Halter.co.nz has built smart collars for grazing animals that record their data and also automatically move them. Really ambitious project that will change grass based (healthy meat) farming if they nail it.
Ask HN: Agriculture startups doing interesting work?
101–110 of 205 posts
Re: Ask HN: Agriculture startups doing interesting work?
#102http://growbot.online (GrowPotBot) YC W2018 is an open source positronic (AI) aeroponic residential and lightweight industrial gardening appliance. the tech stack fits into multiple platforms, we spent the last few years in China and Malaysia understanding value engineering, manufacturing logistics. we're hoping to ship in major retailers starting in 2020 with an incredibly low we're hoping to make them so cheap we c…
Sounds like a very promising venture. I like that you're willing to share the data and are offering an intelligence unit. Have you thought of implementing experimental designs at scale? like you're intelligence unit could organize large scale controlled experiments on possible improvements in technique/process/genetics with willing participants. Since all the systems are controlled, closed loop, and use the same equi…
Thanks @thatcat .. I need to credit micckey at Post Scarcity Robotics for the inspiration to collaborate, that's been my primary driver the last few months to find other people who are like minded and work with them.
https://github.com/limikael/ideas/blob/master/PostScarcityRo...
My primary focus is on the scale, implementing something that is both safe, easy to operate (idiot proof) and environmentally friendly (negative carbon footprint).
My goal is to be able to self realize an economy of scale as it pertains to my own AI/IA interests. Robotic assembly, etc. but not necessarily bringing it to foxconn -- at the same time secure enough that if you want to run it over tor and grow psychadelic cactus in the desert you can do that too -- although it will require loading your own custom software.
I'm a 3rd generation farming family (in general ornamental agriculture) and I've been designing these systems myself for years. I expect humans to screw up this planet in the next 10-20 years and so these are what we'll need to survive in our bunkers; I don't want any shitty drm or anything.
The AI is also a bit complex; but the goal is to allow the units to work together in a quorum for fault tolerance. I literally expect these devices to keep people alive, and hopefully eliminate food deserts at the same time.
Re: Ask HN: Agriculture startups doing interesting work?
#103I am the founder of Optimal: http://optimal.ag . We are a team of engineers and scientists from DeepMind, Palantir, Oxford and MIT. Our mission is to grow safer, healthier food by deploying fully autonomous greenhouses outside every city on earth. We are backed by leading deep technology funds, including Founders Fund. We believe that high-tech greenhouses will be an important part of our agricultural future, for imp…
> Our mission is to grow safer, healthier food by deploying fully autonomous greenhouses outside every city on earth. How exactly is food grown from autonomous greenhouses than traditional greenhouses safer and healthier? Or, alternatively, how is it safer and healthier if it is grown right outside of the cities in which in supply?
Presumably the health/safety improvement in high-tech greenhouses is that you can eliminate the need for pesticides and herbicides.
Re: Ask HN: Agriculture startups doing interesting work?
#104WaterBit — https://Waterbit.com — real hardware deployed on real farms.
Re: Ask HN: Agriculture startups doing interesting work?
#105http://growbot.online (GrowPotBot) YC W2018 is an open source positronic (AI) aeroponic residential and lightweight industrial gardening appliance. the tech stack fits into multiple platforms, we spent the last few years in China and Malaysia understanding value engineering, manufacturing logistics. we're hoping to ship in major retailers starting in 2020 with an incredibly low we're hoping to make them so cheap we c…
> before climate change really kicks into full gear and destroys outdoor gardens
Not sure what the case will be that you can sustain yourself on your apartment tomato while outdoors is Armageddon. Nice! Good luck with your marketing strategy!
Re: Ask HN: Agriculture startups doing interesting work?
#106Halter.co.nz has built smart collars for grazing animals that record their data and also automatically move them. Really ambitious project that will change grass based (healthy meat) farming if they nail it.
Others have sold "smart collars" for years.
Compared to a Lely robotic milking system [2], which uses "smart collars" to identify the cows, that's primitive.
[1] https://modernfarmer.com/2016/01/wearable-devices-livestock/
Re: Ask HN: Agriculture startups doing interesting work?
#107I am the founder of Optimal: http://optimal.ag . We are a team of engineers and scientists from DeepMind, Palantir, Oxford and MIT. Our mission is to grow safer, healthier food by deploying fully autonomous greenhouses outside every city on earth. We are backed by leading deep technology funds, including Founders Fund. We believe that high-tech greenhouses will be an important part of our agricultural future, for imp…
> Our mission is to grow safer, healthier food by deploying fully autonomous greenhouses outside every city on earth. How exactly is food grown from autonomous greenhouses than traditional greenhouses safer and healthier? Or, alternatively, how is it safer and healthier if it is grown right outside of the cities in which in supply?
Controlled environment means pest and weed management is easier with fewer or no chemical agents.
Closer to end user means less plant engineering for transport and storage which is correlated with worse nutrition (or just less variety)
Re: Ask HN: Agriculture startups doing interesting work?
#108I am the founder of Optimal: http://optimal.ag . We are a team of engineers and scientists from DeepMind, Palantir, Oxford and MIT. Our mission is to grow safer, healthier food by deploying fully autonomous greenhouses outside every city on earth. We are backed by leading deep technology funds, including Founders Fund. We believe that high-tech greenhouses will be an important part of our agricultural future, for imp…
I spent a bunch of time modelling out the unit economics for autonomous greenhouses and struggled to find any combination of technologies that could even come close to competing with the current costs of field agriculture, including labor. Do you folks need something key to change in the competitive landscape (like climate change or very different immigration laws in the US) to become profitable? See https://www.eate…
Did you model the cost of transportation and logistics to grow things in the opposite hemisphere out of the local growing season or months of cold storage?
Re: Ask HN: Agriculture startups doing interesting work?
#109I'm an application developer at Semios (Vancouver, BC). Semios has one of the largest IoT networks in agriculture to gather and analyze data to help farmers drive data-driven solutions. The network collects micro-climate data to predict disease and pest risk, alert growers of risks in real-time, and help improve water efficiency. We have a complex stack composed of hardware, embedded, applications, data engineers and…
and we're hiring! https://semios.com/jobs/
Interested to know more about the data science infrastructure. Is there someone you could connect me with?
Re: Ask HN: Agriculture startups doing interesting work?
#110Agriculture is the single most destructive human activity. It is the primary cause of the extraordinary biodiversity loss we had the last 80 years.
We lost half of all life in numbers https://www.cbc.ca/radio/quirks/oct-19-2019-understanding-th..., agriculture is the primary cause of that.
Look with your own eyes what is left only 150 years after we arrived in Western Australia, https://earth.google.com/web/@-33.86075979,117.66498741,330.... and most of that happened in the last 50 years.
So anything we can do to increase yield, and restoring current agricultural land to original habitat, as far as that is possible, is a very worthy cause.