Live data from Hacker News

Ask HN: What's happening in agricultural technology?

news.ycombinator.com

31–40 of 149 posts

Re: Ask HN: What's happening in agricultural technology?

#31
As a wine grape farmer I have to say that there is not much going on.

There are people using drones, but I don't see much actionable data going out of them (especialy as you check each individual plan few times a week anyway). There are reports about some robots being developed, but nothing much being deployed.

State of art technology is optical sorting machine, which check each berry, after being destemed, and discard those which are unripe, molded or damaged. It is kind of cool and I hope to be able to afford it some day.

Re: Ask HN: What's happening in agricultural technology?

#32
post #29
post #27

What are your goals for you research or project? Many ideas stumble not on the technology, but on the people aspects of the project. If your goal is a single family sustainable farm, I've read reports of 2 or 3 acres being plenty for a family of four if you are in an area with enough rainfall (Ohio, for example). However, they needed to have outside income since their land did not produce everything the needed. If yo…

This is just a tiny part of a much broader goal, which is to create a completely self sustaining town of 100 to 1000 people within my lifetime. My intention is with 100k that could get you 10 acres. 1 acre for food, 5 for solar/energy production and 4 for housing/community. Of course, with the comments in this thread, I'd need more land, haha. As far as the economics goes: I've been doing reading but haven't formed a…

This may be exactly the opposite way to look at it, but have a peek at [1] the One Straw Revolution. TL;DR: Masanobu Fukuoka was a scientist with an idea of using existing biological systems to reduce the amount of labour involved in farming. He created a very nearly zero-input farming system with the hope of enabling people to grow enough food to sustain themselves in their spare time.

Unfortunately, lots and lots of hype surrounded the project and reliable numbers of yield, etc, etc are probably not to be found. Still there have been lots and lots of similar initiatives with interesting results. I think you would need quite a lot of land for 100 people, but land is cheaper than robots (and is self repairing, and adds to your quality of life). I have a friend who grows all his rice and vegetables for the year in his spare time using Fukuoka's methods (he studied with him for a while). I helped him harvest once and I was quite surprised how well he was doing (easily as much yield as his neighbour's commercial farm). Farm land is trivial to get in Japan and you can often borrow enough to live off of in exchange for a bottle of whiskey or so per year.

[1] http://www.onestrawrevolution.net/One_Straw_Revolution/One-S...

Re: Ask HN: What's happening in agricultural technology?

#33
Relative to HN I'm probably an expert in ag. Relative to people who grow things I'm far from an expert. I was employee 3 at Blue River Technology and I've been there for four years: http://www.bluerivert.com

The way the Valley generally thinks of ag is completely broken and I highly recommend avoiding Valley people if you want to learn about it. "Fully automated" is a thing people who've never farmed before assume is possible and assume people who farm want.

There is a lot of value on the table in ag tech. Depending on what your objectives are, I recommend having as many face to face / dirty boots meetings w/ growers as you can. Understand the realities and nuance of their day to day and find a place where you can make their lives better. Ignore the sensational articles. Most "ag-tech" companies are comically detached from the realities of their intended customers.

If your goal is to grow things then follow the above advice w/ 10x the emphasis. Happy to help further. Contact in profile.

Re: Ask HN: What's happening in agricultural technology?

#34
We are working on a sort of "AWS for farming" concept here (http://www.habitat84.com/). The goal is not to make fully automated robot controlled farms, but rather to reach an appropriate level of abstraction such that farming systems can be controlled and scaled easily by users (who might be farmers, but also others). The goal is to develop a platform on which to ultimately solve the problems of food production in space.

Re: Ask HN: What's happening in agricultural technology?

#35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Where do you live? Prime land in California? Average acre in America is $4000 [1], so wouldn't call $7183 an acre cheap. 1: http://www.agweb.com/mobile/land/farmland-value-guide/

That average has to include vast areas of aggressively useless and unwanted land (eg Wyoming).

Wyoming's a great place to start a wind farm.

Re: Ask HN: What's happening in agricultural technology?

#36
Agriculture in our age must shift from productivity first to sustainability first, because we are running out of fossil energy allowing to produce most of the fertilizers, and we have already killed our soil with it. A farm involving a lot of machines (i.e. a lot of need for energy) might not be the way to go in order to keep the agricultural system stable. The most you ask from the soil, the poorer it gets, and then you have to dump fertilizer to keep some level productivity.

We have created flawed models of what was good for productivity. I work with a guy very invested in research on olive growing (here in the south of France), he's achieving results believed to be impossible by many agricultural researchers. His method is entirely organic, shifted towards correct use of pollination, cross breeding and a lot of care, the kind of which automated sensors remain lacking of. From what he told me, he's able to develop the root system of an olive tree ~4 times as fast as researchers using what is believed to be optimal conditions.

We already have excellent robots able to take care of farms, they're called humans. Farming is a very noble activity and instead of less farmers, we need more, with more time to study the impact of pollinizers on their crops, how to deal with the new pollinizers they'll get due to climate change, etc. All of which can't be done unless we re-humanize farm work.

Re: Ask HN: What's happening in agricultural technology?

#37
I have lately been exploring agricultural technology as I plan to start farming myself. Here is what I have learnt so far.

1. Yes, its possible but its not as simple as ordering stuff off Amazon. The farmhack.org community is a great place to start. Most of them are existing tools which have been redesigned by farm hackers. http://blog.regehr.org/archives/1446 is an interesting proposition too. But in my interviews with farmers from rural India they said, cost/benefit isn't much for the such aerial reports.

2. One Million Dollars!!! Thats what Jean-Martin Fortier says in his book; The Market Gardener: A Successful Grower's Handbook for Small-Scale Organic Farming. Its a great read as its not just about tech but also market.

Re: Ask HN: What's happening in agricultural technology?

#38
post #29
post #27

What are your goals for you research or project? Many ideas stumble not on the technology, but on the people aspects of the project. If your goal is a single family sustainable farm, I've read reports of 2 or 3 acres being plenty for a family of four if you are in an area with enough rainfall (Ohio, for example). However, they needed to have outside income since their land did not produce everything the needed. If yo…

This is just a tiny part of a much broader goal, which is to create a completely self sustaining town of 100 to 1000 people within my lifetime. My intention is with 100k that could get you 10 acres. 1 acre for food, 5 for solar/energy production and 4 for housing/community. Of course, with the comments in this thread, I'd need more land, haha. As far as the economics goes: I've been doing reading but haven't formed a…

There is an on-going initiative to build a small self-sustaining town close to Almere (20 km from amsterdam) in the Netherlands: https://www.theguardian.com/sustainable-business/2016/jul/12...

Re: Ask HN: What's happening in agricultural technology?

#39
For robotics, try the search term "precision agriculture". This application of robotics is not so much about using the robots to replace manual labor, but rather to gather more detailed information about crops. An example application is yield prediction, which is really valuable as a predictor of the amount of laborers needed to harvest the crop within the window of time opportunity.

Re: Ask HN: What's happening in agricultural technology?

#40

Agriculture in our age must shift from productivity first to sustainability first, because we are running out of fossil energy allowing to produce most of the fertilizers, and we have already killed our soil with it. A farm involving a lot of machines (i.e. a lot of need for energy) might not be the way to go in order to keep the agricultural system stable. The most you ask from the soil, the poorer it gets, and then…

This comment is spot on. There's good reason to believe that the low-hanging fruits in improving agriculture are non-tech changes in farming. For example, a province in India was able to improve rice yields by 45% by transplanting seedlings earlier in a grid pattern [1].

I doubt that eliminating human labor costs would move the needle, automating farms seems like a low ROI move.

If you follow the money, it's easy to see why the US has focused its research on high-tech petrochemical fertilizer farming and GMOs. You can sell proprietary fertilizers, herbicides, insecticides, and seeds, but it's much harder to monetize new farming techniques.

[1] https://www.theguardian.com/global-development/2013/feb/16/i...

Post reply on HN