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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

#101

Post by inglor_cz »

freilanzer wrote: post #84
majoe wrote: post #80

Slightly related, but off-topic. It's astonishing how high-tech agriculture has become without the general public noticing much of it. I recently had a longer talk with my uncle, who is a farmer in South Germany, where he told me about the newish technology he is using: - Milking robots: the process is entirely automated, the cows basically go inside the milking stations by themselves. - His newer tractors are all dr…

> - A lot of data is collected for each cow and processed by an external company. This goes down to temperature measurements at each teat in the milking robot. The external company monitors each cow and plans individual treatment to prevent diseases and to optimize milk production. Very unfortunate for cows that they're able to produce milk for human consumption.

Now imagine how unfortunate it is to be a big, challenging game for human hunt...

Compared to aurochs, the cows are thriving.

(On a side note, I just saw a mounted skeleton of an aurochs yesterday, in the Danish National Museum in Copenhagen. That beast was huge, and it would look even more overwhelming to medieval or Iron Age people, who were on average shorter than us; I am 6 ft and that animal was as tall as me. That is probably why it was so prestigious to hunt one, I can't even imagine a close combat with that. But it was hunted to extinction.)

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

#102

Post by hamlsandwich »

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?

It's a good question. One thing I can think of is that drones can accurately use a pre-determined map of which areas need how much of an input, in a way that would be really difficult for a human on the ground to do.

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

#103

Post by eru »

mjh2539 wrote: post #100
eru wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wonder whether genetic engineering can give nitrogen fixing abilities to plants that currently lack this ability?

It's not the plants themselves that fix nitrogen but endosymbiotic microorganisms in the soil.

I know. For simplicity, I was talking about the plants in the same generic sense that your gut microbiome is a part of you, and the dead tissues that form your hair and skin are also a part of you.

You still need to hack up the eg cereal plants so they can actually engage in that symbiotic relationship (or perhaps actually directly fix nitrogen all by themselves, without any outside help at all).

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

#104

Post by camillomiller »

Most of these high tech drones are from DJI (check out the Agra lineup). You know who has great use for that? US farmers. Instead they get an all-out ban on DJI and they’re stuck with provider-locked John Deere tractors.

I really don’t understand how easy it can be to fool the American public just by saying “national security”, even when it’s clear that large parts of the public will not be best served by Washington’s “China bad!!!” policies.

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

#105

Post by pbmonster »

ensocode wrote: post #83
stoneman24 wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In a recent episode of Countryfile [1](popular UK BBC1 program on the country and farming) the resident farmer was mentioning both crop rotation and the issue of black grass invading his wheat fields. The black grass was slowly out competing his cash crop and would difficult to remove (perhaps taking the entire field out of any production for a year or the use of chemicals). Having a horde of little robots might grea…

I am searching for solutions in this field. Do you have any links to any consumer hardware for this. like drones which can cut down small invasive plants which were selected by AI?

Have you looked at laser weeding? A camera looks at the plants, an ML model identifies which plants are crop and which are weeds, and then a laser burns the weeds just enough so they die from water loss.

Research: https://ethz.ch/en/industry/industry/news/data/2022/03/laser...

Commercial product (first one I found, there are countless others): https://carbonrobotics.com/

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

#106

Post by zeegroen »

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…

This already exists! There's a company called Carbon Robotics that has a prototype of a robot that eliminates individual weeds with a lazer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_2s-0wgQWXM

I'm also looking forward to this technology being widely available and helping solve the issue of herbicide run-off, and later additionally the same for pesticides and fertilization.

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

#107

Post by lucioperca »

universa1 wrote: post #56
bfdm wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Directly, as a substitute for more labour intensive sources like manure, compost or crop rotation. Indirectly by increasing yield per acre per day.

But in the end you have to replace at least some of the nitrogen (and other nutrients) you are taking from the field in some way. And without a major shift in consumption patterns (less meat) this will mean fertilizer, as the alternatives usually lead to a much lower yield.

Nitrogen can also be replenished by crop rotation. Legumes will naturally add nitrogen back.

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

#108

Post by dayjaby »

fragmede wrote: post #74
dmurray wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The military doesn't rely heavily on skills developed by hobbyists. In the vast majority of cases, you learn to shoot a rifle or drive a tracked vehicle or weld a nuclear reactor at the military's expense, after enlisting, even though you could have learnt those skills as a hobbyist. This isn't 15th century England where every man was required to keep a longbow and cricket was banned because it distracted from archer…

Just because you can learn to fly a drone at 18 after enlisting doesn't mean you wouldn't have more skilled populace to draw from if kids started flying drones at 12, every high school had a drone racing team, and there was a competitive sport at the level of the Superbowl. It's not the 15th century, it's 2024. Even if you don't want to call it world war III just yet, there's hot conflict in two regions and cold conf…

Conflict in two regions? You live in a dream world.

More like 100: https://geneva-academy.ch/galleries/today-s-armed-conflicts

I'd recommend not to rely on media for the topic "war" but to educate yourself. Otherwise you end up quickly in a war yourself:

> Naturally the common people don't want war . . . but after all it is the leaders of a country who determine policy, and it is always a simple matter to drag the people along, whether it is a democracy, or a fascist dictatorship, or parliament or a communist dictatorship

H. Göring

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

#109

Post by pbmonster »

eru wrote: post #93
jon_richards wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was very disappointed on my last trip to Iowa to see that most farmers weren't even bothering with cover crops.

I wonder whether genetic engineering can give nitrogen fixing abilities to plants that currently lack this ability?

You could do that, the problem is the same as in making nitrogen fertilizer in a chemical plant: energy cost. It just takes so much energy to break the nitrogen tripple bond.

Even if you made a plant that fixes nitrogen extremely efficiently, every joule of sunlight it pumps into the ground is not available as calories you harvest. And fixing nitrogen will take an amount of energy per acre on the order of what you harvested from that acre in a year.

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

#110

Post by pbmonster »

langsoul-com wrote: post #85

I wonder if drones will change the placement of farms. Right now, farms are very wide and flat, this makes it easier for tractors and spraying pesticides. Would be interesting to see overtime.

Even if you can do all other crop tending from the air, in the end you'll still need the tractor to harvest, pulling a heavier trailer than all crop tending jobs would have required.

So I think flat, reasonably level fields will stay with us for some time.

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