121–130 of 279 posts
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?
If you are interesting in planning agriculture, with or without drones, you can help us by filling out our survey:
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…
Robot labor isn’t free. You pay in capital costs, energy costs to run them, and ongoing maintenance costs if you use them a lot. Environmentally, these costs might be more or less than the chemicals they replace, but it isn’t am obvious comparison. Changing farming methods along with automation might work better, like vertical farming techniques.
Plant growth is (for most plants) limited by available energy, which comes in the form of sunlight. Sunlight is extremely bright compared to artificial light sources and extremely cheap, i.e. free. Replacing it makes no economic sense in most situations.
If we talk about producing a lot of calories to feed the starving, even most reservations go out of the window, because staple crops are staples because they are very efficient at turning sunlight into chemical energy and they need all the sunlight they can get.
In the article they didn't write about side effect but In Turkey My relatives also using drones for rice farming. And trees are dying since they need to fly drones higher then trees. Birds are dying as well. Previously I remember there were so many birds but now there is none. I also remember there were frogs, snakes etc. and now there is none.
I doubt that it's drones causing those issues. More likely it's the poor environmental practices carried out in Turkey. Turkey is a truly beautiful country, but most of the natural beauty is falling to disuse as the government prioritizes other industry, of course with a massive dollop of corruption on the side.
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…
I disagree. I think we should have more human labor take over farming but on an individual level that's working much much closer to the consumption source. Think having your own farmer and food-producer in your own house or property, or perhaps shared with your small flock of neighbors. Way too-many of the problems plaguing society atm can be solved by reducing transport and eliminating all the huge intermediate step…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Fawns as in "deer children". When young, they lie down in fields a lot, and don't have the flight instict developed yet, so if they're in the field with the "parent" deer out getting food and the tractors / harvesters come by, it can be legitimately dangerous.
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.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
How about harvest? Machines are quite specialized, how do you see that working out?
Bigger farms overall, which is anyway the trend so they utilize economies of scale. Or machine rentals if there is plenty of need from smaller farmers.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 ha…
Btw, I don't think plants are close to optimal efficiency in terms of using sunlight. See eg C3 vs C4 plants.
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 just can't imagine land vehicles aren't more efficient Farming drones aren’t all airborne. I guess the ones driving around on the ground might be called robots though? At least in English. I imagine that the main reason these ones fly is because you can’t drive around a rice field as you mention. Here in Denmark though most drone tech aimed at farming drives around. Flying drones are mostly used for surveillance,…
As far as the etymology goes, back in the days a drone was a male bee, so by default airborne. You can trace that meaning back two thousand years or so. It was first used to mean remote controlled aircraft in 1946.
Of course, languages evolve and now it can mean any untethered robot; air, land or sea.
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…
I disagree. I think we should have more human labor take over farming but on an individual level that's working much much closer to the consumption source. Think having your own farmer and food-producer in your own house or property, or perhaps shared with your small flock of neighbors. Way too-many of the problems plaguing society atm can be solved by reducing transport and eliminating all the huge intermediate step…
Impossible. The world is too urbanized, there simply is no space to do this for more than a few % of the population.
> Way too-many of the problems plaguing society atm can be solved by reducing transport and eliminating all the huge intermediate steps [...]
Maybe some problems can be solved, many more will be unsolved. Reducing our transport capacity of food increases the vulnerability to crop failures. De-centralizing processing will make it harder (read: more expensive) to test for pathogens, nutrients and ensure hygiene.
> we'll be be contributing less to AGI/automation and creating actual valuable jobs
No, we would be shrinking the GDP by moving labour from highly productive sectors into agriculture. At the same time food will become much more expensive, even more so if those new employees are paid minimum wage.
> and eliminating all the huge intermediate steps between our food (other other food-related products) and ourselves
How? You're simply replacing one set of steps for another, more labor-intensive one. I encourage you to visit one of those museums where people demonstrate how people in the 18th century lived for some perspective.
> we'll be reducing the amount of plastic, fuel and electricity used for transport, storage, processing, packaging,
You didn't quite state the full conditions to achieve this reduction, so I'll do it for you. Basically we have to completely change our diets. Fresh food can only be eaten in season, and only what is locally available. We can only store food that does not need climate control to keep, so in winter there are only conserved vegetables and fruits. Not using any modern packaging and storage methods means that even in season things have to be eaten really quickly.
On the whole, your insinuation that our food distribution is some kind of unnecessary luxury that we can do away with just rubs me the wrong way. It is the reason the amount of people in famine has been dropping every decade despite a population explosion. It ensures that there are no mass-scale outbreaks of botulism, moulds and other pathogens that used to kill lots of people and waste huge quantities of food. Its efficiency (along with high productivity) guarantees that almost everyone can afford to eat sufficient nutrients even through winter.
Sure we could get some of those benefits in your agrarian fantasy, but the cost would be enormous.