[HN Gopher] Open Source Farming Robot
___________________________________________________________________
Open Source Farming Robot
Author : pedrodelfino
Score : 624 points
Date : 2024-08-03 23:37 UTC (23 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (farm.bot)
(TXT) w3m dump (farm.bot)
| pedrodelfino wrote:
| Previous thread from 2021:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27628101
|
| A lot of advances since then.
| dang wrote:
| Thanks! Macroexpanded:
|
| _Open Source Farming Robot_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27628101 - June 2021 (227
| comments)
|
| _FarmBot Genesis XL_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19002022 - Jan 2019 (1
| comment)
| ChrisMarshallNY wrote:
| My brother told me about this, years ago.
|
| It's a very cool project.
| __MatrixMan__ wrote:
| It's written in Elixir.
|
| Maybe it's just a grass-is-greener thing but the more Kubernetes
| I have to stomach, the more interested I become in BEAM languages
| like Elixir.
|
| Not like they're alternatives exactly, but I get the feeling that
| the BEAM way is to solve the ops problems in a way resembles how
| you solved your dev problems. More holistic, less ad hoc.
| e1gen-v wrote:
| Can you elaborate? I'm intrigued.
| mikepurvis wrote:
| Not a huge erlang person but I think the idea is that
| redundancy and robustness is managed by the BEAM process on
| each host, so that layer is much higher in the stack.
| Compared with k8s where it's like okay die if something goes
| wrong and the container orchestrator makes you a whole new
| chroot as if you just rebooted.
| SoftTalker wrote:
| And multihost is included out of the box, you don't really
| need to do anything special.
| __MatrixMan__ wrote:
| Well, you're hearing it from a guy who has written hardly any
| Elixir or any other BEAM language. (For a proper intro I
| recommend this video https://youtu.be/JvBT4XBdoUE). Less
| practitioner, more fanboy. So I may not be the best source.
| But I'll try anyhow.
|
| The BEAM is a virtual machine, I guess kinda like the JVM. So
| just like you can write Java or Kotlin or Clojure or a
| million other JVM languages, so too can you write Erlang or
| Elixir or Gleam (I like the look of Gleam)... And expect
| similar interoperability.
|
| The BEAM has its roots in the telecom world. So while Sun
| Microsystems was doing the Java thing to make webservers or
| applets or whatever for the JVM, Ericcson was doing Erlang
| things to make things like long distance phone calls happen
| on the BEAM.
|
| (I'm not a fan of Java, I just think it's a decent thing to
| compare with in this case)
|
| The BEAM folks take a different approach to concurrency than
| is common elsewhere. BEAM processes are much more lightweight
| than OS processes, so while it might be insane to run a
| separate copy of your server for each user, it's less insane
| to run a separate BEAM process for each user.
|
| BEAM processes interact through message passing. Of course
| most other processes do to, but only because the developer
| built it that way. With the BEAM it's built in, each process
| periodically checks its mailbox for a message which matches
| its criteria, and if there's no message, it sleeps until it
| is revisited by the scheduler. There's no async/await
| business. They're all single threaded and sequential.
| Instead, you achieve coordination by having many of them,
| some of which are in charge of starting/stopping/organizing
| others. (I guess they build structures out of these things
| called "supervision trees" but I don't precisely know what
| that is).
|
| This has all grown up in a world where nodes are expected to
| be physically separate (like either end of a phone call) so
| you end up with a bit more fault tolerance than if each
| process is expected to be on the same machine.
|
| In Kubernetes you've got this mountain of yaml which you
| craft to tell the container orchestrator how to treat your
| app. And then you've got your app itself which is probably
| not written in yaml. So I find it very jarring to switch
| between my dev hat and my ops hat.
|
| And Kubernetes... That's Google's baby, right, so it makes
| sense that it doesn't feel the same as the underlying app. As
| a cloud provider, they need a rather high wall between the
| app and the infra. But I think it causes all kinds of
| problems. At least in my world, the apps are either in Python
| or Go, so when there's a problem someone will come along and
| solve it with yaml-glue to add an additional container which
| may or may not resemble the app which has the problem.
|
| My brain struggles to hop from Python to Yaml to Go (and
| there's usually some bash in there too).
|
| The BEAM, by contrast, expects processes to start and stop
| other processes. So your orchestration logic and your
| application logic are in the same language. You don't have to
| express your wishes in yaml and then navigate all of these
| superfluous layers (e.g. the container entrypoint script,
| port forwarding, in-cluster DNS, etc) to have your wish
| granted. That kind of communication is handled by the BEAM's
| inbuilt message passing system.
|
| If I got to rebuild our stack from scratch I'd use Kubernetes
| as a cloud-provider-agnostic interface to get access to
| compute, but instead of expressing anything about the app in
| YAML, I'd handle all of that extra stuff (e.g. log scraping,
| metric aggregation, whatever hacky fix is needed today...),
| I'd handle it in the BEAM, right alongside my app.
|
| People like to say "build security into the app" or "build
| observability into the app", but standard practice is to bolt
| on solutions that don't resemble the app at all. My (probably
| flawed) perspective is that if you scratch those itches
| within the BEAM, then you're going to end up with fewer
| superfluous layers of abstraction. Also fewer distinct niches
| that you now must find a specialist to fill when the old one
| quits. Also, you end up more in control of your app because
| since you more or less wrote the orchestrator, you're relying
| less on the cloud provider to be a reliable puppet master.
|
| ---
|
| It's slow going, one class per semester, but I've been taking
| biology classes on the side. I sometimes think about making a
| break for it and trying to build something like farmbot but
| for driving a microscope, or a pipette, or maintaining the
| temperature/pH/etc in a bioreactor.
|
| These are, for now, just dreams.
|
| Sorry for the diatribe, but you did ask me to elaborate :)
| DevOfNull wrote:
| Different person, but thank you for the writeup! Very
| interesting. For anyone else reading: Please write more
| comments like this, they're one of the best parts of HN.
| tonyarkles wrote:
| To elaborate a little bit on the supervision tree thing
| then: there's a bunch of different behaviours you can
| associate with process failure depending on your needs.
| Let's say you have a Postgres connection pool and for
| some reason the pool manager process dies. You can set it
| up so that the death of the manager will:
|
| - kill all of the child processes that the pool was
| managing
|
| - return an error to all of the request handlers who had
| active queries going while not touching the request
| handlers who didn't
|
| - restart the pool manager
|
| - once it's running, respawn the managed pool processes
|
| This is all machinery that's pre-built into the OTP
| runtime. While that's all happening your app as a whole
| can keep trucking along and everything that doesn't need
| to make a database query carries on without even noticing
| that something was amiss.
|
| The slogan "let it die" gets tossed around the
| Elixir/Erlang community quite a bit. This is referring to
| Erlang Processes (the internal lightweight processes, not
| the host process with a formal OS PID associated with
| it). Your whole app doesn't die, just the broken parts,
| and the OTP supervisor subsystem brings them back to life
| quickly.
| rurban wrote:
| See here: https://github.com/FarmBot
| __MatrixMan__ wrote:
| And here: https://github.com/nerves-project/nerves (used by
| FarmBot)
| greenie_beans wrote:
| what is "BEAM"?
| detaro wrote:
| The Erlang VM. (i.e. BEAM is to Erlang what the JVM is to
| Java)
| doawoo wrote:
| It's using the Nerves project! I'm bias since I work directly
| with the Nerves Foundation a lot these days but it's such a
| wonderful development experience to get Linux based embedded
| stuff up and running :)
| donw wrote:
| For some values of "open source": the datasets used for
| information about the plants and such are unavailable as of the
| last time I checked.
| nvy wrote:
| You can probably get anything you need from practicalplants
| donw wrote:
| That looks useful, thanks!
| throwaway346434 wrote:
| Not unavailable so much as unmaintained.
|
| Various APIs still exist and are callable.
| https://github.com/Growstuff/growstuff/blob/e8bc72dc900e2593...
| wmoxam wrote:
| More like _garden_ bot
| myprotegeai wrote:
| How many Farmbots would I need to feed 2 adults and 2 children
| year round? What challenges might I run into?
|
| Edit: Found a link to yield analysis https://farm.bot/pages/yield
| It appears the answer is however many Farmbots cover 549 square
| meters
| serf wrote:
| so 31 farmbots at 3m x 6m?
|
| a bit steep still, plus the maintenance nightmare of keeping 31
| machines working..
|
| it's a fun farm to envisage though.
|
| p.s. I don't think that this gantry has very harsh stiffness
| requirements; I guess one could scale the thing to a larger
| size reasonably easy -- akin to a configurable MPCNC machine.
| delichon wrote:
| Seems like to scale well the gantry needs to be able to
| travel between grow boxes, like on a continuous track.
| _heimdall wrote:
| You'd be better off doing the farming the old fashioned way if
| the goal is to feed a family. Farming is a terrible business to
| be in today, but that's mainly due to the abysmal profit
| margins. When your goal is to feed your family rather than turn
| a profit, that stops mattering.
|
| Most people with any yard or outdoor space could get to the
| point of growing/raising a large portion of their own food
| without too much investment or work. A garden doesn't have to
| be manicured and ready for Instagram, it just needs to produce
| quality food. Meat and dairy would be the outlier lowering that
| % if you eat a lot of it, though chickens work well with a
| modest sized yard and finding a local dairy or farm for meat is
| still a big improvement on grocery store meat and dairy.
| Loughla wrote:
| I've talked about this on this site over the years. My family
| is close to providing enough food on its own little farm for
| the whole family, all year (except dairy products and wheat
| products).
|
| It has taken decades. And about 15 acres. And honestly I
| don't know how many hours. Tens and tens of thousands.
|
| You can grow a small amount of your own food "without too
| much investment or work". To replace a substantial portion of
| your food with home grown takes a shit load of work and time.
| _heimdall wrote:
| That's interesting, I've had a very different experience.
| Maybe it comes down, partially, to a difference in climate?
|
| We're on a larger piece of land actually, mainly because we
| have cattle that we may eventually use for meat and dairy.
| Were producing a large chunk of our food on about 1 acre
| though, and even then most of that is non-productive land
| around our house.
|
| We have chickens that give us 6-7 eggs every day. Our
| garden is 2,500 square feet but well be expanding it a bit
| for next year. We're very hands off with our garden,
| though, compared to how most people do it. We don't till,
| partly to avoid any potential disturbance to the soil and
| partly out of laziness. We did have to water too much for a
| couple weeks in June, but that is about it for this year.
|
| We haven't hit the 80-90% goal yet but are on track for
| that next year, our third year here. Right now I'd estimate
| us at around 40-50% with the rest supplemented mainly from
| local farms.
|
| It is work, no doubt about it, especially if you aren't
| used to working outside. I haven't yet felt like the amount
| of work has blown past what it costs to buy groceries from
| the store though, and bonus that we know it's all local
| without any pesticide or herbicide use.
|
| We live in the southeast US now, the climate is helpful for
| farming. I lived in Seattle for a few years and that
| climate would have been much harder to work with. I don't
| particularly like the task of preserving foods, here we
| don't need to do nearly as much of that.
| zamfi wrote:
| > We live in the southeast US now, the climate is helpful
| for farming. I lived in Seattle for a few years and that
| climate would have been much harder to work with.
|
| Because of (a lack of) winter sunlight? Or something
| else?
| _heimdall wrote:
| A combination of a shorter growing season and less
| rainfall. Seattle has an interesting rap for being
| extremely rainy, but their average rainfall is around 38
| inches while I get around 60 inches per year here.
|
| We've had cattle on the land with us for the last two
| years, and though we have had to buy in hay its has been
| to supplement for 2-3 months rather than 5-6 months. We
| actually have the pasture space to grow and cut our own
| hay, that's just a comparatively big investment that we
| haven't taken on yet but is on the list to next year.
|
| We don't own a tractor and aren't interested in getting
| one. That is our main blocker for producing our own hay,
| today everyone assumes you have a heavy tractor and all
| the implements needed to do the job.
| hattmall wrote:
| Also in the southeast, and it should be pretty easy to
| find someone to come and bail your hay for you and take a
| percentage of the hay for themselves. I believe we do 9
| acres, and get two harvests. After splitting it with the
| bailer that's still enough to feed about 25 head of
| cattle through the year. Though we do supplement with
| some feed for nutrition reasons. (Our Nutrition, not the
| cows, we eat them). Late in season the bailers will also
| typically bring us free hay too because they will cut
| some fields and have extra. You would still likely need a
| tractor to move the hay though but you might could figure
| something out with a trailer. Look for the market
| bulletin in your area if you haven't already subscribed.
| _heimdall wrote:
| Yep, all of that is definitely on the table. Our first
| year on this property we actually did talk with someone
| about cutting hay on a 50:50 split. He used to lease this
| land and built most of the fences that are still here. It
| didn't end up working out that summer but we're keeping
| that in our back pocket for later.
|
| As far as moving hay goes, we have bough square bails the
| last two years and aren't afraid of hauling it around by
| hand. If we bring someone in to cut and bail hay wed
| probably just spend around the same amount the first year
| around to buy a round bail trailer we could pull with an
| ATV or mini truck.
| stevekemp wrote:
| Hell I figured I eat about one onion a week, and one whole
| garlic bulb. I planted 75 onions and 40 garlic bulbs
| expecting that that would keep me going for a year.
|
| Not even close. Between some of them dying, many of them
| producing tiny output, and the difficulty of keeping them
| stored I exhausted my harvest in about four months.
|
| I have a small patch of land, 10m x 10m, and I grow
| potatoes, garlic, cucumbers, and similar things. But I
| quickly realized I would never become self-sufficient, not
| unless I dedicated the whole patch of land to 100%
| potatoes, which would be far less fun and start to feel
| like work.
| timeon wrote:
| > one onion a week
|
| Interesting. Where I'm from (CEE), this would be about
| one onion per one or two days.
| nathancahill wrote:
| I grew up in a family of 6, we had a 1 acre garden and 3
| acres for goats and sheep, 2 acres of fruit trees. Yes, it
| was a full-time job for my parents, but we canned and froze
| everything for the winter and only went to the store for
| sacks of flour. It's possible to do on less land. It took
| about 5 years to get to the point of sustainability.
| SoftTalker wrote:
| It doesn't need to be ready for Instagram but you need to
| keep weeds under control, you need to keep insects under
| control, and you need to keep deer, rabbits, and other
| veggie-loving animals away or barricaded. You also need to
| provide irrigation when needed, and of course harvest the
| vegetables when they are ready. It's quite a bit of work if
| you want to maximize your harvest. Any kind of serious
| vegetable garden probably demands at least an hour a day of
| your time, large gardens may require much more than that.
| _heimdall wrote:
| Its all in expectations I guess. We have been focusing on
| balancing yield with investment. If we can get half the
| production for a quarter of the work, we'll take that trade
| off.
|
| We've actually been running a test this year that has been
| interesting to watch play out. Our garden isn't very dense
| comparatively, and its planted into what was pasture
| before. We did cut the grass when planting and have trimmed
| it a few times, but its far from a garden free of weeds.
|
| We also planted a space along the lines of a milpa or a
| chaos garden. We planted corn in rows, untilled and
| effectively just a grass pasture that we clipped short to
| start. When the corn germinated we followed behind with a
| variety of beans, peas, squash, and greens. It isn't nearly
| as productive per foot as it could be, but we haven't put
| much time into it beyond planting and a few deep waterings
| during a drought.
|
| I think an hour a day is a totally reasonable expectation.
| To me that's worth it, but that wouldn't work for everyone
| and finding an hour a day may not be an easy ask depending
| on your lifestyle. I would argue, though, that if it isn't
| worth an hour a day to you you probably aren't too
| concerned with growing a large portion of your own food.
| jamilton wrote:
| To summarize the analysis: you would need 100-200 square meters
| of farmbotting to get 2000 daily calories from farmbots alone.
| If you're just trying to get your daily recommended servings of
| veggies, you instead target volume of veggies, because that's
| how the recommendations work, and it's a much smaller quantity.
| It ends up being 3-7 square meters per person for that.
|
| A small farmbot covers 4.5 m^2 and costs $3,000, an XL covers
| 18 m^2 and costs $4,500.
|
| I think 3-7 sq m makes sense as a practical range, maybe round
| up to 10 to have some wiggle room.
| defrost wrote:
| In all seriousness, from a real life feeding people farming
| perspective, it's well short of sufficient unto itself.
|
| It's a lightweight gantry system for seeding, watering, and
| (chemical spray) weeding.
|
| Handy for _big_ seeding greenhouses and _some_ leafy greens.
|
| It's not going to significantly help with you apple, lemon,
| orange, fig, grapefruit and etc. trees.
|
| It's not going to significantly help with your potatoes and
| other root vegetables.
|
| It's not going to tend to and protect your lambs, goats,
| chickens, etc.
|
| FWiW I do have one spry old chap born n 1935 who can do all
| that already, has a few decades of experience, and can feed an
| easy magnitude more than just four.
|
| Fun project, needs a wee bit of work.
|
| And, there are scaled up _Farm_ bots for farms, not just for
| oversized regular garden beds.
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AqqOQdDBUwQ
|
| https://www.sydney.edu.au/engineering/news-and-events/news/2...
|
| https://www.agricultural-robotics.com/news/connectivity-in-a...
| NilMostChill wrote:
| This page has a section titled "Cups, Not Calories".
|
| It hurts my soul that anybody producing a table such as that is
| using something as vague as a "cup" in their calculations.
| nilsherzig wrote:
| I think "cup" is one of these American units, it's about
| 236ml
| NilMostChill wrote:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cup_(unit).
|
| American legal cup ? metric cup ? Canadian cup ? or one of
| the other ones.
|
| Even if you narrow it to just the roughly the US you still
| have 4 + metric , so 5 different options.
|
| and that doesn't even account for people just using the cup
| they have to hand.
|
| It's not a rant at you, it's frustration with non-specific,
| arbitrary units.
| jannyfer wrote:
| WAIT.
|
| US cups and metric cups are different?
| NilMostChill wrote:
| Technically yes and that confusion is exactly my point.
| collinmanderson wrote:
| Cups are 236.6 ml. 8 fluid ounces.
|
| But, wow apparently the FDA rounds cups in nutrition
| labeling to be exactly 240ml "legal cup", which I agree
| is super annoying. It's 1.4% more.
|
| "For purposes of nutrition labeling, 1 cup means 240 mL,
| 1 tablespoon means 15 mL, 1 teaspoon means 5 mL, 1 fluid
| ounce means 30 mL, and 1 ounce means 28 g (21 CFR
| 101.9(b)(5)(viii))"
| TheDong wrote:
| The unit of a "cup" there is sourced from the US government,
| and thus it's well known to be a volumetric measurement that
| is equal to 1/672 of a standard oil barrel's volume. It's not
| vague for US customers at least.
|
| It hurts my soul that it's using a volumetric measurement for
| leafy food, like if you cut lettuce leaves into pieces, they
| have the same nutrients but take up way less space, so 3 cups
| of roughly cut lettuce leaves is different from 3 cups of
| finely chopped lettuce leaves, which is also different from 3
| cups of uncut lettuce leaves. Just give it to us in mass or
| calories please (like grams or fractions of an oil barrel's
| mass, or fraction of a barrel of oil's calories and
| nutrients).
| j_timberlake wrote:
| At about $110k for 8000 daily calories, you might as well just
| wait for android robots to be capable of farming and then buy
| one from a company like Figure, though you'd then have to worry
| about it getting hacked and trying to knife you in your sleep.
| James_K wrote:
| It would take 31 of their largest model, the Genesis XL to
| cover that area as each robot covers 18 square meters. So for
| the low low cost of 31 x $4,295 = $133,145 you could buy enough
| farm bots to feed yourself. Then you'd just have to worry about
| the cost of repairs, land, processing, and harvesting.
| 0cf8612b2e1e wrote:
| Cool project, but $2800 for the basic kit is a lot to stomach
| given how many things can go wrong with robotics.
| kyriakos wrote:
| My first thought was exactly this. How reliable can it be to
| run autonomously and how long before parts start breaking down.
| On the other hand this is cheaper than apple vision pro.
| ansible wrote:
| It doesn't really look like it can handle weather or ordinary
| dirt getting into the belt drive and rails. Automating the
| watering isn't hard with existing technology. if it can't
| remove weeds, I don't see what's the point.
| f0e4c2f7 wrote:
| Would be interested to hear the experiences of someone who has
| used this.
| nickhodge wrote:
| But why?
| djbusby wrote:
| Bots are cool. Farming is cool. Cool^2
| brigadier132 wrote:
| why not?
| owlninja wrote:
| To each their own, but small gardens like this are about the
| journey, not the destination.
| nvy wrote:
| Building a garden robot and eating robo-spinach sounds like
| a super dank journey to me
| brigadier132 wrote:
| You just stated two contradictory things :).
|
| > To each their own
|
| I agree. Some people might just want to be in control of
| where there food comes from.
|
| > but small gardens like this are about the journey, not
| the destination
|
| Again, to each their own. Also, coding a robot to automate
| gardening is a journey as well.
| nozzlegear wrote:
| I have a garden that I enjoy, but after years of trial I've
| learned to only plant hardy native plants and wild flowers
| because I have a black thumb for vegetables. My main issue
| is a lack of patience -- I don't want to go out to water
| everything or monitor if things are getting as much
| sunlight as I thought they would. But for the last couple
| years I'd been considering setting up a raspberry pi, some
| moisture sensors and some kind of drip system as a fun
| summer project to add on top of my flower garden, so that'd
| be a journey for me.
| mvidal01 wrote:
| I couldn't agree more.
| Caius-Cosades wrote:
| It's a cool toy, but in the end you're going to be spending
| more time and money maintaining and troubleshooting this
| contraption than you would have by just touching grass and
| getting your hands dirty.
| taylorfinley wrote:
| I can't help but feel like this is a satirical send up of "tech
| bros solve farming," except it's not satire.
|
| I am a software engineer, I also runs a small family farm. I have
| 3d printers and laser cutters and lots of aluminum extrusion and
| raspberry pis... but I keep those things indoors, away from the
| dirt, sun, and rain. I can't imagine a real farmer using a
| contraption like this. Tools have to be reliable to last. I have
| to replace my solid steel shovels every few years because they
| wear out, how is this supposed to work?
| garbagewoman wrote:
| Whats your point, that its not durable enough? Based on what?
| It doesn't have a shovel attachment either as far as i can tell
| thatcat wrote:
| Lol dirt is going to get in all of it and it's very hard to
| clean extruded aluminum rails, not to mention how small those
| wheels were. How's it driven - belts / gears? How often are
| you going to disassemble and maintain this thing? what's the
| maintenance schedule like? I would bet it is more demanding
| than planting a 4x8 raised bed.
|
| That said I still love the project. I don't think the point
| is to grow plants maximally efficiently at this point, it's a
| early release of something cool and it's open source.
| torlok wrote:
| I'm both as well. Imagine all that maintenance of keeping a
| hobby electronics project outside, all just to remove maybe 5%
| of the effort of growing vegetables. You can't even grow
| anything tall with it.
|
| If they have a solid planning software that accounts for crop
| rotation, companion planting, etc. then that's already a much
| better value proposition.
| getpost wrote:
| It sill looks like the software is written by people who don't
| know how to care for plants. You don't spray water on leaves as
| shown in the video; you'll just end up with fungus infestation.
| You water the soil and nourish the microorganisms that facilitate
| nutrient absorption in roots. But, I don't see any reason the
| technology can't be adapted to do the right thing.
| SoftTalker wrote:
| Doesn't rain fall on the leaves as much as the soil?
| r2_pilot wrote:
| Isn't the point of being smart human beings is that we do
| things better than what occurs in nature?
| NilMostChill wrote:
| That assumes that rain falling on leaves serves no purpose.
| stale2002 wrote:
| Nature isn't perfect and has disadvantages compared to
| us.
|
| We don't have to invent ex post facto explanations for
| why something is the case in nature or why there is some
| un-intuitive reason as for why the natural way is better.
| twojacobtwo wrote:
| Nor are we perfect and we've been wrong about much in
| nature more often than we've been right over the past
| many millennia. The previous poster didn't imply either
| case regardless. The post simply pointed out an
| assumption being made.
|
| Frankly, I prefer the way that thinks of 'ex post facto'
| explanations for nature. At least that keeps us
| hypothesizing and not sitting there tooting our own
| horns.
| quaintdev wrote:
| > Nature isn't perfect and has disadvantages compared to
| us.
|
| Wow we have completely different world views. I think
| nature is perfect and it's us who have gone too far away
| from it to notice and hence we are far from perfection as
| well. Ideally we should not be comparing us to nature
| since we are part of it. But somewhere deep down we know
| we are not aligned with it so we end up comparing it to
| humans which seems pretty grandiose on our end.
| throwthrowuknow wrote:
| How can nature be perfect when it is constantly changing?
| We alter our environment out of necessity, we would only
| be able to survive in a very small number of climates on
| Earth if we did nothing to change our surroundings. Lucky
| you if you happen to be somewhere with year round fruit
| to pluck from the vine and temperate climate in the
| winters but that leaves the other 8 billion people to die
| of starvation and exposure.
| freedomben wrote:
| I'm sincerely fascinated by your perspective. I haven't
| heard this viewpoint before.
|
| Why do you think nature is perfect? I.e. what is your
| "gold standard" against which you measure?
|
| Something that immediately comes to mind for me is all
| the death and suffering that is abundant through nature.
| If the only thing that matters is propagation of life,
| then nature does seem pretty good at it, but as a being
| that operates some layers above the selfish gene, it
| seems far from perfect.
| NilMostChill wrote:
| > Nature isn't perfect and has disadvantages compared to
| us.
|
| That's assuming that we are somehow outside of nature.
|
| > We don't have to invent ex post facto explanations for
| why something is the case in nature or why there is some
| un-intuitive reason as for why the natural way is better.
|
| We don't _have_ to , no , but we do , because that 's how
| we learn.
|
| Nobody was claiming the "natural" way was better, just
| that it might serve a purpose.
| lukas099 wrote:
| > That's assuming that we are somehow outside of nature
|
| No it isn't. You _know_ what they meant, you are just
| one-upping them on a technicality in a way that doesn't
| advance the discussion at all.
| NilMostChill wrote:
| > No it isn't.
|
| Yes, it is.
|
| > You know what they meant.
|
| I have clearly stated what i think they meant.
|
| They specifically said "disadvantages compared to us."
| that heavily implies ( if not outright declares ) an us
| vs them.
|
| It seems you have a different interpretation, I'd be
| interested to hear what that is if you don't mind ?
|
| > you are just one-upping them on a technicality in a way
| that doesn't advance the discussion at all.
|
| If you don't see how what i said was related to the
| discussion then we probably aren't going to agree on what
| constitutes a technicality.
| throwthrowuknow wrote:
| Saying something like rain serves a purpose is backwards.
| Plants have evolved to survive in conditions that include
| rain, rain has not been deployed to serve a purpose for
| plants. There may be other conditions that are easier for
| plants to thrive in.
| NilMostChill wrote:
| I was referring to the leaves in this case but i agree
| with what you are saying.
| lukas099 wrote:
| If modern farming protocols are to water at the soil, I
| would be strongly willing to bet that is the best way to
| water, at least for our particular situation of growing
| the crops we grow on the farms we grow them on.
|
| Much has gone into studying how to best grow these crops,
| both at universities and research centers and on the
| field at farms themselves.
| username135 wrote:
| That assumes that we are better at doing things than nature
| is. I dont know if im sold on that.
| jahewson wrote:
| I think it's the difference in frequency. There's likely
| other factors too, I'd suppose rain purges mold spores from
| the air for example, as it does with particulate pollution.
| efilife wrote:
| May I ask why you used _there 's_ instead of there are?
| _There is likely_ sounds wrong and is wrong and I see it
| very often
| ac29 wrote:
| Its written the way it'd be spoken, which seems fine for
| informal writing
| HPsquared wrote:
| Yep. The thoughts are evolving during the speech process.
| The speaker might start the sentence thinking about one
| factor, but decides to make it plural after the first
| words have already started.
| efilife wrote:
| I don't think this is the case.
|
| 1. If you accidentally say _There is_ and want to use a
| plural after, (for example, _a lot_ ), you can just say
| _a number_ in between. The sentence stays correct, you
| just have to say 2 additional words. I personally never
| had this problem
|
| 2. This is internet. You are free to edit your comment
| and reread it a million times before posting
|
| Hope you understand what I'm trying to say, not being
| native sometimes restricts my ability to properly
| articulate semi-complex stuff
| samatman wrote:
| You have very strong opinions about correct English for
| someone who doesn't speak it as a native language.
| efilife wrote:
| Those are not opinions, I am handing you literal facts
| efilife wrote:
| The point is it shouldn't be spoken like this. It's just
| wrong. I'm wondering whether the person is unaware or is
| this some slang I don't know about. I've seen a bunch of
| people speak like this, I'm trying to understand the
| reason
| crazygringo wrote:
| > _It 's just wrong._
|
| Language is ultimately descriptive, not prescriptive --
| so common patterns are never "just wrong". But as someone
| who taught English for many years, I'm actually
| fascinated by what you've noticed. Because as an
| overeducated native English speaker, I observe that:
|
| - "There's likely other factors" sounds totally fine to
| me.
|
| - "There is likely other factors" sounds horribly wrong.
|
| - "There's other factors" sounds wrong, but not horribly
| so.
|
| - "There are likely other factors" sounds fine, but you
| wouldn't usually say "there are" as two distinct words,
| you'd say...
|
| - "There're likely other factors" which would sound fine
| if perfectly enunciated, _except_ the "'re" tends to get
| swallowed up and it will easily sound like "There likely
| other factors" to the listener which will sound wrong
|
| So my theory here is that, in order to aural eliminate
| confusion between "there" and "there're", there's an
| unwritten rule in spoken English where we substitute
| "there's" instead when the plural object isn't
| immediately following, but has an adverb intervening.
|
| I'm not 100% sure this is a full explanation of the
| phenomenon, but what I can tell you is that _criticizing_
| it is useless. It 's just how native speakers talk --
| it's conventional English (at least in the US). What is
| interesting is _investigating_ it, though! So thanks for
| noticing a little quirk of English like that.
| seabrookmx wrote:
| According to whom?
|
| Why are we grammar policing on hackernews? This is a tech
| and startup forum not a language forum.
| TheDong wrote:
| "other factors" can be treated as a singular group noun
| if you want, so I think both are correct.
|
| By example:
|
| "There are likely to be cows over that hill" - correct,
| many cows
|
| "There is likely to be a herd of cows over that hill" -
| correct, one herd
|
| "There are likely to be other factors" - correct, many
| factors
|
| "There is likely to be a number of other factors" -
| correct, one collection of many factors
|
| "There are likely to be a number of other factors" -
| correct, emphasizes the factors over the collection
|
| "There are likely to be other factors" - correct if you
| want to treat 'other factors' as a singular group. Up for
| debate.
|
| Also, "there're" is very hard to say, so using "there's"
| as a contraction for "there are" is, in my book, okay,
| even if it's not technically correct.
| efilife wrote:
| I agree with all of your examples. But his sentence
| misses the crucial _to be_ part to be correct. I 'm just
| wondering whether this is deliberate and just a way of
| speaking informal english, or just the person doesn't
| know it's incorrect
| nozzlegear wrote:
| I'm a native English speaker, and if I'd spoken what they
| said out loud then I would've said "there's" precisely
| because "there're" is more difficult to pronounce. It's
| also how I'd write it, even though I know "there is" is
| not correct; it's just an evolution of the language, like
| "ain't".
| qingcharles wrote:
| It's a common way of speaking informal English.
| skywhopper wrote:
| That's a natural way to speak in American English anyway.
| You wouldn't say "there is". But "there's" is fine.
| efilife wrote:
| It's not about the contraction of there is, there _are_
| has a completely different meaning
| ajuc wrote:
| If something is used often to mean X - it starts to mean
| X. That's how language works.
| kylebenzle wrote:
| Yes, and rain fall causes the spread of fungal infestation as
| said above and it is why we farmers use drip irrigation when
| possible. FarmBot defenitly has a great marketing video, 3d
| animation and logo though!
| Grimblewald wrote:
| Part of the problem is water composition. Water which
| contians fertilizers, surfactants etc is going to damage the
| protective waxy layer on leaves, while rain water will do so
| less. Next, when watering youre doing so as frequently as the
| plants can make use of, to encourage maximal growth rates. It
| would never rain that frequently. finally, the size of
| droplets is different. Rain drops tend to be big and fat and
| roll off the waxy leaves while smaller dropplets sit on /
| stick to the surface where they create a nice wet and likely
| to rot environment.
| RobotToaster wrote:
| Why would you water your plants with surfactants/soap?
|
| Genuine question, does it help the plants in some way?
| HPsquared wrote:
| Reduced surface tension will soak into the soil better
| and improve capillary flow to the roots.
| waldothedog wrote:
| I believe this is common for large scale irrigation and
| ferti-gation as it breaks surface tension and helps the
| water flow
| ajuc wrote:
| It's a common traditional fix to aphids infestation.
| brikym wrote:
| Yes and that's a problem. Many modern plants aren't selected
| to grow in natural conditions. They're breed for properties
| like high yields, large fruit and often other characteristics
| are traded off to achieve that because the farmers can change
| the environment to deal with those problems with greenhouses,
| chemicals, fertilizers, irrigation etc.
| notatoad wrote:
| in the wild, plants compete for space and resources and the
| leaves act as a funnel to direct water (including dew) to the
| roots that might not otherwise be captured. the leaves can
| also serve as a shield to prevent the soil around the roots
| from being eroded by rainfall.
|
| in a garden where plants do not have neighbours competing for
| space and water isn't scarce, there's no reason to water the
| leaves when you could just water the roots directly.
| gen220 wrote:
| Just a mild pruning: in natural/wild environments (I.e. not
| the sterile labs of monocultural agronomy), plants actually
| cooperate in the resources department, because each species
| and stage of maturity has different needs and resource
| extractive capacities. They'll "use" their root systems and
| mycorrhizal connections (which are only reliably present in
| wild soil) as a medium of exchange.
|
| We do plants a disservice by studying them when they're
| grouped together by species and age cohort, and
| generalizing their behavior under those conditions.
|
| You can recreate these circumstances in your garden by, for
| example, planting the three sisters (beans, squash, corn)
| together. You can also opt to grow perennial versions of
| your crops and stagger their planting / surround them with
| annuals the complement their chemical needs.
| lukas099 wrote:
| It doesn't have to be either/or. Plants can both compete
| and cooperate with each other in different ways.
| tonyarkles wrote:
| Here's a wild thing: at many of the high end vineyards
| they'll do low-level helicopter flights over the vines every
| time it rains to blow the water off the leaves and fruit
| specifically to prevent infection and rot.
| 0_____0 wrote:
| having worked at a cargo drone company, that is one thing
| that our platform would have excelled at. although ours had
| a tendency to simply flatten vegetation when "cornering" at
| low altitude.
| amoshebb wrote:
| I've heard of this for frost prevention, but never rain. Do
| you know of a specific vineyard doing this?
| throwup238 wrote:
| Napa and Sonoma vineyards have been doing it for decades:
| https://www.sfgate.com/business/article/vintners-rush-to-
| dry... (dated 1997)
|
| It's pretty rare though. They usually only do it when it
| rains heavily right before harvest.
| amoshebb wrote:
| parent comment said "every time it rains"... this article
| and your comment make it sound "pretty rare".
| freedomben wrote:
| Yep. I recently visited some high end vineyards in Arizona,
| and the grapes really thrive because of how dry it is. They
| are able to irrigate carefully to avoid wetting the tops of
| the plants.
| ajuc wrote:
| Depends on the plant. There's little rain in the lowest layer
| of a forest for example. Or in a desert.
| semicolon_storm wrote:
| Water on the leaves isn't bad if you're watering in the morning
| where it'll soon evaporate in the sunlight.
| tuatoru wrote:
| I was told that water beads on leaf surfaces act as lenses,
| creating burnt spots on the leaves. So water at night.
| mapt wrote:
| This is 99% urban legend. You can just barely create it in
| a lab with just the right plant (with thick hydrophobic
| trichromes) under just the right light with no wind... but
| that's not what happens in nature.
| tzot wrote:
| > but that's not what happens in nature.
|
| Exactly. When it rains in nature, 95% of the times a)
| there isn't enough sunlight for the droplets to focus and
| make a burn spot, and b) the droplets don't stay on the
| leaf but flow down instead.
|
| The original advice is solid and not an urban legend, but
| it applies to cases like watering plants in your balcony
| when the sun is out, bright and hot. Source: I have
| caused burn spots in plants of my own.
| Kerrick wrote:
| Those "burn spots" are almost certainly from a fungal
| disease, not from some magnifying glass effect.
| https://s3.wp.wsu.edu/uploads/sites/403/2015/03/leaf-
| scorch....
| rvense wrote:
| I was told to water at night because it doesn't make much
| sense to pour water on the ground only for it to evaporate
| before it goes where it's needed.
| weweweoo wrote:
| Well, that obviously depends from how sunny and warm it
| is.
| lukas099 wrote:
| I believe watering at night will generally lead to more
| fungal rot problems. Better to water early morning, when
| the water will have a chance to sink into the soil, but
| will be pulled up into the plant by evaporation of water
| from the leaves (the leaves' own water, not water you
| applied)
| cbsmith wrote:
| The evaporation is the thing you want to avoid.
| 6gvONxR4sf7o wrote:
| I think the idea is that using the CNC style design for
| everything makes it a simpler system? Watering from the soil
| may be better, but harder to automate to such an extreme?
| Automating the setup of irrigation lines with a CNC head seems
| like a pretty cool project though.
| aydyn wrote:
| Drip irrigation is a once and done setup and also automated.
| I feel like this project is insanely cool, but ultimately not
| practically useful at the pricepoint.
| kylebenzle wrote:
| Watering is definitely a solved problem in agriculture.
| There is absolutely no scenario where two plants growing
| right next to each other would need drastically different
| amounts of water. The project, founders and company are
| utterly useless.
| mapt wrote:
| Probably?
|
| But spraying water on leaves is not only the way water
| naturally gets to plants, it's often the only practical way to
| water crops at scale. Center-pivot irrigation has dramatically
| increased the amount of and reliability of arable cropland,
| while being dramatically less sensitive to topography and
| preparation than flood irrigation.
|
| The advice to "water the soil, not the leaves" is founded in
| manual watering regimes in very small-scale gardening, often
| with crops bred to optimize for unnaturally prolific growth at
| the cost of susceptibility to fungal diseases, but which are
| still immature, exposing the soil. Or with transplanted bushes
| and trees where you have full access to the entire mulch bed.
| And it's absolutely a superior method, in those instances...
| but it's not like it's a hard-and-fast rule.
|
| We can extend the technique out to mid-size market gardens with
| modern drip-lines, at the cost of adding to the horrific
| amounts of plastic being constantly UV-weathered that we see in
| mid-size market gardens.
| cbsmith wrote:
| Drip irrigation is kind of a thing out here in the desert...
| bboygravity wrote:
| And then there is burried drip irrigation...
| goeiedaggoeie wrote:
| more tricky frequently because you need to measure the
| moisture for each plant as maintainance is difficult
| without, but this is generally the most efficient low
| cost method in very arid regions from what I have seen
| (dad is prof in the field, so exposure is years of unpaid
| labour as a child and student)
| freedomben wrote:
| Yes, but as GP said that doesn't scale. I live in an
| agriculture heavy community in the desert (mountain-west
| USA), and drip irrigation is only really used for small
| gardens and landscaping. Anyone with an acre or more of
| crops is not using drip.
|
| I certainly agree that drip is the ideal, and when you
| aren't doing drip you want to minimize the standing water
| on leaves, but if I were designing this project I would
| design for scale.
| derefr wrote:
| But drip irrigation doesn't scale _because_ you would
| need to lay + connect + pressurize + maintain hundreds of
| miles of hoses. It's high-CapEx.
|
| A "watering robot", meanwhile, can just do what a human
| gardener does to water a garden, "at scale."
|
| Picture a carrot harvester-alike machine -- something
| whose main body sits on a dirt track between narrow-
| packed row-groups, with a gantry over the row-group
| supported by narrow inter-row wheels. Except instead of
| picker arms above the rows, this machine would have hoses
| hanging down between each row (or hoses running down the
| gantry wheels, depending on placement) with little
| electronic valve-boxes on the ends of the hoses, and
| side-facing jet nozzles on the sides of the valve boxes.
| The hoses stay always-fully-pressurized (from a tank +
| compressor attached to the main body); the valves get
| triggered to open at a set rate and pulse-width, to feed
| the right amount of water directly to the soil.
|
| "But isn't the 'drip' part of drip irrigation important?"
| Not really, no! (They just do it because constant passive
| input is lazy and predictable and lower-maintenance.)
| Actual rain is very bursty, so most plants (incl. crops)
| aren't bothered at all by having their soil periodically
| drenched and then allowed to dry out again, getting
| almost bone dry before the next drenching. In fact,
| everything other than wetland crops like rice _prefer_
| this; and the dry-out cycles decrease the growth rates
| for things like parasitic fungi.
|
| As a bonus, the exact same _platform_ could perform other
| functions at the same time. In fact, look at it the other
| way around: a "watering robot" is just an extension of
| existing precision weeding robots (i.e. the machines
| designed to reduce reliance on pesticides by precision-
| targeting pesticide, or clipping /picking weeds, or
| burning/layering weeds away, or etc.) Any robot that can
| "get in there" at ground level between rows to do that,
| can also be made to water the soil while it's down there.
| freedomben wrote:
| Fair point, the robot could lower its nozzle to the
| ground and jet the water there, much like a human would,
| with probably not a lot of changes required. That does
| seem like it would be a good optimization.
| westurner wrote:
| Isn't it better to mist plants, especially if you can't
| delay watering due to full sun?
|
| IIUC that's what big box gardening centers do; with fixed
| retractable hoses for misting and watering.
|
| A robot could make and refill clay irrigation Ollas with
| or without microsprinkler inlets and level sensing with
| backscatter RF, but do Ollas scale?
|
| Why have a moving part there at all? Could just modulate
| spec valves to high and low or better fixed height
| sprayers
|
| FWIU newer solar weeding robots - which minimize
| pesticide use by direct substitution and minimize
| herbicide by vigilant crop monitoring - have fixed arrays
| instead of moving part lasers
|
| An agricultural robot spec:
|
| Large wheels, light frame, can right itself when terrain
| topology is misestimated, Tensor operations per second
| (TOPS), Computer Vision (OpenCV, NeRF,), modular sensor
| and utility mounts, Open CAD model with material density
| for mass centroid and ground contact outer hull rollover
| estimation,
| krisoft wrote:
| What is the scale you are talking about here? Because at
| any significant scale the hard part is not where and how
| you spray the water but how you get the water there. Are
| you imagining a robot with a tank? How much water can
| that carry?
| nradov wrote:
| Drip irrigation is also used in some larger (multiple
| acres) commercial orchards. The lines last for several
| years with minimal maintenance.
| throwthrowuknow wrote:
| If you are concerned about plastic you could substitute
| terracotta half-round channel pipes and do a micro-canal /
| channel irrigation. More expensive than plastic irrigation
| pipes but worth it if you're determined to avoid plastic.
| Wood would be a cheaper alternative but requires a lot more
| maintenance and replacement. We're talking small scale
| agriculture with these robots anyways so either option is
| practical especially compared to the cost of the robot.
| bal00ns wrote:
| You seem like you very much actually know what you're talking
| about. Do you have any recommendations for books for
| laypeople for understanding modern agriculture?
| rmason wrote:
| The best way to water a garden is drip irrigation. You do have
| to manually lay the tubing and then in the fall roll it up. But
| there are farmers doing it in large fields so a small garden
| should be possible. Once everything is hooked up it can be
| pretty well automated. Home Depot now in some stores has drip
| irrigation supplies.
|
| https://www.dripworks.com/drip-irrigation
| goeiedaggoeie wrote:
| you don't need anything fancy for drip, a small hole in the
| pipe and a timer on your pump is is generally enough. If you
| really want to go fancy you can isolate the system and use
| moisture sensors, which are cheap.
| 6gvONxR4sf7o wrote:
| Are moisture sensors any good? I always read about how
| useless they are, but maybe that's just a certain type?
| What would you recommend?
| throwup238 wrote:
| Moisture sensors that measure conductivity are pretty
| useless unless frequently recalibrated but time domain
| reflectometry sensors are much better and more accurate.
|
| I use the VH400 from Vegetronix:
| https://www.vegetronix.com/Products/VH400/
| ein0p wrote:
| I had the same thoughts when watching this. Cucumbers either
| require twine, in which case they grow quite tall), or each
| plant will take up half that raised bed. Tomatoes are not
| planted directly from a seed, you first need to grow seedlings,
| a very laborious process that's hard to automate. Tomatoes can
| also get quite tall, with some plants exceeding 5 feet. You
| don't need such elaborate setups for irrigation either - this
| is trivially solved with drip irrigation stuff available at any
| Home Depot. And so on and so forth. I grew up on a farm and
| will probably retire on a farm. The most labor intensive part
| was weeding and pest control. If you want to do something real,
| automate that, without making any unwarranted assumptions on
| how the various crops are planted.
| tastyfreeze wrote:
| Growing tomatoes as starts that are transplanted is not
| required if your frost free season is long enough. The
| benefit of using starts is you can give plants a head start
| and only plant the strongest.
| portpecos wrote:
| I can't emphasize this enough. I mean, I'm using the
| GardenGrid watering system and an Orbit automated timer to
| water my 8 raised bed. So the intensive watering problem is
| solved.
|
| Automatically planting the seeds? I can take it or leave it.
|
| But the really intensive work is pulling those
| extraordinarily hardy weeds and pest control.
|
| The cost of this thing at nearly $3000 including taxes is
| just too high for effectively an automated watering system
| that is easily solved at HomeDepot and the GardenGrid.
| Nebasuke wrote:
| I get maybe 50 or so tomato plants in about 1 square meter in
| my garden, just from the seeds that are left in the ground
| from last year's tomatoes. (Of course I don't let all 50 grow
| and instead give most away.)
| ein0p wrote:
| Those are not going to bear impressive fruit. People who
| grow tomatoes for sale almost exclusively plant hybrids.
| Making hybrid seeds is even more involved, and they cost
| more, but the crop is much larger, so it's worth the
| hassle.
| thatcat wrote:
| There's a thing called foliar spraying, where you do spray
| water and nutrients on the leaves. You don't do it in the
| sunshine though because the water droplets will magnify the
| light and burn the leaves.
| Kerrick wrote:
| This magnifying glass effect is a pervasive and dangerous (to
| thirsty plants) garden myth. Don't let sunshine stop you from
| watering a plant that's suffering from lack of water.
| https://s3.wp.wsu.edu/uploads/sites/403/2015/03/leaf-
| scorch....
| thatcat wrote:
| Thanks for busting that myth. Foliar isn't about hydration
| state, it has chemicals and surfactants and it's
| recommended to do it in morning/night. according to this AL
| extension office, it can causes a phytotoxicity (leaf burn)
| at high leaf temps (probably because higher uptake rate of
| the chemicals) https://www.aces.edu/blog/topics/lawn-
| garden/foliar-feeding-...
| ionwake wrote:
| Reminds me of when I got into electric skateboarding only to
| realise late in the game every around me had never had a
| skateboard when they were younger, they were all engineers.
| This was back in the day when it was only affordable to make
| your own. Not disrespecting anyone I just found it funny and
| surprising.
| loftsy wrote:
| You seriously think they haven't thought of that? I have no
| association with this project but it has been going for many
| years, has sold to many customers and institutions and the
| pictures certainly look like many healthy plants. Probably
| there is a cost/benefit trade-off to engineering watering at
| the soil level. Perhaps leaves would get damaged by the
| hardware.
| wood_spirit wrote:
| A few years ago I saw on a tropical island some open ended poly
| tunnels growing salads and things that, in my own open air
| garden, are very heavily predated. They had a simple but very
| effective solution: they ran misters for a few minutes every
| hour. This made an environment that the plants thrived and
| insects left alone. And they lost very little water (on an
| island where fresh water was conserved generally) even though
| the tunnels were not closed at the ends. Fungus wasn't
| mentioned when I asked about them. It was very simple tech
| level but I was struck by the smarts and knowledge behind it.
| jmdots wrote:
| So it's like a giant 2L bottle on its side with the ends cut
| off and no label? Was the soil inside fully or was this a
| covering? Very cool
| alisson wrote:
| I heard watering the leaves is a technique to avoid frost
| damage in some regions
| mkranjec wrote:
| Yes it is. Water freezes and provides protection from
| freezing cold as funny as it might sound. Of course watering
| systems for huge gardens or orchards are expensive even if
| you have access to enough water.
| znpy wrote:
| > you don't spray water on leaves as shown in the video
|
| That's pretty much what happens when plants get "watered"
| naturally though... I'm thinking about rain of course
| whynotmaybe wrote:
| From my understanding gathered from grandparents, problems
| occur when watering under the sun because droplets act like
| magnifier and burn the leaves.
|
| Watering the soil means you don't need to care about the sun.
| jejeyyy77 wrote:
| rain?
| enraged_camel wrote:
| Sometimes you do in fact spray water on leaves on hot days
| because the evaporation effect cools the plant.
| jcims wrote:
| I think a lot of these tools are better placed in research
| where you want highly regulated interaction with the plant and
| the cash outlay is worth it.
| chfritz wrote:
| Very cool. Do you have a way to see the farm live (via video
| streaming) in the app or the web?
| abdullahkhalids wrote:
| The idea of introducing robotics to farming is very attractive.
| It doesn't seem like this is a scalable solution for farming, but
| a sufficient one for gardening.
|
| They started this project a decade ago. But robotics has advanced
| quite a bit in that time. Surely, today it is much more viable to
| have four wheeled robots watering, weeding etc at the same
| precision this product can. Then why build a gantry.
| defrost wrote:
| Your points are largely valid and there are many examples of
| mobile robust at scale autonomous robot vehicles for "big
| farms" today, it's still a growing market domain with much
| innovation.
|
| > Then why build a gantry.
|
| Part of at scale agriculture is growing seedlings (fruit trees,
| etc), conducting ANOVA trials (small plots to test many seed
| varieties).
|
| There's a good chunk of "big agriculture" taking place in
| warehouse sized greenhouses with roller topped tables, big
| sliding trays, tightly packed young plants, overhead gantries
| for cameras | sprays | lifting hooks, etc.
|
| This is a lightweight garden bed gantry .. but there is a place
| for big gantries in agriculture.
| taneq wrote:
| So that you're not rolling around on the soil and compacting
| it, or squashing seedlings?
| wokwokwok wrote:
| Come on, there are obvious solutions to this like having
| lanes, same as farm use for machinery right now. :p
|
| Having a roomba like (yes, obviously different to the
| standard look of a robot vacuum cleaner; but a small
| autonomous robot; eg a watering can on tank treads, or a bb8
| rolling ball) bot with a docking station out of the weather
| seems enormously more sustainable and scalable.
| __MatrixMan__ wrote:
| Gantries can go places that tractors can't, like up and down
| the side of a building.
| maxglute wrote:
| >robotics has advanced quite a bit in that time.
|
| Yeah I remember seeing this years ago, and feeling like it was
| the future. Now it barely feels like a robot.
| James_K wrote:
| The cheapest option is to buy $40 worth of hosing, then lay
| hose around the plants with small holes in it so that water
| drips out onto the ground at a constant rate.
| wiradikusuma wrote:
| Looking at the pricing and the area the robot covers, isn't it
| too expensive?
|
| I mean, with that land size, it can be easily done by a human in
| a few minutes? And I'm guessing most people who grow crops at
| that size do it for a hobby, which means they don't mind doing
| the work?
| owenpalmer wrote:
| Would be interesting if they could get it to work in a circular
| pattern with multiple layers, where one FarmBot traverses each
| ring of the garden's "onion".
|
| For an optimized garden to feed a family, you need 549 square
| meters[0], which is a circle with a diameter of 26.4 meters (86.7
| ft). That's all the vegetables for your entire family, mostly
| automated.
|
| That's a future I would love to see, even though it's way less
| efficient than industrial farming.
|
| [0] https://farm.bot/pages/yield
| _kb wrote:
| That seems like an efficient approach for a commercial scale
| version. The form would essentially mirror center-pivot
| irrigation [1] so you can keep a fixed point for delivering
| energy, water, fertiliser etc and cover larger circular patch
| with a series of smaller linear robots. Each span could also be
| modular to adapt to different sizes as suitable for the
| landscape.
|
| [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Center-pivot_irrigation
| torlok wrote:
| > That's all the vegetables for your entire family, mostly
| automated.
|
| This thing only drills the seeds and waters the plants.
| _Marak_ wrote:
| you can buy a soaker hose with a timer its like twenty bucks
| fareesh wrote:
| Is there an open source robot repository somewhere a-la github?
| aussieguy1234 wrote:
| I'd like to see a farming robot using the new SAM model from
| meta.
| gohai wrote:
| Make sure to check out Telegarden by Ken Goldberg and Joseph
| Santarromana, from 1995-2004:
| https://goldberg.berkeley.edu/garden/Ars/
| antoniojtorres wrote:
| This worries me from a positioning standpoint. I imagine a large
| amount of people with a garden bed, even a large one, garden
| because they like it, this would get in the way of that. The
| device doesn't appear like it would scale well to anything large
| enough, and even then it would compete with much more
| sophisticated solutions that do this.
|
| I feel like it's actual market may end up being pretty narrow,
| not that it isn't it a cool idea, it is, but it just gave me that
| gut reaction that it falls squarely in the uncanny valley between
| industrial users and hobbyists.
| defrost wrote:
| It makes more sense targeted towards "people that like robots"
| rather than "people that want to grow their own food".
|
| I'm in a rural area and my first thought seeing this was "Good
| kit to play with for a growing teenager interested in
| agricultural automation" rather than "Serious industrial end
| use tooling".
| rahkiin wrote:
| My partner likes gardening. I like robots. This might work
| for us.
|
| That's a narrow audience though..
| Maxion wrote:
| It could be useful in some research, allowing precise control
| of e.g. watering and automated photography of the plants. But
| that's about it.
| snickmy wrote:
| Do you have any link to more sophisticated solutions ? genuine
| ask
| CapstanRoller wrote:
| www.deere.com
| Loughla wrote:
| Legitimately look into custom farming practices. The level of
| automation, data, and general technology in use in farming
| today is amazing.
| deutz_allis wrote:
| you can look into 'Precision Agriculture' and find quite a
| few solutions. Deere is pretty much at the front of the game
| with automation and data that provide farmers with the
| ability to make super informed decisions.
| nozzlegear wrote:
| I posted elsewhere on this story about this, but I have a
| flower garden I like to grow and fiddle with each year, and I'd
| still be interested in doing something like this Farm Bot too.
| I don't think I'd purchase one, I'm more interested in building
| one from scratch (so I appreciate that it's open source), but
| just seeing what kind of automated vegetable operation I can
| set up with a raspberry pi, a few servos and some
| moisture/sunlight sensors has been a project I've wanted to do
| for a couple summers.
|
| Part of the draw is the potential for iterating on it,
| collecting whatever data might be collectable, adapting it to
| my environment or what I want to grow, etc. I've got a black
| thumb for vegetables anyway - that's why I grow flowers instead
| - so I really don't care if some or all them end up dying
| because the robot fails.
| vertis wrote:
| Snippets from my partners reactions:
|
| "Aimed at prosumers...uh...more nerdsumers"
|
| "Oh I just saw the price, $4000 to avoid an hours work"
| ragebol wrote:
| I've always wondered why this robot uses a gantry system.
|
| Would be less intrusive and thus easier to work alongside a human
| if it was a polar system, with a single pole in the
| middle/corner, like a tower crane.
|
| Simpler mechanically as well I suppose
| daemonologist wrote:
| I toyed with a cable-bot (like what is used for top-down shots
| at sporting events) for gardening. Needs three towers and
| probably difficult to make sturdy enough for watering but way
| cheaper at large scales than anything rigid and relatively more
| portable.
| ragebol wrote:
| Sturdy enough for watering should not be too hard I guess.
| I'd say weeding it harder, depending on the method. Pulling
| out weeds with roots and all (most effective IME) requires
| some force and torque.
| mherrmann wrote:
| Having watched Clarkson's Farm, I can't help but feel that
| farming is extremely antiquated. The sensitivity to unexpected
| weather and the low profit margins despite the high investments
| of time and money seem terrible. I can't see us as an advanced
| species doing this in 100 years, except for specialty
| experiences.
| torlok wrote:
| Modern farming is anything but antiquated. A lot of science
| goes into it, and it's the most efficient use of national
| resources to produce food. The downsides you mentioned is
| purely the fault of the market, not farming itself.
| mherrmann wrote:
| I understand that a lot of science and technology goes into
| modern farming, and that it's much better than it used to be.
| You did not address one of the main downsides I mentioned,
| which is that it still seems to be extremely reliant on the
| weather.
| torlok wrote:
| It also makes use of the sun and rain for free, unlike
| controlled setups. Weather is an issue, but it's not an
| issue everywhere at once. Even now with the progressing
| climate change farmers are adapting. You have introduction
| of regenerative farming to mitigate erosion and help with
| water retention, planting wind barriers, more resistant
| plant varieties, and much more. It's all designed to help
| mitigate weather fluctuations. Startups growing wheat under
| UV lighting are not going to feed the planet.
| CapstanRoller wrote:
| >Having watched Clarkson's Farm, I can't help but feel that
| farming is extremely antiquated.
|
| That's like saying you watched The Bachelor and now have
| Opinions about marriage.
| mherrmann wrote:
| You're telling me I have no clue. I don't disagree. But what
| would be much more interesting is for you to address the
| points I made.
| CapstanRoller wrote:
| You didn't really make any points worth addressing.
|
| If you want to drink Soylent, go ahead. But even the
| predominant ingredient, soy, comes from agriculture.
| rob wrote:
| There's a reason hundreds of miles of abandoned stone walls are
| hidden inside forests all throughout the Northeast US - people
| deforested everything and tried to farm, but abandoned it all
| until nature reclaimed it again. It's tough.
| torlok wrote:
| This is a Juicero of farming. The whole setup is easily replaced
| with a raised garden bed and a drip hose. Hearing about this a
| few years back, I was hoping it would at least do some weed
| control, but no.
| Maxion wrote:
| It is indeed a juicero of farming. It costs 4 grand for
| something that can handle a single garden bed. This is not
| suitable for even small commerical growers, they'd need
| hundreds of these things.
|
| All commercial growers in my latitude start by sprouting their
| plants indoors, using e.g. soil blocks. Very little is direct
| sown.
|
| If you practice no-till, weeding isn't even that big of a task.
|
| This thing definitely does not provide value.
| prattatx wrote:
| Value for me is to scratch the zombie apocalypse itch.
|
| One feature request is some form of animal and pest
| protection. Squirrels and cardinals eat a majority percentage
| of the veggies in my raised bed here in Austin. I think some
| bats eat the vegetables as well but that's difficult to
| validate.
| torlok wrote:
| How does it scratch that itch. This thing can plant seeds
| and water the plants. You can just run a hose through your
| raised bed and have a timer on your water valve. This thing
| won't grow food for you. If you're worried about the
| apocalypse, then start researching how seeds are produced,
| because your apocalypse garden plan will probably die right
| there.
| Vegenoid wrote:
| You believe that this thing will have _more_ usefulness in
| an apocalypse scenario? I think that anything high-tech
| immediately becomes far less useful if the infrastructure
| that supports modern electronics and computers collapses.
| badcppdev wrote:
| Some kind of high tech squirrel protection like mesh?
| RobotToaster wrote:
| > I was hoping it would at least do some weed control, but no.
|
| Looks like it does do weeding, kinda
| https://genesis.farm.bot/v1.7/assembly/tools
| schleck8 wrote:
| > The rotary tool features a 24 volt DC motor, interchangeable
| implements, and an adjustable motor angle allowing FarmBot to
| perform light duty weed whacking, soil surface milling, and
| drilling operations.
| torlok wrote:
| I'd expect either a camera setup to find and kill weeds, or
| at least a basic weeder that sweeps the soil and avoids the
| vegetables the bot planted, same as you'd do on an organic
| farm. Instead what you get is an attachment you have to
| fiddle with and manually point towards the weeds. It's a toy.
| yndoendo wrote:
| Wouldn't sweeping the soil be the equivalent of tilling?
| Thought the farm industry was moving to no-till to prevent
| nutrient run off from water and wind. I know University of
| Iowa has done a number of studies that show tilling is
| long-term harmful to the soil composition.
|
| *fixed typo
| torlok wrote:
| Not at all. It has nothing to do with tilling. We're just
| talking about mechanical weed control using a rotary hoe
| or a tine weeder. The job of a tine weeder is to pull out
| the weeds just as they sprout.
| imtringued wrote:
| I agree. What they should have done is make the raised bed
| thinner and build a wheeled rover for planting. In exchange for
| having smaller beds, you can now let the rover service dozens
| of beds. The irrigation system should be integrated directly
| into the beds and the rover merely tries to check the soil
| moisture to conserve water and prevent mold.
| redman25 wrote:
| Drip irrigation is a PIA to setup in my experience. This looks
| a lot easier.
|
| You have to correctly size and adjust every nozzle and need
| different sizes of pipe as you get further from the hose. It's
| more difficult than you would think.
|
| A lot of the pieces fit together by friction alone and are a
| pain to put together. You have to use boiling water to soften
| the pipes in order to connect them without breaking them. It
| requires quite a bit of elbow grease.
|
| EDIT: I think I must have responded to the wrong comment.
| Rereading my reply doesn't make sense in context...
| timeon wrote:
| Why not just bigger field instead of several raised beds and
| tape-irrigation connected to one pipe on the side?
| nradov wrote:
| What type of drip irrigation lines were you using? The ones
| I've used didn't require softening.
| weweweoo wrote:
| Seems like a cool project, but not something I would pay
| thousands of dollars for as a hobbyist gardener. By the looks of
| it, might work for smaller plants, but not much use in growing
| larger varieties of tomato or cucumber for example.
|
| Really the only thing I would trust and want to automate is
| watering when I'm away, and that can be done much cheaper. The
| most burdensome part right now in my greenhouse is actually
| keeping the large plants in check, prevent them from growing too
| much by taking away right leaves/branches. The robot probably
| wouldn't do too much to help with that. Weeds are a problem
| outside, but that's way too large of an area to cover with this
| kind of robots.
| john_minsk wrote:
| Interesting. A while ago I heard about a project to use laser
| with AI to grow salmon and protect from parasites[1]
|
| Would it be a terrible idea to destroy weeds with laser shots?
| Or crops don't provide enough margin for such advance tech?
|
| 1. https://www.stingray.no/delousing-with-laser/?lang=en
| matthewiiiv wrote:
| This is very cool and I immediately wanted one. Hobby gardening
| is not exactly cost effective but I can think of cheaper ways to
| outsource growing vegetables...
| constantcrying wrote:
| Seems an interesting engineering project, but like a terrible
| product. Who is the customer? If you like gardening, why would
| you pay thousands of dollars so that you don't need to do it? If
| you don't like gardening, you obviously wouldn't be interested in
| having a robot do it for you.
|
| I just can't imagine who would buy this. Gardening can be done
| very cheap and I believe that most people do it because they like
| spending time outside, working with their hands, being involved
| with the food they eat and saving a bit of money. Why would such
| a person want to have a robot which does away with that?
|
| On an industrial scale this thing is of course totally useless.
| naasking wrote:
| > If you don't like gardening, you obviously wouldn't be
| interested in having a robot do it for you
|
| Why? Do people who don't like gardening not like gardens or
| fresh produce? I just don't see how you reached this
| conclusion.
| constantcrying wrote:
| I gave a list of reasons for why people might light to do
| gardening. In that list zero of the points benefit from
| having a robot do it for you.
|
| Why do you just ask the most banal questions instead of
| reading my post and responding to the argument I made?
|
| >Do people who don't like gardening not like gardens or fresh
| produce? I just don't see how you reached this conclusion.
|
| Yes, if you don't ready post you don't know how I reached
| that conclusion.
|
| If you just like fresh produce go to a farmers market.
| naasking wrote:
| Nothing you wrote in this or the original post implies that
| people who don't like gardening wouldn't want to have a
| garden on their own property managed by a robot.
| constantcrying wrote:
| Having a product for gardening and selling it to people
| who don't like gardening is genuinely retarded. With this
| robot you still have to do gardening, only somewhat less.
|
| If you don't like gardening why would you spend 2k on a
| robot doing it for you instead of buying the produce?
| naasking wrote:
| You seem to be struggling with the idea that someone
| might want the results of hard work without actually
| doing that hard work, especially if they can get those
| results by playing with something they do enjoy, like
| robotics. Let me know when that sinks in.
| constantcrying wrote:
| Are you aware of supermarkets? There you can buy food
| that others have produced for you, admission to a
| supermarket is usually free and food can be bought in
| minutes instead of produced over months.
|
| Is this your project? Why are you so emotional over it
| being a shit product?
| naasking wrote:
| It might be difficult, but maybe strain your imagination
| to consider scenarios where people live remotely, off
| grid, or in areas with unreliable supply chains, or they
| might even live right next door to be more self-
| sufficient. Accepting that other people might have
| different values than you can be challenging, but I have
| confidence you can do it.
| rob wrote:
| He's going to blow his mind when he learns I have two
| AeroGardens in my kitchen, but don't want to do any
| farming. I could just hop down to the grocery store to
| buy the same amount in minutes. I can't believe the
| company is still in business!
| nradov wrote:
| If you live off grid in areas with unreliable supply
| chains then where do you get spare parts and technical
| support when the robot breaks?
| bluGill wrote:
| I want higher quality food than my local supermarket.
| Tomatoes are work to grow but what you can buy is awful.
| I wouldn't use this for wheat as I can't tell any
| difference.
| James_K wrote:
| They have these things called farmers' markets where you can
| buy fresh produce and it's much cheaper than $4000. You could
| probably buy fresh produce for a whole year and not have it
| come to that total. A year's worth of food is likely more
| than the robot could produce in your lifetime, so the market
| is a much better deal.
| naasking wrote:
| So in your mind, economics is the only value worth
| considering. So I suppose that entails that you were paid
| to write your reply to my comment? Why else would you
| bother engaging on this site if you're not getting some
| monetary deal out of it?
| James_K wrote:
| When it comes to buying things, I would say yes. I could
| buy an expensive robot to grow a small amount of fresh
| food for me, or I could buy the same fresh food for much
| cheaper from a farmer. The former has little appeal when
| the latter exists.
| devjab wrote:
| I think this is a fairly valid point. From my own anecdotal
| perspective I don't much like "gardening" but when we wanted
| to grow vegetables we did research enough to know that this
| product is basically a waste of money. If you want a self-
| watering system you're going to go with that, and maybe even
| have some fish for cleaning. If you just want easy low
| maintenance vegetables you can build a raised bed and water
| it with a hose on evenings during a dry period. That's
| basically all you need to do.
|
| I've removed a ton of weeds from between our tiles, I've
| removed exactly three from the raised bed. The watering takes
| like 30 seconds a few nights a week. The real trick is to
| plant something with a high output and no maintenance
| required like squash.
| naasking wrote:
| I agree that the watering adapter is basically pointless
| when this thing is built on a raised bed. You can build the
| watering into the base of the bed with a simple water level
| sensor and let capillary action wick the water up to the
| roots.
|
| The gantry design is limited for sure, but extending it
| into a more independent system might be possible, and the
| software they wrote to manage crops could potentially be
| quite useful with a more general system. It seems like a
| final v1 for a "farm bot".
| SpaghettiX wrote:
| This checks out with someone I know who grows their own plants,
| and me, who doesn't spend time growing plants. We're both not
| interested in the product.
|
| Maybe it has a niche. Millionaires who want to go on holiday
| but still like to grow plants. It seems more like a gimmick.
| __MatrixMan__ wrote:
| It took steam engines 100 years to reliably outperform horses.
| Maybe in 100 years the situation will be different. Until then,
| I might buy one because I want to tinker with it. After all,
| it's 100 years of tinkering that got us there with steam
| engines.
| redman25 wrote:
| Maybe you like gardening but also want to vacation during the
| summer. The overhead of having to water every day can be a
| chain for doing other things you love.
| everybodyknows wrote:
| > Who is the customer?
|
| Other ag-academic research teams.
| robxorb wrote:
| > Seems an interesting engineering project, but like a terrible
| product.
|
| Couldn't you say that about half the stuff posted here?
|
| To me that's the "product" - an interesting engineering project
| targeted at people like us; a starting point for learning that
| can be taken further and those advancements potentially fed
| back into it, like all good open source projects.
|
| As that kind of product, similar to a large chunk everything
| else built around RPi's and arduino's posted here (and...
| celebrated), it looks great to me and I don't get the hate. I
| was really excited to see it.
|
| > Why would such a person want to have a robot which does away
| with that?
|
| The same reason they want the many, often entirely pointless
| automations posted here daily, only this is not just fun, but
| also useful?
|
| If this actually produces enough consumable food reliably (idk
| if it does, and be nice to see criticism along that angle),
| maybe also the cost could be justified?
|
| IIRC it's ~$3K for the base model, seems it could pay for
| itself in a year or so if it could supply a years worth of
| fresh veges to a couple of people, depending on the local cost
| (which can vary a lot).
| hkt wrote:
| I used to love things like this, now I realise that actually
| caring for living things is quite nice and life affirming, and
| spending yet more time behind a screen really is not. 40 hours+
| per week obligate online-time plus recreation is not a great way
| to live life. Our working lives are too long and our hours per
| week are too many. The sooner we learn to touch grass regularly,
| the better. Robots are evidently not the way to do this.
| rammer wrote:
| The amount of work required in getting this up and running and
| maintaining it could never pay for itself. The capital cost alone
| would take decades to pay back of ever.
| CapstanRoller wrote:
| How many actual farmers are involved with this project, or were
| at least consulted?
|
| This thing looks like an out-of-touch nerd hobby project, not a
| real tool one would use in the real world of farming.
|
| The "Commercial Production" link goes to a page mostly consisting
| of... art projects. https://farm.bot/pages/research
| Brosper wrote:
| I think it's like, "I want to help in an industry I don't know
| anything about". This is not scalable. I understand that this
| person would like to help, but this is not the help that Farmers
| and needed.
|
| I wonder if he asked farmers about their problems before creating
| this project.
| quijoteuniv wrote:
| I do not understand why so much negativity against an open
| source project. And anyway game changing seldom comes within
| the same industry.
| James_K wrote:
| The negativity comes from the fact that it's obviously stupid
| to spend $4000 on an AI robot that waters plants on a single
| small plot of land. The selling point of this product is "I
| want fresh food but I don't want to garden" which is much
| better served by going to a market and buying the food from a
| farmer.
| quijoteuniv wrote:
| I would argue that negativity comes from you even if the
| project is not that great yet. But i see passion, openness
| and someone trying to tackle a very big problem. What did
| you do today? I tell you what I did... i have been negative
| with post that are negative about a project. So peace on
| earth and hopefully we can make together a better world.
| James_K wrote:
| Okay Mr. High Horse. My issue with them isn't passion,
| it's pride. Every other week some tech-minded person will
| look at something which works perfectly well and think "I
| know nothing about this but I'm sure it could be improved
| with a robot". The robot is almost always a bad idea
| because it doesn't take into account the actual needs and
| wants of the people it's being sold to, and sometimes
| those people are forced to use it anyway. The only reason
| it exists is because its creators know about technology
| and when all you have is a hammer your problems start to
| look like nails.
| schleck8 wrote:
| It's not targeted at farmers clearly. The page literally says
| the xl version is for a family of four
| willguest wrote:
| How many harvests would it take to offset the emissions that go
| into producing a kit? My guess is that this uses more steel per
| sapling than almost any other method of tending to a vegetable
| NotGMan wrote:
| Why always this obsession with emissions?
|
| People don't want poisoned food from pesticides etc...
| primarly.
| henearkr wrote:
| Why do you tie emissions to steel contents.
|
| This system is electricity-based, whereas traditional
| agriculture is fuel-intensive.
|
| Even fertilizer production is fuel-intensive, and this system
| avoids using any.
|
| Multiply by the time scale you want the system to last, and you
| get your emissions savings.
|
| Steel contents is a one-off emissions investment.
|
| Now if you want to compare this system to an other electricity-
| based, renewable energy only, agriculture, say with electric
| trucks etc, that'd be interesting.
| jimnotgym wrote:
| I don't want to be accused of pedantry...but isn't this a
| gardening robot? I don't see how it scales to fields.
|
| I don't really see what problem it solves. Growing in a raised
| bed with drip irrigation looks a lot less hassle than setting up
| a giant cnc watering machine. If you mulch once a year you don't
| need to add nutrients to a no dog bed at all.
| gunalx wrote:
| If it was just a automated irrigation system and a camera with
| some detection for seeing if the plants look oka and can send a
| ping if a human needs to intervene. I remember hearing about this
| year's ago, and find it really cool, but it probably does to
| little, or is to expensive to be able to justify.
| klntsky wrote:
| ROI shouldn't be calculated based on the costs of transportation,
| because no one goes to the store to buy just vegetables (and not
| everyone _drives_ to the store, it 's a purely suburban american
| thing). Not to mention 'CO2 costs' that you don't pay at all
| luckylion wrote:
| > and not everyone drives to the store, it's a purely suburban
| american thing
|
| I live in a german town at the edge of a large city, the
| grocery stores are evenly distributed among this town, max 15
| minutes by foot or 5 by bike. I love my bike and use it all the
| time. On a nice day, there will be 20 bikes and 60 cars at the
| store. On a rainy day there will be 2 bikes and 80 cars at the
| store.
|
| "Only americans take the car to the store" is a myth that you
| shouldn't spread.
| nmeofthestate wrote:
| The promo video - Industrial Farming Bad, Take Back Control, epic
| movie trailer soundtrack - is a real hoot, given the product it's
| selling.
| elric wrote:
| I found it to be incredibly annoying, with overly dramatic
| music and narration, not to mention nonsensical claims. This
| kind of thing immediately turns me off to any product.
| cactusplant7374 wrote:
| Does it kill weeds? Is watering the only thing it does?
| madmask wrote:
| Looks like a thing that takes away the pleasure from
| gardening/small scale farming.
| apexalpha wrote:
| This looks fun but not really useful.
|
| My hope would be that in 20 years everyone has a little bot that
| 24/7 runs a garden for you and provides every family with 80% of
| their vegetable need.
|
| Imagine the amount of acreage we could return to nature / co2
| sinking.
| Waterluvian wrote:
| Every family having to have a robot instead of a handful of
| tractors for every ten thousand families or so. And that is
| likely a less optimal use of acreage. I think what you might
| actually be advocating for is "people should convert more
| residential land into gardens" which is always fun. I love my
| garden as a hobby.
|
| We keep trying to un-invent the division of labour.
|
| Edited for unnecessary pre-coffee poor behaviour. Sorry.
| siffin wrote:
| [flagged]
| agumonkey wrote:
| you know good sites / books about this ? or active groups
| ecocentrik wrote:
| Just imagine all the packaging material that would be
| required to get everyone a new farm bot every few years.
| dang wrote:
| Please don't post in the flamewar style to HN, regardless
| of how provocative another comment is or you feel it is.
|
| If you wouldn't mind reviewing
| https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and taking
| the intended spirit of the site more to heart, we'd be
| grateful.
|
| Your comment would be fine without the first (and I would
| also say the last) sentence.
| redeux wrote:
| I did some quick math on this 10,000 number and I think it's
| off by at least an order of magnitude. You have to assume
| everyone needs the tractors at roughly the same time and the
| cost/time of transporting, loading, unloading, etc severely
| limits the efficiency in a suburban environment.
| Waterluvian wrote:
| It's probably wrong, yeah. I made a wild guess at magnitude
| just to make a rhetorical point. Are you saying it's more
| like 1,000 or 100,000?
|
| I'm not a farmer but I live in a farming city, and one
| thing I notice is that the crops around here are definitely
| not all harvested at the same time. Some are harvested
| months before others. Even the same crops like corn or
| various beans are harvested weeks apart. For corn sometimes
| months. Farms also share a lot of equipment. Though a lot
| of farms are just absolutely massive corporate farms so
| it's not really "sharing" but has the same effect.
| WillAdams wrote:
| For a while I was considering something similar, where instead
| a couple of windows at a home would be miniature
| greenhouses/aquariums with openings arranged so that if the
| interior access was latched it would be impossible to gain
| access from the outside, but it would be possible to fill up
| consumables and drop off additional items (think tilapia for a
| scheduled dinner, but the usual protein product would be
| shrimp).
|
| That said, I think making room for something like:
|
| https://ogardengroup.com/
|
| is perhaps a bit more marketable (though they missed out by not
| sizing it to fit next to a refrigerator).
| James_K wrote:
| Each person owning their own farm is orders of magnitude less
| efficient that one large farm serving many people.
| lukas099 wrote:
| I agree with you overall, but some vegetables were found in a
| recent study to be more efficiently grown at home. Also, a
| lot of people already have turfgrass farms and converting
| those to veggie farms would be a huge net win. Finally, if
| you think that people have a fairly static amount of
| time/energy to spend on hobbies, hobby farming would likely
| be a net benefit because some hobbies have much greater
| negative externalities.
| AtlasBarfed wrote:
| Home gardens are cheaper than stores, since seeds are cheaper
| than finished fruits/veggies. Of course it depends on free
| labor of The Gardener which this may address.
| locococo wrote:
| For homeowners with a garden it's not necessarily about
| efficiency. I have a little garden and the food quality is
| just way better in terms of freshness and taste.
| apexalpha wrote:
| Yes but most people already own a plot of land that is not in
| use for anything except growing grass.
| pydry wrote:
| This is probably not true for a lot of produce with a limited
| shelf life.
|
| If you factor in wastage and the _expensive_ supply chain
| logistics for things that spoil quickly it 's probably
| cheaper to grow them closer to the point of use, especially
| if you can keep down labor costs with automation.
|
| Tastier and more nutritious too.
| bagels wrote:
| Farmers get their inputs much cheaper than I do, especially
| water. Water is essentially free compared to residential
| rates at about 100x cheaper.
| pydry wrote:
| I dont think water forms a large % of the cost of fresh
| veg - certainly not relative to logistics and spoilage.
| pebm wrote:
| From what I recall, it depends on your definition of
| efficiency. Large farms are more efficient in terms of mass
| of produce per unit of labour but less efficient in terms of
| mass of produce per unit area.
| mikepurvis wrote:
| Absolutely. Biointensive gardening blows conventional ag
| out of the water on yield per area, it's just way more
| labour involved since you're companion cropping everything.
| OscarCunningham wrote:
| That explains something I was puzzled about recently. How
| the Amish can keep buying land for their famously many
| children, while using less modern technology than their
| competitors.
| James_K wrote:
| But would you get those same efficiency gains with one of
| these robots? They seem similar to mass farms in how they
| are laid out, and they also are going to wast some space
| for the machines to move around. They would need a truly
| staggering amount of metal and parts compared with a mass
| farm, and that metal has to come from somewhere which takes
| up land.
| redeux wrote:
| There are already some good points made about efficiency, but
| I'll also add that for an individual sometimes it's not about
| efficiency but about survivability in the event of a crisis.
| As we saw in 2020, over indexing on efficiency can lead to
| cascading failures that put individuals at risk, so it's
| logical that some would want to mitigate the risk of food
| production failures.
| krisoft wrote:
| > As we saw in 2020, over indexing on efficiency can lead
| to cascading failures that put individuals at risk
|
| I don't know what you mean here. By 2020 I assume you mean
| the covid-19 pandemic? I agree that the pandemic itself put
| people at risk. But what do you mean by "cascading failures
| that put individuals at risk"?
|
| From my perspective society and systems of it kept on going
| despite the large scale upheavals happening. If for
| anything I would cite 2020 as evidence that things are not
| as fragile as we suspected. But maybe you have a different
| perspective?
| sgu999 wrote:
| I suspect they are referring to the whole "we can't even
| produce face masks" kind of fiascos. Yes we got out of it
| alright, but in good portion out of pure luck that
| covid-19 isn't as deadly as ebola...
| airstrike wrote:
| By the looks of things we did make out of COVID-19 just
| fine (from a civilization standpoint even if not at the
| individual level for all individuals) so not sure this
| supports your point.
| redeux wrote:
| "Just fine" is relative I suppose. We were fortunate that
| COVID-19 was relatively mild compared to what could have
| happened, but if you recall, there were major supply
| chain issues and at least in my area there were
| shortages, outages, and elevated prices on food items.
| Given what we saw, it seems reasonable to me that some
| people would want to hedge against something even worse
| by growing at least some of their food at home.
| riiii wrote:
| So what? I don't let efficiency control my life or hobbies.
| mlyle wrote:
| There are obviously economies of scale in agriculture.
|
| But there are also a whole lot of benefits to producing food
| yourself: resilience, diversity of food crops, taste.
|
| Also, people often enjoy the process, which effectively
| lowers the economic cost of doing it yourself.
| hengheng wrote:
| Same goes for cooking your own food, doing your own laundry
| and picking your own clothes. Efficiency has its place in
| times of scarcity, but there is a cultural component on top.
| Part is education, part is carrying and renewing traditions,
| part is the ikea effect, sure.
|
| These robots will not help avoid famine, but they will help
| rich first world people be more cognizant of food and
| agriculture. Which in turn will help them make better choices
| with the food they buy. This can only work against calory-
| dense inudstrial food, which arguably is the larger problem
| than efficiency in large parts of the world.
| James_K wrote:
| Rich people are the healthiest in society. They eat the
| most fresh food already. The people eating calorie-dense
| industrial food are mostly too poor to afford a $4000 robot
| and a plot of land to put it on, especially when it
| produces a very small amount of fresh food.
| asdf6969 wrote:
| One large farm needs to optimize for their own needs instead
| of mine. I want tomatoes that taste good but they barely
| exist at the store. Large farms want to sell flavourless
| tomatoes that look nice and last a long time.
| AngryData wrote:
| In some ways yes, in other ways it isn't though. Far less
| shipping, and some fruits and vegetables are just straight up
| better and healthier when harvested ripe instead of early so
| they can be shipped and stored. There is also a lot more
| wasted food that doesn't sell in a store well because they
| don't give you a discount for lesser specimens, but that
| people can and would eat otherwise.
| lukas099 wrote:
| I would love a drone or robot that selectively kills invasive
| weeds and leaves native ones.
| airstrike wrote:
| Preferably with the use of a high-powered laser
| mlyle wrote:
| Sounds like a good way to burn down your yard but leave the
| weed alive .:p
| quijoteuniv wrote:
| Is this not the best way to start on that path, an open source
| project yhat shares all the info so others can join branch and
| improve. Yiu cannot climb the mountastarting at the top !
| lancesells wrote:
| For the complexity and materials in this project coupled with
| the fairly small coverage I think the best way to start is to
| garden by hand.
|
| It makes more sense in a laboratory environment but this just
| seems like overkill for a regular person.
| riiii wrote:
| As an open source project it's tremendously useful. This is a
| start of new era in human history.
| asdf6969 wrote:
| In 20 years most people won't be able to afford a yard
| __MatrixMan__ wrote:
| In that case, who cares what the bank says about whose yard
| is whose? Find a patch of ground and grow your food there.
|
| We only uphold property rights because enough of us see a
| benefit in doing so. If that changes, so can we.
| asdf6969 wrote:
| https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/north/matthew-clarke-
| youtube-...
| __MatrixMan__ wrote:
| Supposing the locals enforce this, that would be evidence
| that property rights in the Yukon still have the consent
| of the people. Will they in 20 years? We'll see.
| elric wrote:
| I would love to grow some of my own food, the way I did when I
| was a kid. But alas, I will never be able to afford a garden,
| and the soil here is heavily contaminated with PFAS, heavy
| metals, and goodness knows what else.
| kingkawn wrote:
| it is so so easy to grow that much of a garden, this is a
| complete waste
| j_m_b wrote:
| We could do with a lot less grass lawns and a lot more gardens.
| Even just growing flowers adds tremendously to the local
| ecosystem of insects, while adding beauty to your life. If this
| gets more people thinking about gardening, I'm all for it!
| theo1996 wrote:
| this is very wastefull and stupid, you can buy a auto prinkler
| with a timer for 100 euros, and seeding can be done by hand in
| the same time the bot does it.
| BigParm wrote:
| Lol @ most of you who think this is real. It's a troll post w
| Sora or something. Turn your fucking brain on. By the time you
| fuck around with that, you could have done the garden by hand 20
| times.
| d_burfoot wrote:
| I would love to contribute to something like this for cattle
| ranching. Track your herd with a mapping app, analyze the cows'
| vital signs, estimate how much land you need for grazing, etc.
| hengheng wrote:
| My retirement project is going to be this but at larger scale.
|
| Remove the tires from two old bicycles to run them on rails,
| build a gantry between them mounted to seatposts and handlebars.
| Probably drive it with chains on winches for robustness.
|
| Use movable wall elements so that the pick and place machine can
| set up both shade and increased illumination. Maybe have portable
| rain protection too. Maybe deploy close-up UV and IR lamps.
|
| I'd like to know the max size that a single gantry can serve, see
| how high its utilization can be.
|
| My guess is that it all can pay off once it's big enough. I just
| don't know where that point is. 100ft long? 200ft? 300? And 20ft
| wide?
| GlenTheMachine wrote:
| Farmer and roboticist here.
|
| There is a lot of discussion in a lot of threads about the design
| of the robot to water "from the top" by spraying the leaves
| instead of watering directly on the roots, and whether that's a
| good or bad thing, and whether the designers of the robot thought
| about it.
|
| Here's the problem with watering the leaves: yes, plants
| ultimately get their water from rain. But under normal
| conditions, the rain comes in sporadically in large quantities --
| not every day -- and soaks into the soil, which is where the
| plants actually pick it up. Flood irrigation does largely the
| same thing. Spray irrigation doesn't attempt to water the soil
| that deeply, it tends to give the plants just what they need for
| the next 24-48 hours, and that encourages wilt and fungal
| infections.
|
| Also, domesticated vegetable crops are far more susceptible to
| wilt and fungal infections than natives, and than grain crops,
| which are at the end of the day grasses. So you can in the same
| garden have perfectly healthy corn but all of your melons and
| squash have such bad fungal infections that the leaves are
| literally white. You can criticize the selection of vegetables
| for yield and not hardiness, but the fact is this is where we are
| with vegetable crops.
|
| This is an interesting project, but IMHO it isn't practical, and
| there isn't any way to make it practical. The X-Y gantry design,
| for gardening, has a number of intractable problems, watering
| from the top being just one of them. Another is that the design
| doesn't scale. You can't make this thing handle a 25 by 100 foot
| grade bed, which is the size you'd need to even start making a
| serious dent in the nutritional needs of one person. It can't
| really weed, and there's no way to modify the design to make it
| weed effectively; you'd have to add degrees of freedom to the
| gantry so that it could reach down to soil level and grasp roots
| (or, alternatively, to very selectively apply an herbicide).
| Garden crops grow to dramatically different heights; micro greens
| will be a few inches about the soil, zucchini will be three feet
| high, tomatoes can be 4-5 feet, and corn depending on cultivar
| can be as much as 9 feet tall.
|
| And finally, watering and weeding, if you know what you're doing
| are actually the easiest parts of the problem. Preparing the bed
| so you don't have to weed is a lot more work. To do that, you
| plant your crops and then apply large amounts of mulch. If you've
| never prepared beds, shoveled dirty barn straw for mulch or tried
| to wrangle weed barrier cloth on a hot, humid day, you haven't
| lived, my friend. That's the physically hard part. THe mentally
| hard part is diagnosing problems in your crops before they become
| problems. Noticing that those shiny weird insects flying around
| are squash vine borer. Looking at the underside of leaves and
| seeing squash beetle eggs or going around your tomatoes with a
| blacklight looking for cutworms.
|
| If you want to apply robotics to gardens, you either need a low
| mobile base, or you need to carefully lay out rows with fixed
| spacing, and have a high mobile base that can clear the height of
| the crops, and can take a variety of attachments, e.g. tillers to
| handle weed control. Which means you need think about
| monocropping. Which starts to look like the mid 20th century
| basic garden tractor, the International Harvester Farmall Cub,
| just with maybe an electric power plant and an autonomy applique
| kit. THis makes sense because the mid 20th century was the last
| time people in North America practiced gardening as a survival
| mechanism, and the Farmall Cub was the result of 50 years of
| practical design by people who knew how to garden when it
| counted.
| Havoc wrote:
| A single bed isn't exactly an ungodly amount of effort to do by
| hand.
|
| Think there is more potential industrial scale. i.e. run the arm
| over half a mile rather than a couple of feet
| indus wrote:
| Isn't your headline deceptive? Open source farming bot and the
| next CTA is order now for $2700?
| driverdan wrote:
| I'm surprised no one has mentioned hydroponics. For $2800 you can
| build a very nice, large, and mostly automated hydroponics setup.
| It would have higher yields, no weeding, minimal pests if
| indoors, better nutrient control, a smaller footprint, more
| reliability, and less complexity.
| pcarolan wrote:
| Do you have a good resource for getting a system started?
| Particularly outdoors / backyard scale?
| driverdan wrote:
| There is a lot of good content on YouTube. The top search
| results tend to be decent. Indoor vs outdoor tend to be
| mostly the same minus the lights.
| jejeyyy77 wrote:
| what are benefits of soil vs hydroponics?
| atrus wrote:
| Soil farming (think small family farm) in a field has the
| advantage of being stupidly cheap. Free sun, free water, free
| nutrients, as long as you're not going for 150% yields like
| the big mono-farms do. The tradeoff is lack of consistency.
| It's easy to have a bad season that gives you shit yields.
| Plus it's a _ton_ of work. There 's a reason we've worked so
| hard to automate so much of that.
|
| Hydro gives you a significant amount of control. Exact amount
| and wavelength of light, exact timing and amount of
| nutrients, exact temperature, humidity, co2, wind, etc. All
| with significantly higher costs. There's a reason that those
| "hydroponics in a skyscraper" basically grow lettuce, because
| it's the same growing profile as weed, which is a high profit
| crop.
| greenie_beans wrote:
| nah, part of the fun of gardening is interacting with plants
| alsodumb wrote:
| This project sucks ass - I know some research groups (non-
| engineering, they were more ag programs) who purchased it from
| them for a few thousand dollars and pretty much shelved it after
| a few months - unreliable hardware, buggy software, minimal
| support - all in all it would probably have been much more easier
| if we hired a bunch of engineering undergrads to build something
| like this from scratch.
| kumarvvr wrote:
| I thought you could use this as a springboard to improve and
| customize further, then put back those improvements into the
| open source project.
| cl42 wrote:
| A lot of people are criticizing this product. Does anyone know
| what "best in class" small-scale farming or gardening projects
| are? Very curious! Also any community recommendations would be
| great.
| lucideer wrote:
| > _Does anyone know what "best in class" small-scale farming or
| gardening projects are?_
|
| I think you're misinterpreting the criticisms. It's not "this
| particular product is a bad implementation compared to other
| one-size-fits-all tech-solutionism products", but rather "a
| one-size-fits-all tech-solutionism approach to this problem
| space doesn't make any sense"
|
| This is a very typical tech-industry "everything looks like a
| nail" type issue: going into an area you don't understand with
| a solution to problems that don't exist.
|
| A small subset of problems here:
|
| 1. A robot should automate things you do often/regularly -
| developing complex machinery do to one-off seasonal steps steps
| like seeding & pulling is immensely wasteful - that's going to
| raise the cost of the product a lot just in order to automate
| tasks you rarely do.
|
| 2. It doesn't do those tasks well: the pulling examples are
| contrived & the failure rates look high.
|
| 3. The watering mechanism is developed to suit the robot design
| rather than designing the robot around optimal watering
| strategies - this completely ignores generations of optimising
| watering approaches. The watering mechanism is actively harmful
| to many crops.
|
| 4. Very unadaptable to different plants' needs.
|
| TL;DR: There is no best of class product in this area because
| only someone who doesn't understand the problem space would try
| to develop a product to do this.
| cl42 wrote:
| This is incredibly helpful, thank you!
|
| If you have resources I can read or learn from about all
| this, please share them. You've clearly got wisdom in this
| space!
| simpaticoder wrote:
| It is curious to market a device as an improvement in self-
| sufficiency and design it to require an internet-connected
| centralized webapp.
| robxorb wrote:
| The main criticism against this seems to be it doesn't kill
| weeds. But it's an open system, with standardised, autonomously
| selectable attachments. Can someone come up with an attachment or
| two for it that could control weeds?
| avodonosov wrote:
| Exactly what functions does it perform? Watering? Weeding? Can it
| remove slugs, caterpillars, etc?
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