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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

#181

Post by hnmullany »

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…

Biogas plants still need quite a bit of harvested biomass added tp the manure. Manure by itself has too low a Carbon/Nitrogen ratio, and without supplementation, it will over-produce Ammonia, inihibiting the anaerobic bacteria that digest the feedstock. So you have to add sileage or switchgrass.

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

#182

Post by ovi256 »

Cthulhu_ wrote: post #72
blackoil wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One reason of them being banned is they are very good and hence very popular.

The main reason is a fear - which as far as I know is unsubstantiated - that China's got backdoors in tech sold in the west. But with so many hackers and national security agencies disassembling and analyzing these things, surely they'd have found it by now? Therefore, I wouldn't be surprised if it's more about market protection. Which doesn't make much sense to me because is there a major US drone manufacturer that…

> with so many hackers and national security agencies disassembling and analyzing these things, surely they'd have found it by now

This is a common misconception. With OTA updates, the backdoor can be introduced at any time in a future software version. For example, right before an attack.

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

#183

Post by latchkey »

infecto wrote: post #151
huydotnet wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

From what I understand, it is more now that the war in Ukraine is going on...

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

#184

Post by eru »

pbmonster wrote: post #134
eru wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, only being as efficient as existing nitrogen fixing plants (or rather their microbes) would already be quite interesting. Btw, I don't think plants are close to optimal efficiency in terms of using sunlight. See eg C3 vs C4 plants.

> Well, only being as efficient as existing nitrogen fixing plants (or rather their microbes) would already be quite interesting. My point is that you can't have corn that is as nitrogen-fixing as a legume and still produce nearly as much corn - the plant (or its microbes) will need the majority of the available photosynthesis products to fix nitrogen. This directly makes the cobs smaller. > Btw, I don't think plants…

> My point is that you can't have corn that is as nitrogen-fixing as a legume and still produce nearly as much corn - the plant (or its microbes) will need the majority of the available photosynthesis products to fix nitrogen. This directly makes the cobs smaller.

I can believe that. However for people who don't want to use nitrogen fertiliser, this might still be useful.

You can see it as an alternative to clover (or manure), that happens to produce eg a bit of grain.

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

#185

Post by cagenut »

WillAdams wrote: post #178
tomhoward wrote: post #176

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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/

that website/project looks pretty dead

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

#186

Post by m2f2 »

gumby wrote: post #172
avdlinde wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 a…

You mean picking each ear/grain by a single device? rofl

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

#187

Post by joezydeco »

kccqzy wrote: post #8
IG_Semmelweiss wrote: post #3

I dont get it. I dont farm rice or have experience in vietnam in particular. Yet in my experience, pesticide etc has always been done thru the already existing irrigation system with a pump. Of course with advice from a technical person. The irrigation system requires an upfront investment of course but you are already going to irrigate the plot so this is is a no brainer. Therefore unless the rice grows without any…

I'm pretty sure the irrigation system is flooding the plot. You set up berms and then periodically flood the entire plot with water. This isn't subject to the whims of nature because the flooding is done intentionally by farmers.

Rice fields are flooded as a means of weed control, but flooded fields also generate a lot of methane. There are direct seeded crop variants coming that eliminate the need for flooding.

https://www.bayer.com/en/agriculture/rice-practices

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

#188

Post by tomhoward »

WillAdams wrote: post #178
tomhoward wrote: post #176

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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/

I’ve always been supportive of open-source and plan to make much of our tech open source [1], but I’m not seeing anything on their site that’s anything like what we’re doing (it alls seems to be large machinery, no microelectronics).

The thing about this field that I’ve learned over the decade I’ve been involved is that creating the tech is less than half the challenge; the distribution - building awareness, selling it, installing it, maintaining it - is a huge undertaking, and a lot of money needs to come from somewhere to make that viable.

[1] I’d like to have a RTOS to run on these devices that is as approachable and familiar as common Linux distros like Ubuntu, for people to install and customise themselves, with a full open source license.

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

#190

Post by retrac »

dhruvkar wrote: post #30

>> fly the drone with no physical effort and no direct exposure to pesticides—some of which have been associated with diseases of the eyes, ears, nose, throat, skin, and gastrointestinal tract. Slightly tangential, but what's the thinking here? We don't want to get it on us while spraying it, but then we'll eat it and it'll be fine?

Some pesticides are short-lasting agents, which are acutely toxic, to the target pest, and also humans. But they dissipate or break down fairly quickly. Even just pure nitrogen or carbon dioxide gas can be used for pest control, and a minute of venting makes it safe after. Come to think, fully automated warehouses handling food, could be kept under an oxygen-free atmosphere. Probably impractical but it'd substantially reduce spoilage and it'd stop any rats or cockroaches pretty quick.

(Of course, the history of pesticides is full of pesticides that don't actually dissipate, or break down, as much as claimed.)

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