quantities
| experienced by a farm worker in this context, some pesticides
| can have irritant or toxic effects. They (or rather their
| application methods and cocktails) are designed not to permeate
| the food products of the plant, although some do with some
| foods and this is ongoing research. Farmers need to
| consistently produce healthy produce people can afford, and
| want to do as little harm as possible to people in the process.
| nordsieck wrote:
| > We don't want to get it on us while spraying it, but then
| we'll eat it and it'll be fine?
|
| I suspect that a big part of the issue is the amount of
| exposure.
|
| Dental x-rays aren't dangerous to the patient, but they are
| dangerous to the dental technician, because they're
| (potentially) exposed to many x-rays every day.
|
| Same deal here - if you consume say... 100 lbs of rice a year
| that's not that big of a deal. But if the worker is spraying
| entire fields - they're just in contact with a lot more
| pesticide. And that's beyond the fact that white rice has the
| husk removed, etc.
| vishnugupta wrote:
| The laborers spraying the pesticides get an order of magnitude
| more exposure, repeatedly and in its raw, most harmful form.
|
| While we do consume some amounts of them it's minuscule, more
| so when the food is prepared after proper washing and
| boiling/fried etc.
| thaumasiotes wrote:
| The thinking is that you clean the food before eating it.
| AngryData wrote:
| Without getting in too deep, a lot of pesticides we use degrade
| in sunlight and/or water. So as long as it isn't sprayed near
| the end of harvest, where it would then be stored in a dark dry
| place, most agricultural chemicals will have degraded.
| retrac wrote:
| Some pesticides are short-lasting agents, which are acutely
| toxic, to the target pest, and also humans. But they dissipate
| or break down fairly quickly. Even just pure nitrogen or carbon
| dioxide gas can be used for pest control, and a minute of
| venting makes it safe after. Come to think, fully automated
| warehouses handling food, could be kept under an oxygen-free
| atmosphere. Probably impractical but it'd substantially reduce
| spoilage and it'd stop any rats or cockroaches pretty quick.
|
| (Of course, the history of pesticides is full of pesticides
| that don't actually dissipate, or break down, as much as
| claimed.)
| nthypes wrote:
| Anyone know the model name of the drone used?
| luyu_wu wrote:
| Looks like a DJI Agras model to me! Amusing considering the
| recent news regarding DJI being banned.
| blackoil wrote:
| One reason of them being banned is they are very good and
| hence very popular.
| Cthulhu_ wrote:
| The main reason is a fear - which as far as I know is
| unsubstantiated - that China's got backdoors in tech sold
| in the west. But with so many hackers and national security
| agencies disassembling and analyzing these things, surely
| they'd have found it by now?
|
| Therefore, I wouldn't be surprised if it's more about
| market protection. Which doesn't make much sense to me
| because is there a major US drone manufacturer that can't
| compete with DJI right now?
| eunos wrote:
| It's a fear that US has no similarly competitive drone
| companies
| ovi256 wrote:
| > with so many hackers and national security agencies
| disassembling and analyzing these things, surely they'd
| have found it by now
|
| This is a common misconception. With OTA updates, the
| backdoor can be introduced at any time in a future
| software version. For example, right before an attack.
| ammo1662 wrote:
| I'm not sure whether they can be exported even if DJI is not
| banned.
|
| Just check [0], their latest agricultural drone T60 sold in
| China has 60KG payload and AESA radars. (No English page
| provided)
|
| They also has a T50 [1] with English introduction page.
|
| While the air force of some countries in the world still does
| not have AESA, DJI already uses AESA to grow crops.
|
| [0] https://ag.dji.com/cn/t60/specs
|
| [1] https://ag.dji.com/t50/specs
| eunos wrote:
| If we are moving to neo feudalism, even upper middle class
| families might have a better air force than many smaller
| and poorer countries.
| oefrha wrote:
| Article says brand is XAG so must be one of these:
| https://www.xa.com/en/plant-protection-uas The photo looks like
| either XAG P100 or P100 Pro.
| gumby wrote:
| This is so great. My long term dream is that robotics take over
| farming, individually plucking each weed or weevil, and metering
| just the right amount of water for each individual plant, so that
| all the crops are organic.
|
| Most of the chemicals (yes, including nitrogen fertilizers)
| offset labor, so when the labor is free we shouldn't need them.
| And people won't have to spend their lives in stoop-back work or
| exposed to toxic chemicals.
| mkmk wrote:
| Out of curiosity how does nitrogen fertilizer offset labor?
| bfdm wrote:
| Directly, as a substitute for more labour intensive sources
| like manure, compost or crop rotation.
|
| Indirectly by increasing yield per acre per day.
| universa1 wrote:
| But in the end you have to replace at least some of the
| nitrogen (and other nutrients) you are taking from the
| field in some way. And without a major shift in consumption
| patterns (less meat) this will mean fertilizer, as the
| alternatives usually lead to a much lower yield.
| dmurray wrote:
| Meat farming replaces artificial fertilizer, by providing
| a source of manure, so doesn't that relationship run the
| other way?
|
| But having 1/4 of the land under soy beans or other
| locally appropriate nitrogen-fixing plants doesn't seem
| like it would hurt yields too much.
| jon_richards wrote:
| I was very disappointed on my last trip to Iowa to see
| that most farmers weren't even bothering with cover
| crops.
| eru wrote:
| I wonder whether genetic engineering can give nitrogen
| fixing abilities to plants that currently lack this
| ability?
| mjh2539 wrote:
| It's not the plants themselves that fix nitrogen but
| endosymbiotic microorganisms in the soil.
| eru wrote:
| I know. For simplicity, I was talking about the plants in
| the same generic sense that your gut microbiome is a part
| of you, and the dead tissues that form your hair and skin
| are also a part of you.
|
| You still need to hack up the eg cereal plants so they
| can actually engage in that symbiotic relationship (or
| perhaps actually directly fix nitrogen all by themselves,
| without any outside help at all).
| hnmullany wrote:
| N-fixation does happen in the soil, but legumes have root
| nodules that host rhizobium bacteria and can assimilate
| the N much more easily
| pbmonster wrote:
| You could do that, the problem is the same as in making
| nitrogen fertilizer in a chemical plant: energy cost. It
| just takes so much energy to break the nitrogen tripple
| bond.
|
| Even if you made a plant that fixes nitrogen extremely
| efficiently, every joule of sunlight it pumps into the
| ground is not available as calories you harvest. And
| fixing nitrogen will take an amount of energy per acre on
| the order of what you harvested from that acre in a year.
| eru wrote:
| Well, only being as efficient as existing nitrogen fixing
| plants (or rather their microbes) would already be quite
| interesting.
|
| Btw, I don't think plants are close to optimal efficiency
| in terms of using sunlight. See eg C3 vs C4 plants.
| pbmonster wrote:
| > Well, only being as efficient as existing nitrogen
| fixing plants (or rather their microbes) would already be
| quite interesting.
|
| My point is that you can't have corn that is as nitrogen-
| fixing as a legume and still produce nearly as much corn
| - the plant (or its microbes) will need the majority of
| the available photosynthesis products to fix nitrogen.
| This directly makes the cobs smaller.
|
| > Btw, I don't think plants are close to optimal
| efficiency in terms of using sunlight. See eg C3 vs C4
| plants.
|
| That's true, even photovoltaic panels (which are still
| far away from their theoretical maximal efficiency) are
| an order of magnitude more efficient at pulling energy
| from the sun than plants are. But significantly improving
| photosynthesis in crop plants is far beyond our current
| genetic engineering ability.
|
| And I'm not aware of any way to organically fix nitrogen
| that uses energy outside what is provided by
| photosynthesis - or gets its energy from digesting dead
| organic matter, which also doesn't beat the limits of
| photosynthetic efficiency on a per-acre basis.
| eru wrote:
| > My point is that you can't have corn that is as
| nitrogen-fixing as a legume and still produce nearly as
| much corn - the plant (or its microbes) will need the
| majority of the available photosynthesis products to fix
| nitrogen. This directly makes the cobs smaller.
|
| I can believe that. However for people who don't want to
| use nitrogen fertiliser, this might still be useful.
|
| You can see it as an alternative to clover (or manure),
| that happens to produce eg a bit of grain.
| lucioperca wrote:
| Nitrogen can also be replenished by crop rotation.
| Legumes will naturally add nitrogen back.
| thriftwy wrote:
| By growing nitrogen fixers such as peas and beans on the same
| fields.
| tda wrote:
| And more, smaller, robots vs large tractors could put an end to
| monocultures. Monoculture is the result of optimizing for
| minimal human labour, not an optimization for yields. So when
| labour is free, mixed fields are the way to maximize profits
| avdlinde wrote:
| How about harvest? Machines are quite specialized, how do you
| see that working out?
| jajko wrote:
| Bigger farms overall, which is anyway the trend so they
| utilize economies of scale. Or machine rentals if there is
| plenty of need from smaller farmers.
| IndrekR wrote:
| Unfortunately machine rental math does not work out for
| most of the specialised farming equipment in areas with
| changing seasons -- when combine harvesters are needed
| (at the harvest time), they are needed for everyone
| within the same time window.
| nico_h wrote:
| You might run into time of use contention unless you have
| a ver diversified crop neighborhood or adaptable robot.
| Don't harvests usually happens at the same time for all
| the same species of crop in an area?
| gumby wrote:
| That's a failure of imagination. Hordes of people used to
| do all the work, and Industrial Age engineering (thinking)
| replaced them with a combination of large, specialized
| devices and large, specialized farm layouts. It was more
| efficient for the technology of the time.
|
| But we don't build computing like that any more. Instead of
| large centralized single devices we use a large amount of
| protean hardware with various adapts (software).
|
| Hordes of small devices can flood through the fields, using
| sensors to decide at any point what to do, and can use
| different effectors for different tasks at different times
| of the year, like the humans used to do.
| m2f2 wrote:
| You mean picking each ear/grain by a single device? rofl
| gumby wrote:
| I didn't mean that -- I agree that would be absurd!
|
| I mean an autonomous device that picks a row, then does
| the same on the next row on the way back, then maybe
| unloads into a hopper and continues with the next couple
| of rows. And you don't one, you have 50 or a couple of
| hundred of them rather than one huge combine harvester.
|
| And if you have 50 of these platforms designed to go up
| and down the rows they could have been doing the planting
| at the beginning of the season (or desuckering your vines
| in spring or whatever) using a different tool, so your
| capex isn't tied up in a few huge single-application
| devices, but amortized over a whole season. And when you
| have a fleet, if one fails and needs maintenance it's no
| more of a big deal than when one server in a datacenter
| fails.
| tastyfreeze wrote:
| I was reading that and thinking family sized farm scale. If
| the machines are cheaper farms can be smaller and still
| justify buying a machine. Asian markets have quite a few
| small machines for managing rice crops.
|
| Like these: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rice_transplanter
| https://sda-industries.com/equipment-parts/rice-harvester/
|
| Compare that to "small" machines sold in the US.
| https://www.deere.com/en/harvesting/
| greenie_beans wrote:
| wouldn't a monoculture help the robots, too?
| gumby wrote:
| But it doesn't help us, and the robots are for _our_
| benefit. Make the robots go the the extra effort.
| randomdata wrote:
| Contrary to bizzarre claims made earlier, robots don't
| actually work for free. In fact, they are more staunch
| about getting paid than humans are. They will stop
| working as soon as you stop paying them. Humans, on the
| other hand, will usually keep working for a while until
| they finally give in to the realization that you aren't
| going to pay up.
|
| As a result, we're still going to optimize for the most
| productive use of robots, just as we do for humans.
| mattwest wrote:
| That's false. Homogeneity makes it easier to harvest,
| process, and store crops. It also drives perfect competition
| which brings cost down on the commodity market.
| samatman wrote:
| Harvesting, processing, and storing, are human labor.
| mattwest wrote:
| They _involve_ human labor, just like every industrial
| process in existence. What 's your point?
| gumby wrote:
| Yes, the GP's reasoning is faulty (actually, "imperfect"
| would be a better term), but things aren't as clear as you
| put it either.
|
| Homogeneity helps with trading commodities, no question.
| And commodities reduce risk by allowing a very wide fan out
| on both sides of a two sided market...which has advantages
| and disadvantages for all participants.
|
| More along your argument, it also lets the farmer use
| capital better in the short term (you buy the equipment you
| need for your monocrop).
|
| But if you have multimodal devices you have the opportunity
| to take advantage of more flexibility. You can do crop
| rotation to use less chemicals or to take advantage of
| trends in the commodity market. You can have a different
| mix of crops for the same reason (half corn, half row
| crops, though they re typically worth less). You have more
| flexibility to adapt to climate change. The commodity
| markets can handle all this, in fact they help enable it.
|
| This isn't magic wand -- crop rotation doesn't make sense
| if, say, you have an orchard. But mechanization also caused
| us to abandon growing multiple crops in the same field,
| which can have benefits and improve yield. It was just way
| too labor intensive. If we go back to individual "labor"
| (automated in this case) it could be worthwhile.
| stoneman24 wrote:
| In a recent episode of Countryfile [1](popular UK BBC1 program
| on the country and farming) the resident farmer was mentioning
| both crop rotation and the issue of black grass invading his
| wheat fields.
|
| The black grass was slowly out competing his cash crop and
| would difficult to remove (perhaps taking the entire field out
| of any production for a year or the use of chemicals).
|
| Having a horde of little robots might greatly assist in
| manually keeping other plants at bay without indiscriminately
| affecting the field with chemicals (extra one-use expense,
| robots would last many years).
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Countryfile
| ensocode wrote:
| I am searching for solutions in this field. Do you have any
| links to any consumer hardware for this. like drones which
| can cut down small invasive plants which were selected by AI?
| pbmonster wrote:
| Have you looked at laser weeding? A camera looks at the
| plants, an ML model identifies which plants are crop and
| which are weeds, and then a laser burns the weeds just
| enough so they die from water loss.
|
| Research: https://ethz.ch/en/industry/industry/news/data/20
| 22/03/laser...
|
| Commercial product (first one I found, there are countless
| others): https://carbonrobotics.com/
| doubloon wrote:
| Tertill cuts weeds but the ai is "if object is tall and
| firm enough to trip my bumper, turn"
| seanmcdirmid wrote:
| Robot labor isn't free. You pay in capital costs, energy costs
| to run them, and ongoing maintenance costs if you use them a
| lot. Environmentally, these costs might be more or less than
| the chemicals they replace, but it isn't am obvious comparison.
|
| Changing farming methods along with automation might work
| better, like vertical farming techniques.
| fakedang wrote:
| Sorry, but in every example of vertical farming I've seen,
| there's nothing that actually works. Nearly all of the farms
| and companies I've visited and been exposed to use a lot more
| water and energy (in all forms) compared to a conventional
| farm. The only appeal I see are for places with limited
| agricultural land space such as Singapore or the Netherlands,
| or arid regions such as the Middle East or Central Asia. Even
| then, it's much cheaper for most of these places to simply
| import from abroad.
| ahartmetz wrote:
| Vertical farming is complete bullshit for most plants. I
| don't know why people keep talking about it.
|
| Plant growth is (for most plants) limited by available
| energy, which comes in the form of sunlight. Sunlight is
| extremely bright compared to artificial light sources and
| extremely cheap, i.e. free. Replacing it makes no economic
| sense in most situations.
|
| If we talk about producing a lot of calories to feed the
| starving, even most reservations go out of the window,
| because staple crops are staples because they _are_ very
| efficient at turning sunlight into chemical energy and they
| need all the sunlight they can get.
| InSteady wrote:
| It's weird, vertical farming has gotten so much hype but
| really only makes sense for luxury products like
| microgreens, and still only makes sense if you specifically
| want to grow them in an expensive, dense city. Even things
| like mature lettuces, tomatoes, and strawberries have been
| tried extensively and simply don't make economic sense to
| grow indoors in stacks the vast majority of cases.
| zeekaran wrote:
| I assumed vertical farming was exciting for space reasons,
| and maybe very little else other than someone wanting (for
| whatever reason) to grow things in the middle of a dense
| urban center.
| gumby wrote:
| Non-subsistence farming is basically all cap ex at this
| point. Farmers have Ag Ec degrees and think about cap ex
| first. With the price of energy on a secular decline, imagine
| a world with ubiquitous renewables. The robots can go to a
| charge point and recharge themselves.
| zo1 wrote:
| I disagree. I think we should have _more_ human labor take over
| farming but on an individual level that 's working much much
| closer to the consumption source. Think having your own farmer
| and food-producer in your own house or property, or perhaps
| shared with your small flock of neighbors.
|
| Way too-many of the problems plaguing society atm can be solved
| by reducing transport and eliminating all the huge intermediate
| steps between our food (other other food-related products) and
| ourselves. Just think about how much effort is put into
| something simple like flour or butter or cheese (nevermind all
| the crazy processed stuff). The food will be more natural,
| it'll be healthier and with less additives, we'll be be
| contributing less to AGI/automation and creating actual
| valuable jobs, we'll be reducing the amount of plastic, fuel
| and electricity used for transport, storage, processing,
| packaging, labelling, accounting, lawyering. Every one of the
| major food production + distribution industries has huge
| support networks.
| hamlsandwich wrote:
| Local, small-scale food production used to be the only way
| food was produced - people didn't eat better then, and there
| were many, many fewer people to feed.
|
| There's huge variability in what can be grown where,
| especially if you want to reduce the amount and number of
| inputs that are imported from further afield. There are
| places that can support all the crops and livestock that
| provide a healthy, balanced, and sustainable human diet, but
| not everywhere can. What if you want to eat flour in a place
| where grain crops aren't tenable, or butter where cows, sheep
| and goats don't do well?
|
| Producing food this way also means that we need to build
| houses on fertile land that's good for growing things. That
| happens a _lot_ where I live, and I hate the site of
| previously productive soil disappearing under concrete house-
| slabs.
| tastyfreeze wrote:
| You can have both large scale production and small scale
| production at the same time. It is actually required for
| survival on a large scale long term. Technologies enabling
| small scale farms to be more efficient are as great an
| enabler as the advent of industrial farming.
|
| If you want to see less fertile land covered up make it
| easier for people to make money growing on their own land.
| crubier wrote:
| Oh yes, taking agriculture back to where it was 2 centuries
| ago, when there definitely weren't any famines at all.
| greenie_beans wrote:
| counterpoint: like the great chinese famine, when the
| government forced the country from an agrarian economy to
| an industrialized economy, and they fucked up the local
| food systems.
| themaninthedark wrote:
| The same thing happened when the Soviet government forced
| the country from an agrarian economy to an industrialized
| one.
|
| A lot of people have drawn inferences that it may have
| been the government, their leadership and application of
| ideology rather then the shift from agrarian economy.
| greenie_beans wrote:
| seems to me that taking farmers away from their land will
| make people starve.
|
| similar to how in the american south in the 20th century,
| sharecroppers were forced to work on commodity farms and
| didn't grow food. instead, they imported processed corn
| from the midwest that gave them pellagra. thanks in part
| to market forces of the midwest corn trade.
| int_19h wrote:
| In Soviet case, the primary reason why people starved is
| because they have deliberately took away most of the food
| from the peasants to feed the cities. The cities didn't
| starve; the countryside did, which in turn prompted
| millions of peasants to move to the cities (and become
| industrial workers, which was the whole point).
| thworp wrote:
| > Think having your own farmer and food-producer in your own
| house or property
|
| Impossible. The world is too urbanized, there simply is no
| space to do this for more than a few % of the population.
|
| > Way too-many of the problems plaguing society atm can be
| solved by reducing transport and eliminating all the huge
| intermediate steps [...]
|
| Maybe some problems can be solved, many more will be _un_
| solved. Reducing our transport capacity of food increases the
| vulnerability to crop failures. De-centralizing processing
| will make it harder (read: more expensive) to test for
| pathogens, nutrients and ensure hygiene.
|
| > we'll be be contributing less to AGI/automation and
| creating actual valuable jobs
|
| No, we would be shrinking the GDP by moving labour from
| highly productive sectors into agriculture. At the same time
| food will become much more expensive, even more so if those
| new employees are paid minimum wage.
|
| > and eliminating all the huge intermediate steps between our
| food (other other food-related products) and ourselves
|
| How? You're simply replacing one set of steps for another,
| more labor-intensive one. I encourage you to visit one of
| those museums where people demonstrate how people in the 18th
| century lived for some perspective.
|
| > we'll be reducing the amount of plastic, fuel and
| electricity used for transport, storage, processing,
| packaging,
|
| You didn't quite state the full conditions to achieve this
| reduction, so I'll do it for you. Basically we have to
| completely change our diets. Fresh food can only be eaten in
| season, and only what is locally available. We can only store
| food that does not need climate control to keep, so in winter
| there are only conserved vegetables and fruits. Not using any
| modern packaging and storage methods means that even in
| season things have to be eaten really quickly.
|
| On the whole, your insinuation that our food distribution is
| some kind of unnecessary luxury that we can do away with just
| rubs me the wrong way. It is the reason the amount of people
| in famine has been dropping every decade despite a population
| explosion. It ensures that there are no mass-scale outbreaks
| of botulism, moulds and other pathogens that used to kill
| lots of people and waste huge quantities of food. Its
| efficiency (along with high productivity) guarantees that
| almost everyone can afford to eat sufficient nutrients even
| through winter.
|
| Sure we could get some of those benefits in your agrarian
| fantasy, but the cost would be enormous.
| pawelmurias wrote:
| If we accept subpar nutrition we could propably plant GMO
| potatoes and things like that all over the place
| bluGill wrote:
| Gmo can also increase nutrition. anti gmo and anti
| vaccine come from theisame anti scienece background,
| don't fall for either. Yes deand safety studies but then
| use what is good.
| zo1 wrote:
| Just because it's not 100% possible right now, doesn't mean
| we shouldn't work towards it.
|
| Your first criticism as an example. "World too urbanized".
| Again, the solution solves a big chunk of other problems we
| have. One need only read HN a bit to see a bunch of them.
| E.g. 1. Food islands. 2. Focus on transport to get food
| because mom and pop stores closed and we only have Walmart.
| 3. Car culture.
|
| My point is don't shoot the idea down, we have to consider
| how working towards this arguable ideal moves the needle in
| a better direction. And yes, maybe the end-goal I presented
| isn't 100% possible or the right direction for society. But
| working towards it means we solve a host of intermediate
| problems, with each one making things a bit better.
|
| Sorry I'm not answering all your points, which some are
| 100% valid and I agree, but others are just us talking past
| eachother. E.g. I'm not entirely advocating for us to go to
| the middle-ages and churn butter for 2 hours a day. But
| there has to be an in-between that opens up additional
| options and ideas that I can't possibly envision, or
| articulate well-enough, or consider every angle and
| potential criticism.
| pawelmurias wrote:
| This would be utterly horrible. AGI/automation is a valuable
| thing while being forced to toil working the land sucks hard.
| dukeyukey wrote:
| Small-scale agriculture like that is _vastly_ less efficient
| than industrialised agriculture. It won't create valuable
| jobs, it'll take labor away from valuable jobs.
| infecto wrote:
| This is the typical utopian dream that is complete horse
| manure. We like to look back and think how quaint and healthy
| things were but they were not. While there are a lot of
| improvements to be had in our current supply chain, going
| back to smaller farms is not the way to get there.
|
| What you described would be more costly and I don't think
| there is really any relationship to health. Your food would
| end up being more expensive as most of the things you listed
| cost very little in the grand scheme, labor is the most
| expensive part.
| InSteady wrote:
| I haven't crunched the math or anything, but you don't feed
| 8 billion people with small farms unless every 10th person
| is willing to go farm. Currently it's more like every
| 150th.
| infecto wrote:
| Sounds like solid napkin math. It true though, you don't
| have that happen unless a lot more people are farming and
| honestly, farming is valuable but the labor is not. Its
| better spent else where. I absolutely believe there are
| massive improvements to be made but I think they will
| happen with technology and more automation.
| abdullahkhalids wrote:
| You are getting downvoted, but presumably, in Russia a
| significant amount of food is being produced in small family
| farms/gardens called Dacha [1], with a typical size of only
| 600 m^2 [4].
|
| Since, original sources are all Russian, it's hard to fully
| verify via secondary sources, but there are claims that (1)
| as much as 77% of all vegetables and 59% of all meat [2] or
| (2) as much as 50% of all food [3] produced in Russia is on
| these farms.
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dacha
|
| [2] https://thebovine.wordpress.com/2009/08/09/in-1999-35-mil
| lio...
|
| [3] https://mospace.umsystem.edu/xmlui/handle/10355/84725
|
| [4] https://www.notechmagazine.com/2020/03/a-dacha-for-
| everyone-...
| zeegroen wrote:
| This already exists! There's a company called Carbon Robotics
| that has a prototype of a robot that eliminates individual
| weeds with a lazer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_2s-0wgQWXM
|
| I'm also looking forward to this technology being widely
| available and helping solve the issue of herbicide run-off, and
| later additionally the same for pesticides and fertilization.
| boringg wrote:
| None of the inputs to farming will ever be free. Whomever owns
| the robots will be charging for their labour you are only
| substituting one form for another. Potentially it might workout
| better for production numbers still tbd. Farmers these days are
| beholden to the agri tech companies for costs and maintenance.
|
| That is a great dream to have. In the energy world it was
| supposed that prices would go to close to zero with fully
| adopted solar but thats an equivalent far fetched dream.
| tomhoward wrote:
| In case anyone's reading this who is interested in working on
| it:
|
| I'm building a company/platform that does a lot of this,
| particularly the "metering just the right amount of water for
| each individual plant" part.
|
| The thing I have in mind is very low cost devices (sub-$20)
| with mesh radio comms, inputs to read from sensors and outputs
| to control irrigation, and TinyML running the devices to
| optimize everything in real time.
|
| I have about 10 years experience working in the field (mostly
| with high-value crops like wine grapes, nuts, avocados) and
| several iterations of prototype devices and web software, but
| am keen to attract people who are excited at the idea of
| working on this kind of thing.
|
| Anyone - particularly low-level programmers or hardware
| engineers - interested in working on it can contact me (email
| in bio).
| WillAdams wrote:
| The Open Source Ecology folks have been working on this sort
| of thing for a while --- check in with them?
|
| https://www.opensourceecology.org/
| cagenut wrote:
| that website/project looks pretty dead
| tomhoward wrote:
| I've always been supportive of open-source and plan to make
| much of our tech open source [1], but I'm not seeing
| anything on their site that's anything like what we're
| doing (it alls seems to be large machinery, no
| microelectronics).
|
| The thing about this field that I've learned over the
| decade I've been involved is that creating the tech is less
| than half the challenge; the distribution - building
| awareness, selling it, installing it, maintaining it - is a
| huge undertaking, and a lot of money needs to come from
| somewhere to make that viable.
|
| [1] I'd like to have a RTOS to run on these devices that is
| as approachable and familiar as common Linux distros like
| Ubuntu, for people to install and customise themselves,
| with a full open source license.
| gumby wrote:
| In another comment I wrote that you probably need a BOM
| less than $0.50. At that price you don't have a massive
| OS like Linux, you need something embedded that can run
| in a few KB.
|
| But a bunch of small devices can be managed by a huge
| device running Linux -- maybe even something as expensive
| as a Raspberry Pi.
|
| (Apart from some time trying to sell in the Ag sector I
| spent a lot of time on embedded devices)
| tomhoward wrote:
| Well I already have a firmware version that can run in a
| few KB, which my father developed in Motorola assembly
| and that ran most of the soil moisture monitoring devices
| sold to the big-volume wine grape producers in Australia
| (mostly in Riverland SA supplying Treasury etc) from the
| late 90s till about 2010, after which newer products
| using Zigbee and cellular IoT took over (though we worked
| together on our own newer versions supporting Bluetooth
| LE and Cat-M1 up until his retirement a couple of years
| ago).
|
| I hear you that $20 is high - but the status quo in this
| business now is monitoring devices that sell for AUD
| $600+, and with LTE-M or LoRa comms modules that cost
| over AUD $60 alone.
|
| I'm forever thinking about ways you could drive the cost
| down further. I'd love it if there were a way to get the
| on-plant modules under $1. Feel free to get in touch if
| you want to discuss further.
| HeyLaughingBoy wrote:
| BLE mesh and solar power should get your BoM cost below
| $20, but I don't see any way that you're going to hit a
| sub $1 price point. Assuming your mesh can cover the
| entire field (reasonable if you have one monitoring point
| every few plants), you can have one or a small handful of
| LTE-M basestation points to handle the data uplinks.
|
| It's an interesting problem and I am sure reference
| designs already exist. Maybe talk to someone at Nordic.
| tomhoward wrote:
| Yeah I think that's right. It's a matter of trading off
| the water cost savings (and produce quality/yield gains)
| per plant vs unit cost per device, to determine the
| optimal density of devices.
|
| As I said in the previous comment, right now, high-value
| crop growers like wine grape growers pay $700-$1000 or
| more per site (including reader/comms module and
| sensors), and generally only install one monitoring point
| per block (I have a system running at one of Australia's
| top boutique/biodynamic wine makers and at current prices
| he can only cost-justify having one 10 monitoring sites
| over his 70 acres of vines).
|
| So, whatever we can do to drive down the cost to $20 or
| less should deliver big wins.
|
| > Maybe talk to someone at Nordic
|
| Yep, we're working with hardware engineers who are well
| connected to people at Nordic.
| gumby wrote:
| There's (relatively) lots of water in the Barossa Valley
| and it's worth growing a thirsty high value crop like
| grapes there. And even there the cost structure you say
| is unsupportable.
|
| But the economics of farming in the Eyre Peninsula is
| quite different and they _really_ have a water problem.
| From a food PoV these are the people we really need to
| help.
|
| (I have family in both, not to mention in laws in Germany
| who also have a water problem...getting rid of it!)
| fragmede wrote:
| Can you use mesh networking? A solar panel and an Esp32,
| with mesh networking might be cheaper than an LTE module
| on each device, at the cost of needing more devices.
| tomhoward wrote:
| Yep, mesh networking is the plan:
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40740278
| kaveh_h wrote:
| Why must the device be so cheap? Is the intent to have
| one serve each plant? Why can't one serve many plants?
| tomhoward wrote:
| Yes, that's how it's done now, but it's a matter of the
| precision vs cost tradeoff.
|
| Right now it costs about $750-$3000 to set up each
| monitoring site, so growers can only afford to install a
| low number of devices per acre [1], thus a high number of
| plants per device. In that case you're not optimizing to
| anywhere the specific requirements of each plant, you're
| assuming (often falsely) that all the plants in that area
| have the same needs as the one you're monitoring.
|
| The lower the cost per device, the higher your resolution
| and precision of monitoring can be, and the more you can
| accurately provide for the specific needs of each plant.
|
| [1] Very often that number is zero.
| schaefer wrote:
| If you use an Olla, the plants self regulate their water
| intake.
|
| See the book gardening with less water by David A. Bainbridge
| declan_roberts wrote:
| Great for backyard tomato plants, not a commercial farming
| option for tens of thousands of acres.
| gumby wrote:
| Not the way farms are run today, sure. But if it's worth
| it, farms will adapt.
| cookiengineer wrote:
| This sounds like the optimum use case for LoRa, doesn't it?
| tomhoward wrote:
| LoRa gets talked about plenty for ag monitoring, and sure
| it can be great for certain use cases. Optional support for
| LoRa is certainly something we want to support (via device
| variants or plug-on comms modules).
|
| For the use case invoked in this subthread (an individual
| monitoring device on each plant), I don't think it's the
| best.
|
| We're currently working with Nordic nRF52xx/53xx/54xx
| modules, which have dual ARM cores and built-in 2.4GHz
| radio, so, support for protocols like Bluetooth Mesh,
| Zibgee, Thread.
|
| That means you can have a single module that can handle
| mesh comms with neighboring devices, as well as sensor
| reading, machine learning and output control. You wouldn't
| need a separate comms module to communicate back to a base
| station or a high post and antenna for long-range comms. So
| it offers big savings on the device production side and the
| installation time/cost side.
| HeyLaughingBoy wrote:
| Ha. Didn't see this post before I responded to your other
| one :-)
| gumby wrote:
| I wonder if in a large farm it will be worth running hoses
| and deploying a frob next to each device vs having an
| electric robot with a refillable tank walking the rows.
|
| Such a robot is still SF today, so deploying a frob with each
| seedling would be the only choice at the moment (or continue
| current irrigation practices). The frobs have to be cheap
| enough to be consumables.
| HeyLaughingBoy wrote:
| My gut tells me that the robot will cost less in the long
| run. It also doesn't seem like a hard problem (yeah, easy
| to say) since row crops are planted at fixed spacings and
| detecting that the thing next you is a plant and not a
| rabbit should not be a difficult task. The combination of
| GPS mapping (planter knows where it was during planting),
| known plant & row spacing, and basic visual imaging should
| simplify the problem.
|
| So why isn't it done today? Probably still cheaper to rely
| on the weather or center pivot irrigation.
| hondo77 wrote:
| Scale, I imagine. Orchards are _big_. How many robot
| waterers would you need when you have to spend time at
| each individual tree (or groups of trees) to water it
| /them? How far is it to the nearest refill?
|
| Put another way, drip is massively parallel. Robot
| waterers, not so much.
| HeyLaughingBoy wrote:
| Oh, I wasn't thinking orchards. I thought OP was talking
| about row crops which can't feasibly be irrigated with
| hoses.
| krisoft wrote:
| > I thought OP was talking about row crops which can't
| feasibly be irrigated with hoses.
|
| Are we talking about irrigation pivots[1] here? Because
| those are a known technology.
|
| If we are thinking about robots driving up and down the
| rows and watering plants from a tank, and then returning
| to some central location to re-fill their tank that feels
| like a "carrying water for elephants" situation. I
| suspect the logistics won't work out. Could try to run
| some numbers on it of course. Is that how you are
| thinking about it?
|
| 1: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7j1lMs7fcIQ
| HeyLaughingBoy wrote:
| Yeah, and I think you're right. I hadn't even given any
| thought to the massive weight of the water tank you'd
| need to do this. I was thinking of it more like a
| sprayer, which requires a much smaller volume to be
| useful.
| tomhoward wrote:
| The other issue is the ability to respond to extreme heat
| quickly enough.
|
| We work with fruit growers in South Eastern Australia
| where temperatures routinely hit high 30s and even low-
| mid 40s (degC) a few days each year.
|
| Those growers want to see our soil moisture data readings
| updated every 15 minutes so they can turn the drippers on
| very quickly as soon as the soil starts drying out
| rapidly.
|
| It would just be too slow to rely on robots driving up
| and down the rows in those conditions.
| unregistereddev wrote:
| Row crops can be (and already are) irrigated with hoses.
| In dry areas of the world, drip tape is buried throughout
| the entire field because it allows farmers to make more
| efficient use of the water available to them. It does
| require the machinery has auto-steer (which is standard
| practice now anyway), because tearing up the drip tape
| with a planter is an expensive mistake.
|
| https://whyfarmit.com/drip-tape-irrigation/
| HeyLaughingBoy wrote:
| Really? I didn't know that. Just didn't seem feasible to
| have irrigation lines running for that distance.
| bell-cot wrote:
| Let's say the RoboWater(tm) rolls down a row of trees in
| the orchard, water hose unreeling behind it. At each
| tree, it dumps the calculated dose of water into a clay
| pot that is sunken into the ground near the trunk (from
| which the water slowly soaks into the soil). When the row
| is done - it reverses direction, reeling the hose back up
| in the process. Then some side-shuffling, and it's soon
| rolling down the next row of trees in the orchard, again
| dumping the calculated dose of water...
| gumby wrote:
| > The combination of GPS mapping (planter knows where it
| was during planting), known plant & row spacing...
|
| This is not robust. Humans don't use GPS for this purpose
| (and anyway, the plants are closer than GPS resolution.
|
| Looking and using the local data is the more robust
| approach. Trying to assume the real world is the same as
| your model has been the source of countless visual gags
| since the advent of movies.
| gumby wrote:
| $20 is a lot (I assume that's the customer price buying them
| in volume). You have to save a lot of water / increase yield
| enough to justify that. That suggests a BOM well under a
| buck, probably less than $0.50.
|
| I spent some time in this sector (at one company irrigation
| of almonds and stone fruit, another in wine) and the margins
| are very tight. Fortunately the farmers have sharp pencils.
| gnuser wrote:
| When you think about it, farming is the perfect physical
| application of scaling.
| mattwest wrote:
| We're not moving away from nitrogen fertilizers. Ever. Why?
|
| Look at the following three graphs: global population, staple
| crop yield, and nitrogen fertilizer application.
|
| Now overlay them. That's why.
|
| Also, there are myriad chemical inputs that cannot be removed
| simply due to free labor. Sure, a robot can pluck weeds, but
| what about fungal and bacterial diseases?
| sandworm101 wrote:
| >> individually plucking each weed or weevil, and metering just
| the right amount of water for each individual plant, so that
| all the crops are organic.
|
| Not even close. The sorts of critters and diseases that
| pesticides combat cannot be mitigated by plucking things off
| plants, nor can nitrogen fertilizer be replaced with elbow
| grease. Identifying and removing (burning) infected plants
| would help, but only if each plants was isolated from its
| neighbors, otherwise you are just back to burning fields once
| infection is detected. Growing each potato inside its own
| little box cannot scale.
|
| For many farmers the "right amount of water" ends up being
| however much is available. Crop fields are not home gardens.
| The amounts of water needed are measured in acre-feet. Metering
| it out to each corn stalk individually would certainly help,
| but likely fails the cost/benefit analyses at scale. A corn
| field has roughly 50,000 plants per acre, and commercial farm
| several hundred acres. That will be a heck of a lot of plastic
| tubing to install/maintain.
| onlyrealcuzzo wrote:
| > so when the labor is free we shouldn't need them.
|
| Short of the singularity happening - "labor" (even Robotic) -
| at this scale - is not going to be anywhere near free.
|
| I mean, in some ways, "labor" is already "free" in agriculture
| if you compare current cost of labor per yield vs what you
| would get before the industrial revolution.
|
| The average labor cost to farm an acre of wheat pre-industrial
| revolution was 50-100 hours. Today, it's <1.
|
| Short of the singularity, we are not getting a 100x improvement
| from here in our lifetime.
|
| There's not only so many 100x improvements you can make until
| you need a perpetual motion machine traveling faster than
| light...
| conradolandia wrote:
| This sounds beautiful. Also sounds like you have never worked a
| farm nor know anything practical about working fields and
| crops.
| itqwertz wrote:
| Despite this optimism, I wonder what the tradeoffs are for the
| drone services. Does it actually spray pesticide as thoroughly as
| a worker manually applying it? Can it spread seed and fertilizer
| as well as someone who has tended the land for decades? Is there
| really a difference in quality of produce?
| hamlsandwich wrote:
| It's a good question. One thing I can think of is that drones
| can accurately use a pre-determined map of which areas need how
| much of an input, in a way that would be really difficult for a
| human on the ground to do.
| infecto wrote:
| You are thinking way too hard about this. Vietnam is the wild
| west, there are some levels of cost optimization but these
| farmers are not usually well educated living in the poorer
| country side. In the country side you will just fill up your
| sprayer and chuck the fertilizer/pesticide packaging on the
| ground like your own personal landfill. Maybe you might every
| now and then collect some of the trash and create a fire that
| is no where hot enough to burn trash so it will smolder a
| wonderful scent for a day or so.
|
| That guy spraying in the article is most definitely not wearing
| any PPE, maybe a cloth mask at best, fertilizers/pesticides
| have not been used in Vietnam for as long as they have in the
| rest of the world.
|
| These drones are absolutely all benefits.
|
| - No more guy inhaling chemicals all day.
|
| - Hopefully more programmatic approach to spraying where some
| level of measurement is happening.
|
| - If you have business being built around spraying, they will
| eventually optimize around using the right amount for their
| service.
| speedbird wrote:
| But can they mount speakers and play Ride of the Valkyries
| zensnail wrote:
| You guys reckon with a big enough drone (or a few of them) you
| could hoist a pivot line spin it around the center, then fly to a
| new field to rinse and repeat. Get rid of those monstrously huge
| Fixed Center Pivot that are only in use 15% of the year??
| morsch wrote:
| I can see this making sense for monitoring and observation and
| even for very targeted application of pesticides. But bulk
| application of pesticides and seed, I just can't imagine land
| vehicles aren't more efficient in terms of energy use and
| longevity. Maybe rice fields are particularly unsuited to it. But
| buying a drone as an investment for your children... I don't
| think it's gonna last that long.
| fragmede wrote:
| Do you mean that you don't think the drone's electronics won't
| physically last long enough to pass down to their children? The
| lithium ion batteries will need to be replaced every few years,
| and eventually the motors and control boards and other parts
| will need to be replaced as well (rotors), but why wouldn't
| they be able to pass the drone and the skills and knowledge
| down to their children?
| SapporoChris wrote:
| To go further, drone models will improve. Drones that last,
| Drones that can be repaired, the drones that can be
| maintained cheaply. These things should happen unless a
| monopoly forms...
| morsch wrote:
| Batteries need to be replaced, yes. But overall flying things
| need to be light, and light things are either flimsy or
| expensive and often both. So whatever the baseline is, it'll
| break more often than non-flying equipment.
| devjab wrote:
| > I just can't imagine land vehicles aren't more efficient
|
| Farming drones aren't all airborne. I guess the ones driving
| around on the ground might be called robots though? At least in
| English.
|
| I imagine that the main reason these ones fly is because you
| can't drive around a rice field as you mention. Here in Denmark
| though most drone tech aimed at farming drives around. Flying
| drones are mostly used for surveillance, to see which areas
| need to be watered and such.
|
| As far as repairs go, drones aren't that bad in comparison to a
| lot of other farm equipment. This is because farmers can 3D
| print almost every part of a drone. Of course some
| manufacturers are going to struggle with this, and this is
| actually one of the major reasons keeping farming tech "slow"
| since a lot of the actually sellable solutions are build by
| startups which John D and his friends struggle to figure out
| how to make money of something that's cheap and easy to repair.
|
| Anyway, farming drones is probably the most interesting field
| of technology you can work in right now. At least in my
| opinion.
| IndrekR wrote:
| _> Farming drones aren't all airborne. I guess the ones
| driving around on the ground might be called robots though?
| At least in English._
|
| As far as the etymology goes, back in the days a drone was a
| male bee, so by default airborne. You can trace that meaning
| back two thousand years or so. It was first used to mean
| remote controlled aircraft in 1946.
|
| Of course, languages evolve and now it can mean any
| untethered robot; air, land or sea.
| blackoil wrote:
| Vietnam has lot of terrace farms done on side of hills. Maybe
| land vehicles aren't optimized for them.
| freddie_mercury wrote:
| Not really. We have a very small minority of them in
| picturesque areas that are extremely poor because making rice
| terraces is a last resort thing in poor farming areas.
|
| The overwhelming majority of the rice comes from the Mekong
| and Red River Deltas which are, like all deltas, extremely
| flat.
| infecto wrote:
| Definitely not, unless you are in the highlands its all
| pretty flat. Most of the farming is happening in very flat
| land.
| infecto wrote:
| I am not so sure about that.
|
| A lot of the farming that is happening in Vietnam is on these
| smaller scale farmer levels. Drones are a harder sell in
| America imo because you have large multi-hundred/thousand acre
| farms in a country optimized for cars. In Vietnam the farmer
| will have a much much smaller plot of land and in the
| countryside often the roads will look more like sidewalks to a
| westerner.
|
| I am not sure how effectively you could move tractors around in
| the countryside and you would be doing it often with the size
| of these farms.
| KaiserPro wrote:
| This was my thought but I suspect for rice farming its easier
| than wheeled based devices.
|
| As you can imagine rice paddies are a bastard for wheels,
| because its muddy as fuck. Its not like its economical to put a
| cement pan underneath as some rice plants have >1m roots[1] so
| you can't treat it like watercress (thats a wild assertion,
| maybe you can)
|
| Also, the banks that hold the water to make it a paddy are
| unlikely to be regular or load bearing. Moreover, the fields
| are not laid out with a road to link them all together.
|
| So conventional tractor with thin wheels/floaters just won't
| work. And smaller vehicles are just impractically heavy or
| impossible to get into most fields.
|
| As for the AI shit, I don't think there is acutally that much.
| It looks a lot like its just standard drone mapping/possible
| machine vision to detect the state of the crops/border of the
| field.
|
| Would this scale up for western style large fields? no. but for
| small irregular terrace style fieldlets, it would
|
| [1]https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/pdf/10.1626/pps.3.281
| majoe wrote:
| Slightly related, but off-topic.
|
| It's astonishing how high-tech agriculture has become without the
| general public noticing much of it.
|
| I recently had a longer talk with my uncle, who is a farmer in
| South Germany, where he told me about the newish technology he is
| using:
|
| - Milking robots: the process is entirely automated, the cows
| basically go inside the milking stations by themselves.
|
| - His newer tractors are all driving GPS based, which allows him
| to keep the track with a precision of about 20cm. He is now able
| to exactly apply the amount of fertilizer, pesticides or seeds he
| wants to apply and plan the amounts in advance.
|
| - A lot of data is collected for each cow and processed by an
| external company. This goes down to temperature measurements at
| each teat in the milking robot. The external company monitors
| each cow and plans individual treatment to prevent diseases and
| to optimize milk production.
|
| - He currently plans to build a manure biogas plant, which will
| produce enough electricity for him and then some. I really like
| the approach to mainly use manure instead of harvested biomass
| (the economics of the two are vastly different, an interesting
| discussion in itself).
|
| And that's just one farm. There are a lot of innovative things
| happening in agriculture.
| majoe wrote:
| Oh, I forgot a neat one: Drones with thermal imaging to prevent
| fawns to be killed by tractors.
| wrp wrote:
| _Fawns_ , as in female deer? Is hitting them with tractors
| really a problem?
| olex wrote:
| Fawns as in "deer children". When young, they lie down in
| fields a lot, and don't have the flight instict developed
| yet, so if they're in the field with the "parent" deer out
| getting food and the tractors / harvesters come by, it can
| be legitimately dangerous.
| sshine wrote:
| Their instinct is to stay put, which means they don't run
| when the tractor comes.
|
| A drone flies over the field, maps where the fawns are
| staying put, sends a message to automated tractors to
| reroute.
|
| This is probably the most "feel good" application of
| drones. That and detecting landmines.
| Muromec wrote:
| That's exactly the opposite of what thermal drones are
| use most of the other time
| 867-5309 wrote:
| those fawns could be lying on a lot of oil
| infecto wrote:
| Is it? I believe the commercial application for drones
| with thermal cameras is fairly well establish at this
| point. You can spot a lot of things in buildings,
| transmission lines, etc.
| baq wrote:
| The ops point is that after you spot them you call in old
| fashioned artillery.
| mschuster91 wrote:
| Besides deer protection and wildlife management in
| general, they're used in SAR and police - especially in
| mountainous or forest areas, it's just soooo much faster
| to send a quick-response team with thermal drones than to
| travel by foot or wait for a chopper to show up.
| Obviously in rough weather you still need a legit
| chopper, but for stuff like "find someone who didn't
| return from a hike/called for an emergency without
| knowing where he precisely is" they're just fine.
|
| On the infrastructure side, you can use thermal drones in
| construction planning to detect if/where a building is
| losing heat, spot (beginning) defects in industrial
| installations and inspect if a power line is still
| working acceptably. DJI also pairs the thermal camera
| with a decent photo camera so you don't need to send up
| two drones for the job.
| masklinn wrote:
| > don't have the flight instict developed yet
|
| They specifically have the opposite instinct, because
| fawns usually lack coordination to flee like an adult. So
| they have the instinct to still.
| newsclues wrote:
| They hide in the field and are too afraid of running from a
| track or and farmers can't see them.
| ClumsyPilot wrote:
| A you imagine the aftermath of a deer getting 'harvested'
| by the combine?
|
| Can you imagine being I the cabin and witnessing that, how
| it probably sounds in the process?
|
| Then cleaning up the mess and repairing the damage?
| einarfd wrote:
| I grew up on a farm in the nineties, and in my teens, I
| saw a roe deer fawn that went through a forage harvester.
|
| Surprisingly enough, there was almost no blood, but every
| bone in the animal was broken. The load of silage that it
| ended up in had to be thrown out, the forage harvester
| itself, needed some light repairs, the harvest got
| delayed a few hours, and the whole thing was really
| depressing.
|
| Luckily as far as I can remember it happened only once,
| and it was definitely something that we tried hard to
| avoid.
| nsvd wrote:
| A female deer is called a _doe_.
| mrWiz wrote:
| > doe
|
| A deer? A female deer?
| lesuorac wrote:
| > Ray
|
| A drop of golden sun?
| joncrocks wrote:
| > Me
|
| A name I call myself?
| achenet wrote:
| > Fa
|
| A long long way to run?
| spuriouserror31 wrote:
| > Sew
|
| A needle pulling thread?
| FranOntanaya wrote:
| I assume they don't want wild animals that are ridden with
| diseases to end in something like cattle feed more than
| unavoidable.
| HeyLaughingBoy wrote:
| Also, running over a fawn really bums out the person
| driving the tractor!
| olex wrote:
| Anecdote on this: I've been flying R/C planes and drones in
| some publicly accessible fields with friends for years. Some
| farmers were a bit confrontational when they saw us
| (sometimes understandably so, we were always careful but the
| occasional crash and aircraft retrieval in the middle of a
| field _did_ happen...). But a few of them were interested,
| and asked if we could arrange to take some pictures and
| videos of the fields at specific times, to search for fawns
| before harvest or similar things. We were happy to oblige,
| and in return got access to even nicer, non-public areas to
| gather and fly from regularly. Win-win for all involved.
| defrost wrote:
| There's business in routine agricultural overflights for
| year to year comparison and records, with multispectral
| cameras (expensive) for ANOVA plots when cross breeding for
| new crops with resistance, for rock outcrop plotting |
| individual large rock recording for { later pickup | hazard
| enty into tractor maps } etc.
|
| A lot of that is done locally here ( large grain fields in
| Australia ).
| Vox_Leone wrote:
| I am putting together a computer vision dataset for
| detection, identification, classification and counting for
| cattle herds of Indian breeds, which are the strength of
| Brazilian livestock farming [where there are still a lot of
| cattle in free-range pastures]. The dataset will also be
| useful for monitoring illegal livestock farming in
| protected areas, such as the Amazon. The scarcity of images
| of these types of cattle on the Internet, where European
| varieties are prevalent, forces me to negotiate with local
| farmers to fly my drones in order to obtain the images.
| It's not an easy job. Most are confrontational and hostile.
| I move forward with great difficulty but I will not give
| up. Soon at cownt.com.br.
|
| Edited for clarity.
| freilanzer wrote:
| > - A lot of data is collected for each cow and processed by an
| external company. This goes down to temperature measurements at
| each teat in the milking robot. The external company monitors
| each cow and plans individual treatment to prevent diseases and
| to optimize milk production.
|
| Very unfortunate for cows that they're able to produce milk for
| human consumption.
| eru wrote:
| Evolutionary speaking, being tasty and able to produce milk
| for human consumption has been an extremely successful
| strategy for cows.
|
| Of course, the individual cow might (or might not!) disagree.
| inglor_cz wrote:
| Now imagine how unfortunate it is to be a big, challenging
| game for human hunt...
|
| Compared to aurochs, the cows are thriving.
|
| (On a side note, I just saw a mounted skeleton of an aurochs
| yesterday, in the Danish National Museum in Copenhagen. That
| beast was _huge_ , and it would look even more overwhelming
| to medieval or Iron Age people, who were on average shorter
| than us; I am 6 ft and that animal was as tall as me. That is
| probably why it was so prestigious to hunt one, I can't even
| imagine a close combat with _that_. But it was hunted to
| extinction.)
| ClumsyPilot wrote:
| > Compared to aurochs, the cows are thriving
|
| This depends on the level of empathy you have for cows.
|
| If you empathise with them as you would with humans,
| imagine making the same argument to justify slavery
|
| One could argue industrial farms are fate worse than death
| freilanzer wrote:
| This is what I wanted to convey with my original comment.
| It seems people think having millions of enslaved cows
| living in horrible conditions is an advantage for cows
| compared with "less successful species". I imagine the
| cows see it very differently.
| jajko wrote:
| If cows would be useless to humans, their population would be
| probably in hundreds/thousands globally, or we would let
| their whole sub-species just die.
|
| Milking is the least bad thing we do to them, I would
| recommend focusing more on other parts of farming/ranching if
| you care.
| langsoul-com wrote:
| Farming has always been innovative, except where an extreme
| abundance exists, like flood farming.
| eru wrote:
| Thanks to modern capitalism, there's no such thing as a
| (localised) extreme abundance. Extremely fertile land will be
| bid up, until it's productivity per-dollar-value will be
| equivalent to other land.
|
| So we will always have incentives for innovation.
|
| (I specifically say 'localised', because on a global level we
| are living in extreme abundance by historic standards.)
| ClumsyPilot wrote:
| This doesn't really make sense, Local resources exist in
| abundance because transportation cost is not zero.
|
| Iceland has more geothermal power than it knows what to do
| with, north of Canada has abundance of fresh water but it's
| uneconomical to move it to California, etc.
| Nasrudith wrote:
| I suppose it depends on how you define 'extreme' as a
| matter of boring tautological semantics. If extreme is
| defined as 'enough that it is worth extracting to anybody
| who discovers it'. Sort of like how ore is defined.
|
| Basically there being a limit to abundance before it is
| too extreme to exist sustainably (without being
| extracted). You can have Cerro de Potosi, a very silver
| rich mountain sustainably exist. But a mountain made of
| solid gold? That would be extracted from until gold
| devalued itself.
| skybrian wrote:
| A good way to think about this is to compare the cost of
| a commodity to shipping costs. Sure, pricey bottled
| spring water gets shipped all over the world, but bulk
| agricultural water (measured in acre feet) doesn't. It's
| heavy for what it's worth, so it's mostly transported
| downhill in rivers, canals, and so on, with occasional
| pumps.
|
| There's no global market for water, like there is for oil
| and liquified natural gas, because the price of water is
| much lower. Instead there are regional water projects.
|
| Even for natural gas, there aren't pipelines everywhere,
| and shipping natural gas (by ship) is more expensive than
| transporting it through pipelines.
| tomnipotent wrote:
| > Farming has always been innovative
|
| Shout out to Tractor Wars, which I never expected to enjoy as
| much as I did.
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UgtHQUi8AvQ
| mywacaday wrote:
| There are also collars that monitor temperature and gait
| analysis to identify infection and hoof problems. Cows get
| automatically segregated at milking time for inspection. A
| monitor is also available that goes over the tail and monitors
| when a cow begins calving and alerts the farmer, traditionally
| farmers would wake up every hour or two to check on cows that
| were close. Successful farmers have always always on the
| cutting edge of anything that can increase margins or
| efficiency, they have to be it's a tough business.
| ragnaruss wrote:
| I know quite a few people in the industry, and some near the
| top of big players and the common thing I've heard said is "We
| have so much data on such a granular level, we don't even know
| how to exploit most of it".
| dukeyukey wrote:
| Is there anything happening with self-driving tractors? I'd
| expect that in the absence of speed and most of the typical
| hazards cars on the roads face, when doing pretty rote stuff
| like spraying, harvesting row crops, or tilling a field we'd be
| able to automate it pretty easily.
| bluGill wrote:
| A lot is going on. 15 years ago farmers were putting the dog
| in the tractor - it worked so long as there were no deer or
| other things in the field. Safety is just as hard as for cars
| though and so progress is just as slow.
|
| I work for john deere. But I don't have non public
| information and I don't speak for the company.
| hnmullany wrote:
| Biogas plants still need quite a bit of harvested biomass added
| tp the manure. Manure by itself has too low a Carbon/Nitrogen
| ratio, and without supplementation, it will over-produce
| Ammonia, inihibiting the anaerobic bacteria that digest the
| feedstock. So you have to add sileage or switchgrass.
| langsoul-com wrote:
| I wonder if drones will change the placement of farms. Right now,
| farms are very wide and flat, this makes it easier for tractors
| and spraying pesticides.
|
| Would be interesting to see overtime.
| hliyan wrote:
| Terraced paddy fields have been used for centuries in countries
| such as Sri Lanka (where I'm from), Bangladesh, Vietnam and
| Indonesia.
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paddy_field#/media/File:Pana_B...
| pbmonster wrote:
| Even if you can do all other crop tending from the air, in the
| end you'll still need the tractor to harvest, pulling a heavier
| trailer than all crop tending jobs would have required.
|
| So I think flat, reasonably level fields will stay with us for
| some time.
| avodonosov wrote:
| TLDR:
|
| > Because drones spray or scatter the ideal concentration
| uniformly over a precise area, farmers require less pesticide and
| fertilizer than they would if applying materials by hand, says
| XAG engineer Long Hung.
|
| I hope Long Hung knows that for sure and not just fantasizes.
| sahinyanlik wrote:
| In the article they didn't write about side effect but In Turkey
| My relatives also using drones for rice farming. And trees are
| dying since they need to fly drones higher then trees. Birds are
| dying as well.
|
| Previously I remember there were so many birds but now there is
| none. I also remember there were frogs, snakes etc. and now there
| is none.
| fakedang wrote:
| I doubt that it's drones causing those issues. More likely it's
| the poor environmental practices carried out in Turkey. Turkey
| is a truly beautiful country, but most of the natural beauty is
| falling to disuse as the government prioritizes other industry,
| of course with a massive dollop of corruption on the side.
| sahinyanlik wrote:
| Why you doubt that? Before drones there were no issues about
| birds at least. I hope Vietnam will not have same future
| since they are not Turkey.
| zeristor wrote:
| The Royal Society had a two day conference on farming technology.
|
| https://royalsociety.org/science-events-and-lectures/2024/06...
|
| There's almost a 7 hour video posted on Vimeo on the page.
| camillomiller wrote:
| Most of these high tech drones are from DJI (check out the Agra
| lineup). You know who has great use for that? US farmers. Instead
| they get an all-out ban on DJI and they're stuck with provider-
| locked John Deere tractors.
|
| I really don't understand how easy it can be to fool the American
| public just by saying "national security", even when it's clear
| that large parts of the public will not be best served by
| Washington's "China bad!!!" policies.
| eunos wrote:
| Because the Blobs saw how's drone perform in Ukraine war and
| they are spooked that US has no national champions for drones.
| 83 wrote:
| >>even when it's clear that large parts of the public will not
| be best served by Washington's "China bad!!!" policies.
|
| The majority of the public do not own or fly drones. The
| government has bigger concerns than a few people getting burnt
| on their DJI purchase.
|
| Disposable drones are the future of warfare. Would you really
| want to subsidize China's ability to develop and manufacture
| them? While also letting China collect data from drones flying
| over your country? Better to rip that bandaid off sooner rather
| than later imo.
| markus23 wrote:
| Slightly related, but a bit off-topic, too :-)
|
| If you are interesting in planning agriculture, with or without
| drones, you can help us by filling out our survey:
|
| https://survey.permaplant.net/
| mattwest wrote:
| Sorry, but an overwhelming amount of people commenting in here
| are extremely ignorant of the modern agri-food system.
|
| The notion that robots and drones will eliminate monocultures and
| chemical inputs is wildly untrue. In some minor cases they will
| reduce the need.
|
| It amazes me that software engineers think they have the panacea
| for whatever faults they see in our food system without a full
| understanding and history of it.
| _DeadFred_ wrote:
| I have a friend that owns a huge forrest. Currently seedlings
| come from human harvesters who go into the forest and gather
| cones. This doesn't necessarily represent the best candidates,
| but 'good' candidates that people could get to. A drone that
| could gather cones from any tree would add to the diversity of
| future forests and allow better choice candidates to be selected.
|
| Keeping ahead of beatles is a big thing for him. Better aerial
| detection would be good. Currently he misses stands that could
| have been managed better earlier.
|
| Documenting and automating what current forresters would be huge
| because their kids aren't interested and aren't spending the time
| to learn and will be managing things much more like a farm than a
| healthy forest if they manage at all (most likely they will just
| harvest it all and then sell the land).
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