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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

#241

Post by tomhoward »

fragmede wrote: post #237
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…

Can you use mesh networking? A solar panel and an Esp32, with mesh networking might be cheaper than an LTE module on each device, at the cost of needing more devices.

Yep, mesh networking is the plan:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40740278

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

#242

Post by zeekaran »

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…

I assumed vertical farming was exciting for space reasons, and maybe very little else other than someone wanting (for whatever reason) to grow things in the middle of a dense urban center.

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

#243

Post by HeyLaughingBoy »

unregistereddev wrote: post #235
HeyLaughingBoy wrote: post #230

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Row crops can be (and already are) irrigated with hoses. In dry areas of the world, drip tape is buried throughout the entire field because it allows farmers to make more efficient use of the water available to them. It does require the machinery has auto-steer (which is standard practice now anyway), because tearing up the drip tape with a planter is an expensive mistake. https://whyfarmit.com/drip-tape-irrigation/

Really? I didn't know that. Just didn't seem feasible to have irrigation lines running for that distance.

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

#244

Post by tomhoward »

kaveh_h wrote: post #238
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…

Why must the device be so cheap? Is the intent to have one serve each plant? Why can’t one serve many plants?

Yes, that’s how it’s done now, but it’s a matter of the precision vs cost tradeoff.

Right now it costs about $750-$3000 to set up each monitoring site, so growers can only afford to install a low number of devices per acre [1], thus a high number of plants per device. In that case you’re not optimizing to anywhere the specific requirements of each plant, you’re assuming (often falsely) that all the plants in that area have the same needs as the one you’re monitoring.

The lower the cost per device, the higher your resolution and precision of monitoring can be, and the more you can accurately provide for the specific needs of each plant.

[1] Very often that number is zero.

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

#245

Post by HeyLaughingBoy »

krisoft wrote: post #233
HeyLaughingBoy wrote: post #230

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

> I thought OP was talking about row crops which can't feasibly be irrigated with hoses. Are we talking about irrigation pivots[1] here? Because those are a known technology. If we are thinking about robots driving up and down the rows and watering plants from a tank, and then returning to some central location to re-fill their tank that feels like a "carrying water for elephants" situation. I suspect the logistics w…

Yeah, and I think you're right. I hadn't even given any thought to the massive weight of the water tank you'd need to do this. I was thinking of it more like a sprayer, which requires a much smaller volume to be useful.

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

#247

Post by conradolandia »

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…

This sounds beautiful. Also sounds like you have never worked a farm nor know anything practical about working fields and crops.

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

#248

Post by abdullahkhalids »

zo1 wrote: post #94
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…

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…

You are getting downvoted, but presumably, in Russia a significant amount of food is being produced in small family farms/gardens called Dacha [1], with a typical size of only 600 m^2 [4].

Since, original sources are all Russian, it's hard to fully verify via secondary sources, but there are claims that (1) as much as 77% of all vegetables and 59% of all meat [2] or (2) as much as 50% of all food [3] produced in Russia is on these farms.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dacha

[2] https://thebovine.wordpress.com/2009/08/09/in-1999-35-millio...

[3] https://mospace.umsystem.edu/xmlui/handle/10355/84725

[4] https://www.notechmagazine.com/2020/03/a-dacha-for-everyone-...

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

#249

Post by tomhoward »

HeyLaughingBoy wrote: post #245
krisoft wrote: post #233

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I thought OP was talking about row crops which can't feasibly be irrigated with hoses. Are we talking about irrigation pivots[1] here? Because those are a known technology. If we are thinking about robots driving up and down the rows and watering plants from a tank, and then returning to some central location to re-fill their tank that feels like a "carrying water for elephants" situation. I suspect the logistics w…

Yeah, and I think you're right. I hadn't even given any thought to the massive weight of the water tank you'd need to do this. I was thinking of it more like a sprayer, which requires a much smaller volume to be useful.

The other issue is the ability to respond to extreme heat quickly enough.

We work with fruit growers in South Eastern Australia where temperatures routinely hit high 30s and even low-mid 40s (°C) a few days each year.

Those growers want to see our soil moisture data readings updated every 15 minutes so they can turn the drippers on very quickly as soon as the soil starts drying out rapidly.

It would just be too slow to rely on robots driving up and down the rows in those conditions.

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

#250

Post by fragmede »

dmurray wrote: post #208
nradov wrote: post #192

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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/...

...in 1903.

While the world has changed since 1903, the point remains that having a more educated population is desirable for a country to have.
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