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Agricultural drones are transforming rice farming in the Mekong River delta

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Re: Agricultural drones are transforming rice farming in the Mekong River delta

#151

Post by infecto »

huydotnet wrote: post #24
latchkey wrote: post #2

I'm back in Vietnam (Saigon) for the first time in 4 years and it has been like a time machine. Covid definitely left its mark on this country due to the severe lockdowns they went through. The most interesting change I've noticed is that nearly everyone speaks at least a little English now. Attributed to being locked inside and a lot of YouTube. It used to be difficult/expensive to get drones here, but I see DJI sto…

In Hoi An, locals are known for their English fluency since more than 10 years ago, when I came back there last year, I was blown away by so many locals speak Korean just as fluent.

Money talks. A decade ago a good portion of people could speak Russian in Da Nang because of the large number of Russian tourists that come to vacation on the beaches.

Re: Agricultural drones are transforming rice farming in the Mekong River delta

#152

Post by infecto »

blackoil wrote: post #82
morsch wrote: post #54

I can see this making sense for monitoring and observation and even for very targeted application of pesticides. But bulk application of pesticides and seed, I just can't imagine land vehicles aren't more efficient in terms of energy use and longevity. Maybe rice fields are particularly unsuited to it. But buying a drone as an investment for your children... I don't think it's gonna last that long.

Vietnam has lot of terrace farms done on side of hills. Maybe land vehicles aren't optimized for them.

Definitely not, unless you are in the highlands its all pretty flat. Most of the farming is happening in very flat land.

Re: Agricultural drones are transforming rice farming in the Mekong River delta

#153

Post by infecto »

morsch wrote: post #54

I can see this making sense for monitoring and observation and even for very targeted application of pesticides. But bulk application of pesticides and seed, I just can't imagine land vehicles aren't more efficient in terms of energy use and longevity. Maybe rice fields are particularly unsuited to it. But buying a drone as an investment for your children... I don't think it's gonna last that long.

I am not so sure about that.

A lot of the farming that is happening in Vietnam is on these smaller scale farmer levels. Drones are a harder sell in America imo because you have large multi-hundred/thousand acre farms in a country optimized for cars. In Vietnam the farmer will have a much much smaller plot of land and in the countryside often the roads will look more like sidewalks to a westerner.

I am not sure how effectively you could move tractors around in the countryside and you would be doing it often with the size of these farms.

Re: Agricultural drones are transforming rice farming in the Mekong River delta

#154

Post by FranOntanaya »

wrp wrote: post #86
majoe wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Oh, I forgot a neat one: Drones with thermal imaging to prevent fawns to be killed by tractors.

Fawns , as in female deer? Is hitting them with tractors really a problem?

I assume they don't want wild animals that are ridden with diseases to end in something like cattle feed more than unavoidable.

Re: Agricultural drones are transforming rice farming in the Mekong River delta

#155

Post by mschuster91 »

Muromec wrote: post #126
sshine wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Their instinct is to stay put, which means they don't run when the tractor comes. A drone flies over the field, maps where the fawns are staying put, sends a message to automated tractors to reroute. This is probably the most "feel good" application of drones. That and detecting landmines.

That’s exactly the opposite of what thermal drones are use most of the other time

Besides deer protection and wildlife management in general, they're used in SAR and police - especially in mountainous or forest areas, it's just soooo much faster to send a quick-response team with thermal drones than to travel by foot or wait for a chopper to show up. Obviously in rough weather you still need a legit chopper, but for stuff like "find someone who didn't return from a hike/called for an emergency without knowing where he precisely is" they're just fine.

On the infrastructure side, you can use thermal drones in construction planning to detect if/where a building is losing heat, spot (beginning) defects in industrial installations and inspect if a power line is still working acceptably. DJI also pairs the thermal camera with a decent photo camera so you don't need to send up two drones for the job.

Re: Agricultural drones are transforming rice farming in the Mekong River delta

#156

Post by infecto »

itqwertz wrote: post #36

Despite this optimism, I wonder what the tradeoffs are for the drone services. Does it actually spray pesticide as thoroughly as a worker manually applying it? Can it spread seed and fertilizer as well as someone who has tended the land for decades? Is there really a difference in quality of produce?

You are thinking way too hard about this. Vietnam is the wild west, there are some levels of cost optimization but these farmers are not usually well educated living in the poorer country side. In the country side you will just fill up your sprayer and chuck the fertilizer/pesticide packaging on the ground like your own personal landfill. Maybe you might every now and then collect some of the trash and create a fire that is no where hot enough to burn trash so it will smolder a wonderful scent for a day or so.

That guy spraying in the article is most definitely not wearing any PPE, maybe a cloth mask at best, fertilizers/pesticides have not been used in Vietnam for as long as they have in the rest of the world.

These drones are absolutely all benefits.

- No more guy inhaling chemicals all day.

- Hopefully more programmatic approach to spraying where some level of measurement is happening.

- If you have business being built around spraying, they will eventually optimize around using the right amount for their service.

Re: Agricultural drones are transforming rice farming in the Mekong River delta

#157

Post by Vox_Leone »

olex wrote: post #88
majoe wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Oh, I forgot a neat one: Drones with thermal imaging to prevent fawns to be killed by tractors.

Anecdote on this: I've been flying R/C planes and drones in some publicly accessible fields with friends for years. Some farmers were a bit confrontational when they saw us (sometimes understandably so, we were always careful but the occasional crash and aircraft retrieval in the middle of a field _did_ happen...). But a few of them were interested, and asked if we could arrange to take some pictures and videos of th…

I am putting together a computer vision dataset for detection, identification, classification and counting for cattle herds of Indian breeds, which are the strength of Brazilian livestock farming [where there are still a lot of cattle in free-range pastures]. The dataset will also be useful for monitoring illegal livestock farming in protected areas, such as the Amazon. The scarcity of images of these types of cattle on the Internet, where European varieties are prevalent, forces me to negotiate with local farmers to fly my drones in order to obtain the images. It's not an easy job. Most are confrontational and hostile. I move forward with great difficulty but I will not give up. Soon at cownt.com.br.

Edited for clarity.

Re: Agricultural drones are transforming rice farming in the Mekong River delta

#158

Post by Nasrudith »

ClumsyPilot wrote: post #133
eru wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thanks to modern capitalism, there's no such thing as a (localised) extreme abundance. Extremely fertile land will be bid up, until it's productivity per-dollar-value will be equivalent to other land. So we will always have incentives for innovation. (I specifically say 'localised', because on a global level we are living in extreme abundance by historic standards.)

This doesn’t really make sense, Local resources exist in abundance because transportation cost is not zero. Iceland has more geothermal power than it knows what to do with, north of Canada has abundance of fresh water but it’s uneconomical to move it to California, etc.

I suppose it depends on how you define 'extreme' as a matter of boring tautological semantics. If extreme is defined as 'enough that it is worth extracting to anybody who discovers it'. Sort of like how ore is defined.

Basically there being a limit to abundance before it is too extreme to exist sustainably (without being extracted). You can have Cerro de Potosi, a very silver rich mountain sustainably exist. But a mountain made of solid gold? That would be extracted from until gold devalued itself.

Re: Agricultural drones are transforming rice farming in the Mekong River delta

#159

Post by baq »

infecto wrote: post #149
Muromec wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That’s exactly the opposite of what thermal drones are use most of the other time

Is it? I believe the commercial application for drones with thermal cameras is fairly well establish at this point. You can spot a lot of things in buildings, transmission lines, etc.

The ops point is that after you spot them you call in old fashioned artillery.

Re: Agricultural drones are transforming rice farming in the Mekong River delta

#160

Post by greenie_beans »

tda wrote: post #53
gumby wrote: post #32

This is so great. My long term dream is that robotics take over farming, individually plucking each weed or weevil, and metering just the right amount of water for each individual plant, so that all the crops are organic. Most of the chemicals (yes, including nitrogen fertilizers) offset labor, so when the labor is free we shouldn’t need them. And people won’t have to spend their lives in stoop-back work or exposed t…

And more, smaller, robots vs large tractors could put an end to monocultures. Monoculture is the result of optimizing for minimal human labour, not an optimization for yields. So when labour is free, mixed fields are the way to maximize profits

wouldn't a monoculture help the robots, too?
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