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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

#261

Post by freilanzer »

jajko wrote: post #112
freilanzer wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> - A lot of data is collected for each cow and processed by an external company. This goes down to temperature measurements at each teat in the milking robot. The external company monitors each cow and plans individual treatment to prevent diseases and to optimize milk production. Very unfortunate for cows that they're able to produce milk for human consumption.

If cows would be useless to humans, their population would be probably in hundreds/thousands globally, or we would let their whole sub-species just die. Milking is the least bad thing we do to them, I would recommend focusing more on other parts of farming/ranching if you care.

> If cows would be useless to humans, their population would be probably in hundreds/thousands globally, or we would let their whole sub-species just die.

I think the cows would prefer that.

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

#262

Post by eru »

skybrian wrote: post #260
eru wrote: post #256

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 towar…

> 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.

Yes, that was basically my point: participating in modern economies tends to smooth out local abundance. [0]

That's good overall! Less waste, more innovation. But, of course, there are certain specific things lost to be nostalgic about.

You are also right that water as an input is subject to lots and lots of distortions. And that leads to wasting of water, especially expensive in places where water is actually scarce.

> 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?

When water has a proper market clearing price, that's exactly what happens.

[0] Home production in a garden is a good example here, because it's usually not for participating in the wider market economy.

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

#264

Post by tomhoward »

AlotOfReading wrote: post #259
tomhoward wrote: post #205

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Yeah absolutely. You’d certainly need solar power on your devices, and the more data processing they’re doing the more battery and solar power you’ll need.

So you’d centralize the more intensive processing on a unit with more power, and have smaller node devices on the plants doing simpler tasks - just reading from sensors and uploading data, and/or receiving commands to switch things on/off. They’d be solar powered too but the batteries and solar panels can be smaller.

These are all the trade offs you’re constantly working with in this game.

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

#265

Post by ViktorV »

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…

Have you thought about sub Ghz mesh networking like 6lowpan with TI CC1310? If you don't need that much computing power then it's a good option, with way longer battery life.

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

#266

Post by tda »

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.

But there are also costs considered: no flexibility, thus no way to hedge risk. Think weather, plagues and diseases, funghi whatever: If you single crop is vulnerable, now all of it is affected. The use of pesticides and fertiliser is also not free, and monocultures need a lot more of that. Furthermore the giant tractors needed for monoculture tend to damage the soil they drive on, and require the ground water table to be fairly low.

Certainly the logistical challenge of multiple small harvests of varying products is there, but this is definitely more manageable with robots and computers than without.

And for a small close to population centers, if they can supply multiple kinds of produce reliably, they might be able to make orders of magnitude more money on the local market than on the commodities market.

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

#267

Post by dukeyukey »

algoatecorn wrote: post #195
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…

We're not moving away from nitrogen fertilizers. Ever. Why? Look at the following three graphs: global population, staple crop yield, and nitrogen fertilizer application. Now overlay them. That's why. Also, there are myriad chemical inputs that cannot be removed simply due to free labor. Sure, a robot can pluck weeds, but what about fungal and bacterial diseases?

There are absolutely automated systems out there to handle recognition and application of whatever fertiliser/fungicide is needed. Not cheap of course, but prices will come down.

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

#268

Post by skybrian »

eru wrote: post #262
skybrian wrote: post #260

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 towar…

> 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. Yes, that was basically my point: participating in modern economies tends to smooth out local abundance. [0] That's good overall! Less waste, more innovation. But, of course, there are certain specific things lost to be nostalgic about. You are also right that wate…

Yes, agreed. To continue, though, I think it's not just nostalgia; people who benefit from local abundance can lose something from more efficiency.

AirBnB is another example. There are benefits to living in a desirable location and they're often free for the residents. If the neighbors are, effectively, selling off those amenities, it benefits them and their customers, but not you. And that's why some communities place restrictions.

I believe the Coase theorem suggests that paying off the neighbors would be somehow efficient, if a deal can be reached. It can be difficult to agree on a price, though.

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

#269

Post by tomhoward »

ViktorV wrote: post #265
tomhoward wrote: post #205

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Have you thought about sub Ghz mesh networking like 6lowpan with TI CC1310? If you don't need that much computing power then it's a good option, with way longer battery life.

Looks cool but I'm not sure how current those TI CC1310 devices are. I can see product release pages going back to 2015. Do you know anything about future support/availability for this model, or any newer models?

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

#270

Post by greenie_beans »

int_19h wrote: post #252
greenie_beans wrote: post #174

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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).

taking control away from their land is very similar to "taking farmers away from their land". parallels with sharecropping in the US
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