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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

#251

Post by infecto »

InSteady wrote: post #221
infecto wrote: post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Sounds like solid napkin math. It true though, you don't have that happen unless a lot more people are farming and honestly, farming is valuable but the labor is not. Its better spent else where. I absolutely believe there are massive improvements to be made but I think they will happen with technology and more automation.

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

#252

Post by int_19h »

greenie_beans wrote: post #174
themaninthedark wrote: post #171

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The same thing happened when the Soviet government forced the country from an agrarian economy to an industrialized one. A lot of people have drawn inferences that it may have been the government, their leadership and application of ideology rather then the shift from agrarian economy.

seems to me that taking farmers away from their land will make people starve. similar to how in the american south in the 20th century, sharecroppers were forced to work on commodity farms and didn't grow food. instead, they imported processed corn from the midwest that gave them pellagra. thanks in part to market forces of the midwest corn trade.

In Soviet case, the primary reason why people starved is because they have deliberately took away most of the food from the peasants to feed the cities. The cities didn't starve; the countryside did, which in turn prompted millions of peasants to move to the cities (and become industrial workers, which was the whole point).

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

#253

Post by GuardianAg »

eunos wrote: post #166
Cthulhu_ wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

It's a fear that US has no similarly competitive drone companies

Check out Guardian Ag

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

#255

Post by throwaway2037 »

gumby wrote: post #206
declan_roberts wrote: post #191

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Great for backyard tomato plants, not a commercial farming option for tens of thousands of acres.

Not the way farms are run today, sure. But if it’s worth it, farms will adapt.

It seems much more labour intensive compared to drip irrigation that essentially run long hoses in each row. Can you command on this comparison?

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

#256

Post by eru »

skybrian wrote: post #222
Nasrudith wrote: post #158

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Yes, that's true. There can be localised relative abundances of some inputs. Eg almost all of the world has an abundance of air. But submarines and space stations do not.

I guess I can rescue my statement that we don't have localised abundances of (easily) tradeable goods. And that leads to no localised abundances of all the inputs required to make a tradeable good.

To come back to the original example: flood farming would produce an abundance of agricultural outputs, and those are fairly easy to trade. Both across space and these days also across time, thanks to preservation techniques.

(Not all agricultural outputs are easy to transport or preserve, but there's probably something you can grow that is.)

I hope that in the future almost everywhere in the world will still have way too much air so that it's too cheap to measure; but thanks to global trade food prices will always be relatively flat across the globe.

So even people farming insanely productive regions will have plenty of incentives to innovate to further improve productivity.

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

#257

Post by throwaway2037 »

lucioperca wrote: post #107
universa1 wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But in the end you have to replace at least some of the nitrogen (and other nutrients) you are taking from the field in some way. And without a major shift in consumption patterns (less meat) this will mean fertilizer, as the alternatives usually lead to a much lower yield.

Nitrogen can also be replenished by crop rotation. Legumes will naturally add nitrogen back.

At the same rate as artificial nitrogen fertilizers? I doubt it. And, is the profit per hectare the same when planting legumes? Again, I doubt it.

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

#258

Post by throwaway2037 »

ClumsyPilot wrote: post #133
eru wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thanks to modern capitalism, there's no such thing as a (localised) extreme abundance. Extremely fertile land will be bid up, until it's productivity per-dollar-value will be equivalent to other land. So we will always have incentives for innovation. (I specifically say 'localised', because on a global level we are living in extreme abundance by historic standards.)

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.

    > Iceland has more geothermal power than it knows what to do with
Build more aluminum smelters and data centers!

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

#259

Post by AlotOfReading »

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…

Are you not concerned about the battery life running edge ML on these chips? I imagine battery replacement will be a large part of the TCO for farmers.

When I've done similar projects in the past, we did the edge compute on a more expensive box that could be more conveniently accessed by users. It was also the system collected and summarized data into reports, so having the data locally helped.

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

#260

Post by skybrian »

eru wrote: post #256
skybrian wrote: post #222

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Yes, that's true. There can be localised relative abundances of some inputs. Eg almost all of the world has an abundance of air. But submarines and space stations do not. I guess I can rescue my statement that we don't have localised abundances of (easily) tradeable goods. And that leads to no localised abundances of all the inputs required to make a tradeable good. To come back to the original example: flood farming…

Yes, we can see that in the American West where most water is used by agriculture. Exporting food can be seen as a more practical alternative to exporting water. When there's a drought, maybe don't export quite so much?

Water rights are complicated, so water is far from freely-traded commodity, but over time, cities do pay more, and that means they tend to get their way. There's a saying that water flows uphill towards money.

Local abundance is traditional: fruit and vegetables in season. It's still true for people with big gardens, when it's not worth their while to sell it.

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