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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

#211

Post by randomdata »

gumby wrote: post #170
greenie_beans wrote: post #160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

wouldn't a monoculture help the robots, too?

But it doesn’t help us, and the robots are for our benefit. Make the robots go the the extra effort.

Contrary to bizzarre claims made earlier, robots don't actually work for free. In fact, they are more staunch about getting paid than humans are. They will stop working as soon as you stop paying them. Humans, on the other hand, will usually keep working for a while until they finally give in to the realization that you aren't going to pay up.

As a result, we're still going to optimize for the most productive use of robots, just as we do for humans.

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

#212

Post by tntxtnt »

IG_Semmelweiss wrote: post #148
Cthulhu_ wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I dont farm rice > I know rice is traditionally grown on flooded plains but that seems very risky A recurring HN trope is people who don't know about a subject feel like they have to have an opinion on it anyway. Why do you believe it's very risky / in the hands of nature? Flooded plains (aka rice paddies) have been used for thousands of years; rice is a semiaquatic plant so it needs to be submerged, and paddies ar…

History is also replete with droughts that killed millions of people We are in 2025. We have plastics. Anyway thats nit my question. My question was simple: how is is that continued, ongoing drone expense -into perpetutity- was cheaper than a one-time investment in irrigation system which can be used for water, pesticide, and even fertilizer?

Irrigation pipes have tiny holes which can be blocked by calcium deposit in hard water. You'll need filters, a lot of filters in order to operate them, and the filters needd to change for like every year or so, so it's not a one-time investment.

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

#213

Post by gnuser »

gumby wrote: post #209
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…

$20 is a lot (I assume that’s the customer price buying them in volume). You have to save a lot of water / increase yield enough to justify that. That suggests a BOM well under a buck, probably less than $0.50. 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.

When you think about it, farming is the perfect physical application of scaling.

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

#214

Post by gumby »

m2f2 wrote: post #186
gumby wrote: post #172

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

I didn’t mean that — I agree that would be absurd!

I mean an autonomous device that picks a row, then does the same on the next row on the way back, then maybe unloads into a hopper and continues with the next couple of rows. And you don’t one, you have 50 or a couple of hundred of them rather than one huge combine harvester.

And if you have 50 of these platforms designed to go up and down the rows they could have been doing the planting at the beginning of the season (or desuckering your vines in spring or whatever) using a different tool, so your capex isn’t tied up in a few huge single-application devices, but amortized over a whole season. And when you have a fleet, if one fails and needs maintenance it’s no more of a big deal than when one server in a datacenter fails.

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

#215

Post by sandworm101 »

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…

>> 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.

Not even close. The sorts of critters and diseases that pesticides combat cannot be mitigated by plucking things off plants, nor can nitrogen fertilizer be replaced with elbow grease. Identifying and removing (burning) infected plants would help, but only if each plants was isolated from its neighbors, otherwise you are just back to burning fields once infection is detected. Growing each potato inside its own little box cannot scale.

For many farmers the "right amount of water" ends up being however much is available. Crop fields are not home gardens. The amounts of water needed are measured in acre-feet. Metering it out to each corn stalk individually would certainly help, but likely fails the cost/benefit analyses at scale. A corn field has roughly 50,000 plants per acre, and commercial farm several hundred acres. That will be a heck of a lot of plastic tubing to install/maintain.

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

#216

Post by _DeadFred_ »

I have a friend that owns a huge forrest. Currently seedlings come from human harvesters who go into the forest and gather cones. This doesn't necessarily represent the best candidates, but 'good' candidates that people could get to. A drone that could gather cones from any tree would add to the diversity of future forests and allow better choice candidates to be selected.

Keeping ahead of beatles is a big thing for him. Better aerial detection would be good. Currently he misses stands that could have been managed better earlier.

Documenting and automating what current forresters would be huge because their kids aren't interested and aren't spending the time to learn and will be managing things much more like a farm than a healthy forest if they manage at all (most likely they will just harvest it all and then sell the land).

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

#217

Post by InSteady »

ahartmetz wrote: post #123
seanmcdirmid wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Vertical farming is complete bullshit for most plants. I don't know why people keep talking about it. 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 starvi…

It's weird, vertical farming has gotten so much hype but really only makes sense for luxury products like microgreens, and still only makes sense if you specifically want to grow them in an expensive, dense city. Even things like mature lettuces, tomatoes, and strawberries have been tried extensively and simply don't make economic sense to grow indoors in stacks the vast majority of cases.

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

#218

Post by gumby »

algoatecorn wrote: post #198
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

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.

Yes, the GP’s reasoning is faulty (actually, “imperfect” would be a better term), but things aren’t as clear as you put it either.

Homogeneity helps with trading commodities, no question. And commodities reduce risk by allowing a very wide fan out on both sides of a two sided market…which has advantages and disadvantages for all participants.

More along your argument, it also lets the farmer use capital better in the short term (you buy the equipment you need for your monocrop).

But if you have multimodal devices you have the opportunity to take advantage of more flexibility. You can do crop rotation to use less chemicals or to take advantage of trends in the commodity market. You can have a different mix of crops for the same reason (half corn, half row crops, though they re typically worth less). You have more flexibility to adapt to climate change. The commodity markets can handle all this, in fact they help enable it.

This isn’t magic wand — crop rotation doesn’t make sense if, say, you have an orchard. But mechanization also caused us to abandon growing multiple crops in the same field, which can have benefits and improve yield. It was just way too labor intensive. If we go back to individual “labor” (automated in this case) it could be worthwhile.

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

#219

Post by tomhoward »

gumby wrote: post #210
tomhoward wrote: post #188

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

In another comment I wrote that you probably need a BOM less than $0.50. At that price you don’t have a massive OS like Linux, you need something embedded that can run in a few KB. 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)

Well I already have a firmware version that can run in a few KB, which my father developed in Motorola assembly and that ran most of the soil moisture monitoring devices sold to the big-volume wine grape producers in Australia (mostly in Riverland SA supplying Treasury etc) from the late 90s till about 2010, after which newer products using Zigbee and cellular IoT took over (though we worked together on our own newer versions supporting Bluetooth LE and Cat-M1 up until his retirement a couple of years ago).

I hear you that $20 is high - but the status quo in this business now is monitoring devices that sell for AUD $600+, and with LTE-M or LoRa comms modules that cost over AUD $60 alone.

I'm forever thinking about ways you could drive the cost down further. I'd love it if there were a way to get the on-plant modules under $1. Feel free to get in touch if you want to discuss further.

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