201–210 of 279 posts
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That's false. Homogeneity makes it easier to harvest, process, and store crops. It also drives perfect competition which brings cost down on the commodity market.
Harvesting, processing, and storing, are human labor.
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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…
Local, small-scale food production used to be the only way food was produced - people didn't eat better then, and there were many, many fewer people to feed. There's huge variability in what can be grown where, especially if you want to reduce the amount and number of inputs that are imported from further afield. There are places that can support all the crops and livestock that provide a healthy, balanced, and susta…
If you want to see less fertile land covered up make it easier for people to make money growing on their own land.
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’…
The majority of the public do not own or fly drones. The government has bigger concerns than a few people getting burnt on their DJI purchase.
Disposable drones are the future of warfare. Would you really want to subsidize China's ability to develop and manufacture them? While also letting China collect data from drones flying over your country? Better to rip that bandaid off sooner rather than later imo.
The notion that robots and drones will eliminate monocultures and chemical inputs is wildly untrue. In some minor cases they will reduce the need.
It amazes me that software engineers think they have the panacea for whatever faults they see in our food system without a full understanding and history of it.
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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…
This sounds like the optimum use case for LoRa, doesn't it?
For the use case invoked in this subthread (an individual monitoring device on each plant), I don’t think it’s the best.
We’re currently working with Nordic nRF52xx/53xx/54xx modules, which have dual ARM cores and built-in 2.4GHz radio, so, support for protocols like Bluetooth Mesh, Zibgee, Thread.
That means you can have a single module that can handle mesh comms with neighboring devices, as well as sensor reading, machine learning and output control. You wouldn’t need a separate comms module to communicate back to a base station or a high post and antenna for long-range comms. So it offers big savings on the device production side and the installation time/cost side.
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If you use an Olla, the plants self regulate their water intake. See the book gardening with less water by David A. Bainbridge
Great for backyard tomato plants, not a commercial farming option for tens of thousands of acres.
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…
Such a robot is still SF today, so deploying a frob with each seedling would be the only choice at the moment (or continue current irrigation practices). The frobs have to be cheap enough to be consumables.
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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…
The Civilian Marksmanship Program begs to differ. Congress specifically established that program because too many military recruits were showing up without knowing even the basics of safe and accurate shooting. https://www.usar.army.mil/News/News-Display/Article/1028255/...
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…
I spent some time in this sector (at one company irrigation of almonds and stone fruit, another in wine) and the margins are very tight. Fortunately the farmers have sharp pencils.
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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…
But a bunch of small devices can be managed by a huge device running Linux — maybe even something as expensive as a Raspberry Pi.
(Apart from some time trying to sell in the Ag sector I spent a lot of time on embedded devices)