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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

#171

Post by themaninthedark »

greenie_beans wrote: post #167
crubier wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Oh yes, taking agriculture back to where it was 2 centuries ago, when there definitely weren't any famines at all.

counterpoint: like the great chinese famine, when the government forced the country from an agrarian economy to an industrialized economy, and they fucked up the local food systems.

The same thing happened when the Soviet government forced the country from an agrarian economy to an industrialized one.

A lot of people have drawn inferences that it may have been the government, their leadership and application of ideology rather then the shift from agrarian economy.

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

#172

Post by gumby »

avdlinde wrote: post #73
tda wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

How about harvest? Machines are quite specialized, how do you see that working out?

That’s a failure of imagination. Hordes of people used to do all the work, and Industrial Age engineering (thinking) replaced them with a combination of large, specialized devices and large, specialized farm layouts. It was more efficient for the technology of the time.

But we don’t build computing like that any more. Instead of large centralized single devices we use a large amount of protean hardware with various adapts (software).

Hordes of small devices can flood through the fields, using sensors to decide at any point what to do, and can use different effectors for different tasks at different times of the year, like the humans used to do.

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

#173

Post by gumby »

seanmcdirmid wrote: post #79
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…

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.

Non-subsistence farming is basically all cap ex at this point. Farmers have Ag Ec degrees and think about cap ex first. With the price of energy on a secular decline, imagine a world with ubiquitous renewables. The robots can go to a charge point and recharge themselves.

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

#174

Post by greenie_beans »

themaninthedark wrote: post #171
greenie_beans wrote: post #167

Earlier quoted context omitted.

counterpoint: like the great chinese famine, when the government forced the country from an agrarian economy to an industrialized economy, and they fucked up the local food systems.

The same thing happened when the Soviet government forced the country from an agrarian economy to an industrialized one. A lot of people have drawn inferences that it may have been the government, their leadership and application of ideology rather then the shift from agrarian economy.

seems to me that taking farmers away from their land will make people starve.

similar to how in the american south in the 20th century, sharecroppers were forced to work on commodity farms and didn't grow food. instead, they imported processed corn from the midwest that gave them pellagra. thanks in part to market forces of the midwest corn trade.

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

#175

Post by einarfd »

ClumsyPilot wrote: post #131
wrp wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

A you imagine the aftermath of a deer getting ‘harvested’ by the combine? Can you imagine being I the cabin and witnessing that, how it probably sounds in the process? Then cleaning up the mess and repairing the damage?

I grew up on a farm in the nineties, and in my teens, I saw a roe deer fawn that went through a forage harvester.

Surprisingly enough, there was almost no blood, but every bone in the animal was broken. The load of silage that it ended up in had to be thrown out, the forage harvester itself, needed some light repairs, the harvest got delayed a few hours, and the whole thing was really depressing.

Luckily as far as I can remember it happened only once, and it was definitely something that we tried hard to avoid.

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

#176

Post by tomhoward »

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…

In case anyone’s reading this who is interested in working on it:

I’m building a company/platform that does a lot of this, particularly the “metering just the right amount of water for each individual plant” part.

The thing I have in mind is very low cost devices (sub-$20) with mesh radio comms, inputs to read from sensors and outputs to control irrigation, and TinyML running the devices to optimize everything in real time.

I have about 10 years experience working in the field (mostly with high-value crops like wine grapes, nuts, avocados) and several iterations of prototype devices and web software, but am keen to attract people who are excited at the idea of working on this kind of thing.

Anyone - particularly low-level programmers or hardware engineers - interested in working on it can contact me (email in bio).

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

#178

Post by WillAdams »

tomhoward wrote: post #176
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…

In case anyone’s reading this who is interested in working on it: I’m building a company/platform that does a lot of this, particularly the “metering just the right amount of water for each individual plant” part. The thing I have in mind is very low cost devices (sub-$20) with mesh radio comms, inputs to read from sensors and outputs to control irrigation, and TinyML running the devices to optimize everything in rea…

The Open Source Ecology folks have been working on this sort of thing for a while --- check in with them?

https://www.opensourceecology.org/

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

#179

Post by hnmullany »

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.

N-fixation does happen in the soil, but legumes have root nodules that host rhizobium bacteria and can assimilate the N much more easily

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

#180

Post by schaefer »

tomhoward wrote: post #176
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…

In case anyone’s reading this who is interested in working on it: I’m building a company/platform that does a lot of this, particularly the “metering just the right amount of water for each individual plant” part. The thing I have in mind is very low cost devices (sub-$20) with mesh radio comms, inputs to read from sensors and outputs to control irrigation, and TinyML running the devices to optimize everything in rea…

If you use an Olla, the plants self regulate their water intake.

See the book gardening with less water by David A. Bainbridge

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