The rise of the robot farmer • Hacker News Board

Re: The rise of the robot farmer

#151

Post by nradov » Tue, Oct 23, 2018, 2:43 AM UTC

jelliclesfarm wrote: post #146

nradov wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Vertical farming is a pipe dream for everything but specialized high-margin produce. There's just not enough space to grow staple crops in coastal cities. Those volume crops will always be grown in large open areas and then hauled in to population centers. And no, improvements in solar cell efficiency or whatever won't change that equation.

Indoor soilless farming has possibilities. Higher productivity through benign GMOs is possible. Also I like GMOs grown inside controlled indoor environment ..esp transgenic so they don’t go rogue or feral with the natural habitat and wilderness. There are uses for vertical farming. We need that too.

We don't need vertical farming. We already produce way more food than we need. Up to 40% is just wasted.

Re: The rise of the robot farmer

#152

Post by jelliclesfarm » Tue, Oct 23, 2018, 2:48 AM UTC

nradov wrote: post #150

neuromantik8086 wrote: post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> in coastal cities I've never heard this being proposed- most vertical farming startups with any true prospects tend to be just outside the cities, but substantially closer than other farms. The chief advantage in vertical farming has nothing to do with actually farming within a city and everything to do with shortening supply lines. Likewise, I've never seen any company propose that they could completely replace co…

Shortening supply lines is a rather silly goal. It doesn't really save anything.

It brings fresher produce. I guess I don’t understand your comment.

Short supply chain: If I harvest in the morning and drop produce off in the afternoon to a restaurant or sell at a farmers market.

Regular supply chain: especially with large corporate farms. Harvested and hydrocooled(in case of greens) within 90 mts. Transported to cooler. Goes to packer and wholesaler. Distributor and broker and then onto shelf space at supermarket. It’s alreadr 3-4 days old. Expensive with fossil fuel based storage. Being transported. Could go into trash as food waste if it isn’t in pristine condition. These are the costs of longer supply chain.

With tomatoes etc that can bruise when ripe, they are picked unripe and then given the ethylene treatment for ripening.its several days old and needs a lot of $$. And energy wasted.

Why would you say short supply chains don’t save anything.

Re: The rise of the robot farmer

#153

Post by abecedarius » Tue, Oct 23, 2018, 3:10 AM UTC

nradov wrote: post #95

otakucode wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not a huge amount of work, but it is a significant time investment. I'm thinking more of a nearly-sealed box that is entirely automated, a family could purchase for a couple thousand dollars, and then it produces food for a few years. It's not so much robots in the sense of things which drive around the landscape that will improve that sort of things, but the work in the 'vertical farming' market. Isolated syste…

Vertical farming is not an economical method of producing useful quantities of food. The people pursuing it appear to be motivated by utopian idealism and inaccurate cost estimates. Any future "farm in a box" is going to require about as much labor as a garden does today. Someone has to clean the filters, wipe off the mold, plug the leaks, replace the corroded parts, etc. Those activities won't be practical to automa…

A lifetime is a long time. I have no trouble believing enclosed agriculture is uneconomical now, but look at the trends: robots and AI are set for a long run of improvement, daytime electricity is likely to get much cheaper with the progress in solar power (when prices have been roughly level since 1970), people increasingly want local and fresh food without pesticides, harm to the ecosystem is an increasingly big deal, and so is variability from climate change. A couple of more speculative possibilities: median income might start going up again (it roughly doubled in 1950-1970) and nuclear power could make a comeback with the new startups tackling it, for even more abundant cheap electricity.

So how far is the tipping point for some crops, and then most?

Re: The rise of the robot farmer

#154

Post by zanny » Tue, Oct 23, 2018, 3:18 AM UTC

tomatotomato37 wrote: post #11

pwaivers wrote: post #6

> This is the one note of darkness that enters an otherwise optimistic conversation. “This technology could be used in a completely different way,” he says. “You could have entire states in America with no people in them. The potential for what we’re doing to be used in the wrong way is there.” What is inherently wrong or evil about this? If we could automate a state-size farm to feed everyone, isn't that a good thin…

There's nothing morally wrong with it, but our current government systems aren't built for a few corporate entites (because there's no way this is downscalable to small family farms) essentially owning both entire states and the majority of the nation's food production. That's one merecenary army away from corporate nation-states

So you fix the government. Fully automated farming seems an inevitability at this point, and the materials costs to build denser instead of wider will be prohibitve so long as we have perfectly arable land to throw combines at.

It sure can feel like you have to design your economy, culture, and society around an unchanging, unaffable government, but none of those are really receptive to bending around something as transient as the ruling class of a given age.

Re: The rise of the robot farmer

#155

Post by jelliclesfarm » Tue, Oct 23, 2018, 3:20 AM UTC

nradov wrote: post #151

jelliclesfarm wrote: post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Indoor soilless farming has possibilities. Higher productivity through benign GMOs is possible. Also I like GMOs grown inside controlled indoor environment ..esp transgenic so they don’t go rogue or feral with the natural habitat and wilderness. There are uses for vertical farming. We need that too.

We don't need vertical farming. We already produce way more food than we need. Up to 40% is just wasted.

We import a lot. Vertical farming will grow local food and provide food security. I think it’s valuable in any urban food system.

Re: The rise of the robot farmer

#156

Post by winningcontinue » Tue, Oct 23, 2018, 3:50 AM UTC

this doesn't sound like it's even in the technology's infancy. prototypes are being drawn up in the labs. they don't understand any drawbacks. when they eventually come up with something, inevitably it'd disappoint and fail. I can't see robots making the complex decisions of harvesting individual plants with all its variables involved, especially at the scale to not fail. This is much more than three years ago. This is a cheer leading fluff piece.

Re: The rise of the robot farmer

#157

Post by deialtrous » Tue, Oct 23, 2018, 4:14 AM UTC

thatcat wrote: post #133

deialtrous wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's simply not true. Low axle weight and low pressure both reduce soil compaction tremendously, to the point where it no longer causes any at all when you get small enough. This is easily measured. A garden tractor is 1000 pounds, even with normal turf tires you get no measurable compaction unless you are in mud. I can drive around my garden all day long and a penetrometer confirms absolutely no difference.

Exactly, compaction is the result of pressure. If you're at <~ 1000 psi and there won't be compaction on any soil type in dry conditions.

It isn't just pressure, total weight matters too. 1000 psi is WAY too high. Keeping ground pressure as low as 10 psi is generally the recommendation for heavy equipment, but a person walking might get up as high as 20 psi and doesn't cause compaction on soil with a reasonable organic matter content (5% or more I think?). Here's a good explanation: https://extension.psu.edu/avoiding-soil-compaction

Re: The rise of the robot farmer

#158

Post by sleepychu » Tue, Oct 23, 2018, 7:16 AM UTC

HeyLaughingBoy wrote: post #80

sleepychu wrote: post #41

I've been interested in setting up setting up some sort of micro farm in my flat (led based) for a few years. Anyone got some good resources for the novice micro farmer? (I like robotics/automation as well so if I could blend that in it would be cool)

Forget LEDs and just put it in a window that faces the sun.

Hah, what sun? I live in Scotland :-(

Re: The rise of the robot farmer

#159

Post by chicob » Tue, Oct 23, 2018, 8:54 AM UTC

zackmorris wrote: post #35

Now for a bit of hubris: anyone else reading this feel that building a robot that could do pest/weed control and harvesting is almost a triviality compared to say, fixing enterprise software to maximize customer purchases and ad revenue? What are we all doing? Seriously, why can't each of us take a year of our lives and automate all the most awful jobs in the world? Asking for a friend :-P

When I read articles such as this one I still see a lot of hype.

I'm not a Luddite or anything, bu I think the future of sustainable, productive agriculture lies in agronomic science, not laser-robot overlords or the next OGM fad.

If driving a car is less demanding than driving a tractor, let alone a tractor coupled with equipment, since we're still some years away from generalized self-driven cars, what can we say about farming in general?

There's a lot of work to be done that would make agriculture sky-rocket in terms of efficiency and environment protection.

The last great changes in agriculture have been to lock away the farmer from the equipment, managing software, and crops they use, and to make it easier for large companies to guarantee sales and futures markets to gamble on predicted yields.

In the past, the food industry was in between farmers and consumers. Now it seems independent farmers are the middle man corporations want to remove: an annoying part of the chain of production.

So this has nothing to with technological advances, but in feeding the hype that everything can be automated with ease. This is a publicity stunt for the zeitgeist of the AI dream.

And, by the way, pest and weed control is not a triviality. Not if you want to do it right. Automation is not the mere substitution of humans: it's also the adaptation of the chain of value so that it can be automated. It always comes with a cost that is sometimes underestimated.

Re: The rise of the robot farmer

#160

Post by rorykoehler » Tue, Oct 23, 2018, 9:11 AM UTC

joe_the_user wrote: post #33

tda wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

managing giant monocultures with a few giant machines (that may or may not be human controlled) is not what this article is about; it is about the huge potential that smallish robots have for farming. More diverse crops, less pesticides, less damage to soil, less energy use, mixed instead of mono cultures. Really exciting if this takes off, such a win for the environment, the landscape, and ultimately for everyone of…

Sure, this might allow family farms to expand but it could also monoculture operations to diversify and become efficient through decreased pesticide and water use.

The biggest efficiency gains would be from not being a mono-culture.