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Open Source Farming Robot

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Re: Open Source Farming Robot

#321

Post by James_K »

quijoteuniv wrote: post #273
James_K wrote: post #199

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The negativity comes from the fact that it's obviously stupid to spend $4000 on an AI robot that waters plants on a single small plot of land. The selling point of this product is "I want fresh food but I don't want to garden" which is much better served by going to a market and buying the food from a farmer.

I would argue that negativity comes from you even if the project is not that great yet. But i see passion, openness and someone trying to tackle a very big problem. What did you do today? I tell you what I did… i have been negative with post that are negative about a project. So peace on earth and hopefully we can make together a better world.

Okay Mr. High Horse. My issue with them isn't passion, it's pride. Every other week some tech-minded person will look at something which works perfectly well and think "I know nothing about this but I'm sure it could be improved with a robot". The robot is almost always a bad idea because it doesn't take into account the actual needs and wants of the people it's being sold to, and sometimes those people are forced to use it anyway. The only reason it exists is because its creators know about technology and when all you have is a hammer your problems start to look like nails.

Re: Open Source Farming Robot

#322

Post by timeon »

redman25 wrote: post #293
torlok wrote: post #106

This is a Juicero of farming. The whole setup is easily replaced with a raised garden bed and a drip hose. Hearing about this a few years back, I was hoping it would at least do some weed control, but no.

Drip irrigation is a PIA to setup in my experience. This looks a lot easier. You have to correctly size and adjust every nozzle and need different sizes of pipe as you get further from the hose. It's more difficult than you would think. A lot of the pieces fit together by friction alone and are a pain to put together. You have to use boiling water to soften the pipes in order to connect them without breaking them. It…

Why not just bigger field instead of several raised beds and tape-irrigation connected to one pipe on the side?

Re: Open Source Farming Robot

#323

Post by James_K »

naasking wrote: post #271
James_K wrote: post #182

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They have these things called farmers' markets where you can buy fresh produce and it's much cheaper than $4000. You could probably buy fresh produce for a whole year and not have it come to that total. A year's worth of food is likely more than the robot could produce in your lifetime, so the market is a much better deal.

So in your mind, economics is the only value worth considering. So I suppose that entails that you were paid to write your reply to my comment? Why else would you bother engaging on this site if you're not getting some monetary deal out of it?

When it comes to buying things, I would say yes. I could buy an expensive robot to grow a small amount of fresh food for me, or I could buy the same fresh food for much cheaper from a farmer. The former has little appeal when the latter exists.

Re: Open Source Farming Robot

#324

Post by James_K »

hengheng wrote: post #220
James_K wrote: post #176

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Each person owning their own farm is orders of magnitude less efficient that one large farm serving many people.

Same goes for cooking your own food, doing your own laundry and picking your own clothes. Efficiency has its place in times of scarcity, but there is a cultural component on top. Part is education, part is carrying and renewing traditions, part is the ikea effect, sure. These robots will not help avoid famine, but they will help rich first world people be more cognizant of food and agriculture. Which in turn will hel…

Rich people are the healthiest in society. They eat the most fresh food already. The people eating calorie-dense industrial food are mostly too poor to afford a $4000 robot and a plot of land to put it on, especially when it produces a very small amount of fresh food.

Re: Open Source Farming Robot

#325

Post by timeon »

stevekemp wrote: post #123
Loughla wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've talked about this on this site over the years. My family is close to providing enough food on its own little farm for the whole family, all year (except dairy products and wheat products). It has taken decades. And about 15 acres. And honestly I don't know how many hours. Tens and tens of thousands. You can grow a small amount of your own food "without too much investment or work". To replace a substantial porti…

Hell I figured I eat about one onion a week, and one whole garlic bulb. I planted 75 onions and 40 garlic bulbs expecting that that would keep me going for a year. Not even close. Between some of them dying, many of them producing tiny output, and the difficulty of keeping them stored I exhausted my harvest in about four months. I have a small patch of land, 10m x 10m, and I grow potatoes, garlic, cucumbers, and simi…

> one onion a week

Interesting. Where I'm from (CEE), this would be about one onion per one or two days.

Re: Open Source Farming Robot

#326

Post by James_K »

pebm wrote: post #196
James_K wrote: post #176

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Each person owning their own farm is orders of magnitude less efficient that one large farm serving many people.

From what I recall, it depends on your definition of efficiency. Large farms are more efficient in terms of mass of produce per unit of labour but less efficient in terms of mass of produce per unit area.

But would you get those same efficiency gains with one of these robots? They seem similar to mass farms in how they are laid out, and they also are going to wast some space for the machines to move around. They would need a truly staggering amount of metal and parts compared with a mass farm, and that metal has to come from somewhere which takes up land.

Re: Open Source Farming Robot

#328

Post by nradov »

freedomben wrote: post #276
bboygravity wrote: post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And then there is burried drip irrigation...

Yes, but as GP said that doesn't scale. I live in an agriculture heavy community in the desert (mountain-west USA), and drip irrigation is only really used for small gardens and landscaping. Anyone with an acre or more of crops is not using drip. I certainly agree that drip is the ideal, and when you aren't doing drip you want to minimize the standing water on leaves, but if I were designing this project I would desi…

Drip irrigation is also used in some larger (multiple acres) commercial orchards. The lines last for several years with minimal maintenance.

Re: Open Source Farming Robot

#329

Post by nozzlegear »

antoniojtorres wrote: post #84

This worries me from a positioning standpoint. I imagine a large amount of people with a garden bed, even a large one, garden because they like it, this would get in the way of that. The device doesn’t appear like it would scale well to anything large enough, and even then it would compete with much more sophisticated solutions that do this. I feel like it’s actual market may end up being pretty narrow, not that it i…

I posted elsewhere on this story about this, but I have a flower garden I like to grow and fiddle with each year, and I'd still be interested in doing something like this Farm Bot too. I don't think I'd purchase one, I'm more interested in building one from scratch (so I appreciate that it's open source), but just seeing what kind of automated vegetable operation I can set up with a raspberry pi, a few servos and some moisture/sunlight sensors has been a project I've wanted to do for a couple summers.

Part of the draw is the potential for iterating on it, collecting whatever data might be collectable, adapting it to my environment or what I want to grow, etc. I've got a black thumb for vegetables anyway – that's why I grow flowers instead – so I really don't care if some or all them end up dying because the robot fails.

Re: Open Source Farming Robot

#330

Post by nradov »

redman25 wrote: post #293
torlok wrote: post #106

This is a Juicero of farming. The whole setup is easily replaced with a raised garden bed and a drip hose. Hearing about this a few years back, I was hoping it would at least do some weed control, but no.

Drip irrigation is a PIA to setup in my experience. This looks a lot easier. You have to correctly size and adjust every nozzle and need different sizes of pipe as you get further from the hose. It's more difficult than you would think. A lot of the pieces fit together by friction alone and are a pain to put together. You have to use boiling water to soften the pipes in order to connect them without breaking them. It…

What type of drip irrigation lines were you using? The ones I've used didn't require softening.
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