131–140 of 236 posts
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As a fellow backyard raised bed hipster, part of the point for me is going out and tending it. I struggle to see the value in this unless it’s about scaling.
Some day I hope everyone has a backyard farm to supply at least some of their food. Some of those people will need assistance to do it.
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Your argument is a strawman, this obviously isn't for commercial farming. This is for personal use for people who have a 120 sqft+ in their backyard.....
Which is why this product is named "gardenbot"?
"At home Grow food for yourself, your family, and your community by installing FarmBot on a raised bed, urban rooftop, or in a small greenhouse at home. Fully automated, hyper-local food production has never been so attainable."
This is the antithesis of commercial farming.
I don't like this. It feels way too "Juicero" to me. Too cute, to inconsequential. It feels likely one would spend more time on building and maintaining this thing than work it actually saves and a significant amount the benefit of having a garden is working it with you hands and watching that work grow in fruition.
Bots in the farm though, they are the real deal. Reducing herbicide use by 80% or more, allowing the use of non-GMO crop while maintaining strong weed control and healthy crop, treating and optimizing every individual plant in a field, all things that will happen in the next 10 years due to robotics in the farm.
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Tertill is cool and all, but for a new garden, you still have to weed until the payplants are big enough to trigger "collisions". There's no magic in sensing: It just kills new growth.
It also looks like you need to give it room to move around? Look at all that space that could be used for more veggies!
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Texas checking in -- the dirt in my backyard is full of clay and totally unsuitable for growing anything other than grass and weeds. Many places are like this.
That makes sense, and maybe I'm sweeping aside many places similar without thinking about them. In the Midwest I've always had good luck in the ground.
I've built robots. I've built greenhouses. I like software and the occasional bit of farming. Thirs looks cute and fun, and I hope they iterate, but it's not really solving the right problems, and introduces its own. 1 - there are no straight lines on a farm. Maybe in a hydro setup built on concrete slab, in which case, why robot? 2 - needs a way to cover more ground. If it's not able to travel linearly indefinitely…
As someone who went through endurance sports, being the fix-it guy, and a CS program I always sort of had one foot in both worlds and didn't really engage in this kind of rhetoric.
But as I've been accumulating more woodworking tools and getting a lot of dirt under my nails building a giant garden, I'm starting to see their point.
This device is going to gum up, being exposed to UV all day, dust, wind, and rain. The tolerances on this device are way tighter than any in situ environment is going to allow. And you're going to kneel on that track and it's gonna hurt like a motherfucker.
This will be like a pet turtle you have to keep flipping right side up, not like a roomba.
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> small hipster raised bed farming in back yard As a small hipster raised bed farmer (or rather, gardener), I actually looked into this at one point - the $1500 price tag put me off of it really quick. There's no way that kind of investment makes sense unless you're planning to sell the vegetables to recoup your investment - and it's doubtful that the machine will realistically last more than five years or so, so you…
I think you pay to get hands off garden.
I really can't see the value add from adding a CNC machine to each raised bed.