Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Ask HN: What's happening in agricultural technology?

news.ycombinator.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

61–70 of 149 posts

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

#61

Post by ju-st »

dejv wrote: post #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 disca…

Isn't there at least some buzz around optimizing water usage? Fine grained monitoring of individual plants using cheap sensors for example.

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

#62

Post by agentultra »

Vertical farms are going to be huge. They're almost fully isolated from the outside environment save for taking in local air and removing carbon from it. They require magnitudes less water than traditional agriculture and no fertilizers. You can build them in the middle of a downtown core if you need to. And you could optimize power consumption so that the majority of your energy comes from renewable sources.

See Aerofarms[0] for an example. I've heard of companies in Japan developing similar technology. If I meet the right people I might take the plunge and build one myself.

Traditional farming needs to go. It requires huge amounts of land to be cleared, fertilizers, and a large amount of fresh water. Most of what goes into such farms is wasted. Then you have to ship the output over large distances. Better to go vertical in my opinion.

[0] http://aerofarms.com/

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

#63

Post by lambdadmitry »

sebleon wrote: post #40
subtenante wrote: post #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…

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…

> 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.

I believe this means that you are not aware of the work of Norman Borlaug [1] [2]. Basically the very fact that we don't have famines now in places like India, Pakistan and Mexico is due to his and his group's work on intensive agriculture, which was mostly about farming techniques, government practices and setting up local fertilizer productions.

Moreover, it seems that you somehow look down to fertilizers. There is nothing wrong or inherently "non-green" in fixing nitrogen into nitrate fertilizers, you can easily do this with solar energy.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Norman_Borlaug

[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Green_Revolution

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

#64

Post by lambdadmitry »

agentultra wrote: post #62

Vertical farms are going to be huge. They're almost fully isolated from the outside environment save for taking in local air and removing carbon from it. They require magnitudes less water than traditional agriculture and no fertilizers. You can build them in the middle of a downtown core if you need to. And you could optimize power consumption so that the majority of your energy comes from renewable sources. See Aer…

Please note that vertical farming is mostly about producing leafy greens and other low-footprint, high-value goods. Purely from the energy standpoint there is no sense in using vertical farming for the bulk of calorie consumption. Compare traditional farming:

sunshine -> green parts of the plant -> seeds -> food -> people

with vertical farming:

sunshine -> [... -> electricity -> LED light] -> green parts of the plant -> seeds -> food -> people

The part in brackets will inevitably reduce overall efficiency by at least one order of magnitude. This means you will need to cover x10+ of land area with solar panels if you want to use them for electricity for vertical agriculture.

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

#65

Post by ChrisjayHenn »

I do think permaculture is the most advanced method of farming in that (when done right) it produces increasing yields year-over-year. If high-yield monoculture farming is an industrial approach to farming, permaculture is an information-age approach. But nobody's tried to automate the design work, and for good reason. It's not that that would be impossible - I think a sufficiently advanced sensor drone coupled with a sufficiently advanced machine learning algorithm could design a permaculture installation as well as a human. But then the question becomes, are the supply chain costs of creating the drone and the algorithm cheaper than educating the human and having them do the work, especially given the health benefits of light exercise like gardening? Nobody with the money to do it has tried that yet.

Some friends and I have been thinking that an ideal setting to advance this technology would be on a semitraditional farm, where the researchers spent a few hours a day working on the farm and a few hours thinking about how to automate their most time-consuming tasks. If we do manage that we'll be sure to put our results out there.

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

#66

Post by lambdadmitry »

subtenante wrote: post #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…

The most important fertilizer is some form of ammonia (bioavailable nitrogen) and you can't "run out" of nitrogen really, not on this planet. Energy requirements of fixing nitrogen are high, but the process is quite robust to fluctuating power supply, so you can easily use "green" energy to do this. So in the end you either let bacteria do this (e.g. in legumes' root nodules with questionable energy efficiency) or you do this on industrial scale, using solar energy to efficiently fix nitrogen and introducing it manually to the soil. It should not be a question of "what's natural" or what feels better, rather it's a question of energy efficiency and reasoning from first principles.

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

#67

Post by OliverJones »

I've a cousin who teaches large-animal veterinary medicine at Purdue. THAT's about as far away from Sili Valley as you can get while staying in the US. Build a robot to help cows give birth. I double-dare ya! :-)

She told me they're doing interesting things at their Open Ag Technology and Systems lab. https://engineering.purdue.edu/oatsgroup/ Check it out. Their contact with farmers is helping them focus on solvable and meaningful problems.

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

#68

Post by DavidWanjiru »

subtenante wrote: post #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…

Is these a way to get in touch with this person, follow their work, read their research, etc.?

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

#69

Post by Roelven »

Happy to see there is an increased interest in this topic. I've been reading a bit about hydroponics lately which was sparked by IKEA's indoor gardening product line [1].

I think there are definitely technological advancements being used to make this more accessible, although most of it seems heavily focused on hydro- or aeroponics.

While Grovegrown is a super exciting product [2] it doesn't fit the yield you are looking for.

Perhaps Farmfromabox [3] is an interesting pointer, which seems closest to what you described.

[1] http://www.ikea.com/gb/en/products/indoor-gardening/ [2] https://grovegrown.com/products/the-garden [3] http://www.farmfromabox.com

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

#70

Post by dejv »

ju-st wrote: post #61
dejv wrote: post #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 disca…

Isn't there at least some buzz around optimizing water usage? Fine grained monitoring of individual plants using cheap sensors for example.

It might be case in California: grapes are ok without any irrigation, unless you are farming in couple of really hot places, or you really want to boost your quantity instead of quality.
Post reply on HN