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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

#221

Post by InSteady »

infecto wrote: post #150
zo1 wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

This is the typical utopian dream that is complete horse manure. We like to look back and think how quaint and healthy things were but they were not. While there are a lot of improvements to be had in our current supply chain, going back to smaller farms is not the way to get there. What you described would be more costly and I don't think there is really any relationship to health. Your food would end up being more…

I haven't crunched the math or anything, but you don't feed 8 billion people with small farms unless every 10th person is willing to go farm. Currently it's more like every 150th.

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

#222

Post by skybrian »

Nasrudith wrote: post #158
ClumsyPilot wrote: post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This doesn’t really make sense, Local resources exist in abundance because transportation cost is not zero. Iceland has more geothermal power than it knows what to do with, north of Canada has abundance of fresh water but it’s uneconomical to move it to California, etc.

I suppose it depends on how you define 'extreme' as a matter of boring tautological semantics. If extreme is defined as 'enough that it is worth extracting to anybody who discovers it'. Sort of like how ore is defined. Basically there being a limit to abundance before it is too extreme to exist sustainably (without being extracted). You can have Cerro de Potosi, a very silver rich mountain sustainably exist. But a mo…

A good way to think about this is to compare the cost of a commodity to shipping costs. Sure, pricey bottled spring water gets shipped all over the world, but bulk agricultural water (measured in acre feet) doesn't. It's heavy for what it's worth, so it's mostly transported downhill in rivers, canals, and so on, with occasional pumps.

There's no global market for water, like there is for oil and liquified natural gas, because the price of water is much lower. Instead there are regional water projects.

Even for natural gas, there aren't pipelines everywhere, and shipping natural gas (by ship) is more expensive than transporting it through pipelines.

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

#223

Post by HeyLaughingBoy »

gumby wrote: post #207
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…

I wonder if in a large farm it will be worth running hoses and deploying a frob next to each device vs having an electric robot with a refillable tank walking the rows. 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.

My gut tells me that the robot will cost less in the long run. It also doesn't seem like a hard problem (yeah, easy to say) since row crops are planted at fixed spacings and detecting that the thing next you is a plant and not a rabbit should not be a difficult task. The combination of GPS mapping (planter knows where it was during planting), known plant & row spacing, and basic visual imaging should simplify the problem.

So why isn't it done today? Probably still cheaper to rely on the weather or center pivot irrigation.

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

#224

Post by HeyLaughingBoy »

tomhoward wrote: post #219
gumby wrote: post #210

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

BLE mesh and solar power should get your BoM cost below $20, but I don't see any way that you're going to hit a sub $1 price point. Assuming your mesh can cover the entire field (reasonable if you have one monitoring point every few plants), you can have one or a small handful of LTE-M basestation points to handle the data uplinks.

It's an interesting problem and I am sure reference designs already exist. Maybe talk to someone at Nordic.

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

#225

Post by HeyLaughingBoy »

tomhoward wrote: post #205
cookiengineer wrote: post #196

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This sounds like the optimum use case for LoRa, doesn't it?

LoRa gets talked about plenty for ag monitoring, and sure it can be great for certain use cases. Optional support for LoRa is certainly something we want to support (via device variants or plug-on comms modules). 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 cor…

Ha. Didn't see this post before I responded to your other one :-)

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

#226

Post by zdp7 »

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…

What you are missing is that as it grows most of the rice is not underwater. You need pesticides to protect what's above the water. Average height is about 4 feet (1.2 meters).

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

#227

Post by tomhoward »

HeyLaughingBoy wrote: post #224
tomhoward wrote: post #219

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

BLE mesh and solar power should get your BoM cost below $20, but I don't see any way that you're going to hit a sub $1 price point. Assuming your mesh can cover the entire field (reasonable if you have one monitoring point every few plants), you can have one or a small handful of LTE-M basestation points to handle the data uplinks. It's an interesting problem and I am sure reference designs already exist. Maybe talk…

Yeah I think that's right. It's a matter of trading off the water cost savings (and produce quality/yield gains) per plant vs unit cost per device, to determine the optimal density of devices.

As I said in the previous comment, right now, high-value crop growers like wine grape growers pay $700-$1000 or more per site (including reader/comms module and sensors), and generally only install one monitoring point per block (I have a system running at one of Australia's top boutique/biodynamic wine makers and at current prices he can only cost-justify having one 10 monitoring sites over his 70 acres of vines).

So, whatever we can do to drive down the cost to $20 or less should deliver big wins.

> Maybe talk to someone at Nordic

Yep, we're working with hardware engineers who are well connected to people at Nordic.

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

#228

Post by HeyLaughingBoy »

FranOntanaya wrote: post #154
wrp wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

I assume they don't want wild animals that are ridden with diseases to end in something like cattle feed more than unavoidable.

Also, running over a fawn really bums out the person driving the tractor!

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

#229

Post by hondo77 »

HeyLaughingBoy wrote: post #223
gumby wrote: post #207

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wonder if in a large farm it will be worth running hoses and deploying a frob next to each device vs having an electric robot with a refillable tank walking the rows. 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.

My gut tells me that the robot will cost less in the long run. It also doesn't seem like a hard problem (yeah, easy to say) since row crops are planted at fixed spacings and detecting that the thing next you is a plant and not a rabbit should not be a difficult task. The combination of GPS mapping (planter knows where it was during planting), known plant & row spacing, and basic visual imaging should simplify the pro…

Scale, I imagine. Orchards are big. How many robot waterers would you need when you have to spend time at each individual tree (or groups of trees) to water it/them? How far is it to the nearest refill?

Put another way, drip is massively parallel. Robot waterers, not so much.

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

#230

Post by HeyLaughingBoy »

hondo77 wrote: post #229
HeyLaughingBoy wrote: post #223

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My gut tells me that the robot will cost less in the long run. It also doesn't seem like a hard problem (yeah, easy to say) since row crops are planted at fixed spacings and detecting that the thing next you is a plant and not a rabbit should not be a difficult task. The combination of GPS mapping (planter knows where it was during planting), known plant & row spacing, and basic visual imaging should simplify the pro…

Scale, I imagine. Orchards are big . How many robot waterers would you need when you have to spend time at each individual tree (or groups of trees) to water it/them? How far is it to the nearest refill? Put another way, drip is massively parallel. Robot waterers, not so much.

Oh, I wasn't thinking orchards. I thought OP was talking about row crops which can't feasibly be irrigated with hoses.
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