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Farming robot kills 100k weeds per hour with lasers

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Re: Farming robot kills 100k weeds per hour with lasers

#471

Post by annoyingnoob »

f6v wrote: post #470
annoyingnoob wrote: post #287

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Its funny, I've lived most of my life not too far from fields growing food. But when I go to the grocery store, most of the produce there is imported. In 2019, California agriculture produced about $50B in receipts, with almost $22B in exports. Our water goes with those exports too.

> Our water goes with those exports too. Now, that kind of nationalism is very uncalifornian.

Not following you. We've had drought in CA for years now. There are fights over where water goes, and a lot goes to farming. Then a bunch of those farm products are exported. Do we focus on serving the people in CA or the exports from CA when we talk about water regulation?

My original point is that even though we produce a crazy amount of farmed goods in CA, we still import things that we grow here and export. Always seems odd to me to see produce from Ecuador in the grocery store when I can buy better quality down the road from a local farm stand.

Re: Farming robot kills 100k weeds per hour with lasers

#472

Post by colinmhayes »

annoyingnoob wrote: post #471
f6v wrote: post #470

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Our water goes with those exports too. Now, that kind of nationalism is very uncalifornian.

Not following you. We've had drought in CA for years now. There are fights over where water goes, and a lot goes to farming. Then a bunch of those farm products are exported. Do we focus on serving the people in CA or the exports from CA when we talk about water regulation? My original point is that even though we produce a crazy amount of farmed goods in CA, we still import things that we grow here and export. Alway…

The Ecuadorian produce is cheaper. If you want local produce buy it from the stand. The water rights stuff is pretty messed up anyway, because the us is essentially stealing water that used to go to Mexico.

Re: Farming robot kills 100k weeds per hour with lasers

#473

Post by 99_00 »

hosh wrote: post #435
99_00 wrote: post #413

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Rather than eliminating everything but the monocrop No one is suggesting this be done. Fanatical monocropists don't exist. Your argument is based on a false dichotomy. We can make monocrop farming more efficient and environmentally friendly (eliminate pesticides) while also exploring other systems.

I am not sure how you define monocropping, and so I will write what I think it is. By “monocropping”, I am talking about planting a single cash crop on a plot of land. A farm may operate multiple crops, each on its own field. They might rotate crops with cover. Some might even interplant crops in rows, or even between plants (as cover). Each field is intended to grow and harvest a single cash crop. You don’t even wan…

When you said "Rather than eliminating everything but the monocrop" I assumed you meant society eliminating non-monocropping farming methods.

Is that what you mean or did you mean something else, like the machine could eliminate some non-monocrop plants but not others?

Re: Farming robot kills 100k weeds per hour with lasers

#474

Post by jmacd »

fortran77 wrote: post #119
jmacd wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is in no small part because of the massive subsidization of fuel for farming in most countries. Not only is the fuel for agriculture heavily discounted, but what you do pay can be written off against your revenues. Same with most fisheries. If governments want these sectors to go green, that is going to be a very big and painful band-aid to peel off.

> but what you do pay can be written off against your revenue How is that different from any other business expense in any other industry.

Operating expense is different from a capital expenditure.

Re: Farming robot kills 100k weeds per hour with lasers

#475

Post by kolbe »

jerf wrote: post #99
kolbe wrote: post #63

These AI solutions that shoot a laser at weeds or water at a squirrel seem to be pointing a straight line towards AI weaponry, which makes me a little uncomfortable.

Oh, don't worry. This is way behind AI weaponry tech. Err... that's probably not what you wanted to hear, though.

You say that, but I've seen plenty of modern war videos where US soldiers are pointing/shooting weapons manually and locating enemies only by seeing them with their eyes.

Re: Farming robot kills 100k weeds per hour with lasers

#476

Post by loonster »

motohagiography wrote: post #56

Given where ML and CV are today, I'd bet on open source models trained on weeds within 3-5 years. This company can scale, but their unit price is going to plummet. Also, it sounds like they're using cameras, where it's concievable that other future sensors could be more efficient. An iteration of this with higher resolution cameras and small flying drones seems like an intuitive next step. This is a super interesting…

Microwave powered drones. Have a mothership or tower track and send energy to the drones.

Re: Farming robot kills 100k weeds per hour with lasers

#477

Post by ceejayoz »

jerf wrote: post #86
piyh wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Farming goes from broad selection against pests with chemicals to introducing a massive selection pressure towards biological mimicry and adversarial image attacks.

I wouldn't worry about it too much, for a couple of reasons. First, the evolution of the computational model is simply faster than biological evolution. The computation model is going to be inside biological evolution's (metaphorical) OODA loop. Humans are going to be helping, too, it's not like it's just going to be up to the deep learning algorithms on their own. Second, for most weed plants, they aren't just a cou…

> Evolution is OK at adapting current things to new uses, or doing a massively-parallel search on what you can do with just a tweak to a gene, but if the task can't be done with one of those things, it just loses and the organism dies. Or, to put it another way, it's good at climbing slopes one step at a time, but if you present it with a cliff it just fails.

Not the case. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E._coli_long-term_evolution_ex... gives us a concrete example of this; the ability to metabolize citrate required two mutations, the first of which isn't useful on its own.

As long as a mutation isn't drastically harmful, it may persist in the population to be built upon later.

> It's essentially the same reason why nothing has evolved a resistance to a human gardener yanking them physically out of the ground and leaving them to die on the concrete...

They have evolved quite a few of these. Try and clear a lawn of dandelions and you'll discover they regenerate from their taproot if you leave any of it in. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vavilovian_mimicry indicates another, where false flax has evolved based on a human invention, winnowing machines, to evade them.

Rye grain evolved so effectively based on human activity that it went from weed to useful crop, even.

Re: Farming robot kills 100k weeds per hour with lasers

#478

Post by hosh »

99_00 wrote: post #473
hosh wrote: post #435

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am not sure how you define monocropping, and so I will write what I think it is. By “monocropping”, I am talking about planting a single cash crop on a plot of land. A farm may operate multiple crops, each on its own field. They might rotate crops with cover. Some might even interplant crops in rows, or even between plants (as cover). Each field is intended to grow and harvest a single cash crop. You don’t even wan…

When you said "Rather than eliminating everything but the monocrop" I assumed you meant society eliminating non-monocropping farming methods. Is that what you mean or did you mean something else, like the machine could eliminate some non-monocrop plants but not others?

Ah I see, I did not write that well. Let me see if I can rephrase that: in the practice of monocropping, we eliminate everything but the cash crop in order to optimize yield and profit. Everything that is not the cash crop is a weed.

Rather than doing that, we can use companion planting, integrated pest management (chickens, ducks, etc) on smaller fields.

Smaller fields and multi-crops don’t have the same scale as the current farming operations. But the idea here isn’t to replace a large commercial monocropping farm with another large commercial polycropping farm. Instead, we are replacing large monocropping farms with many smaller farms using these methods, and locating them to population centers.

As far as the point you brought up about society eliminating non-monocropping methods ... I don’t think there is a need to have our society use laws to force monocroppers out of business. Instead, I think it is better as a grassroot effort with people practicing this, as a sort of ecological succession —- people starting up home gardens and neighorhood farms to supplement existing food supplies, with monocropping dying on its own.

It does not even have to happen in affluent places first. There are many urban food deserts where people can only get expensive, nutritionally-poor food from convenience stores. You get some small operations there, even hybrid methods, with community involvement and it can change a neighborhood. (Examples: Urban Farming Guys out in Kansas City, and Brad Lancaster out in Tuscon, AZ)

There are plenty of commercial farmers who want to get out of the debt trap they got into with cash cropping. Some even tried their hand at organic farming ... but some will bring their big farm monocropping mindset into it and fail. I think many farmers (and not the agricorps) love working the land and feeding their society. The ones that don’t have been leaving farming for easier work.

But I do think there are things our society does to keep agricorps going. If food decentralization reaches a certain point, I think those agricorps will fight back to retain control of their markets.

Re: Farming robot kills 100k weeds per hour with lasers

#479

Post by delackner »

sprainedankles wrote: post #108
joosters wrote: post #38

"It's harder to find people to do that work every single year" Translation: The wages we pay are crap and we're not going to pay them more.

I'd push back on that a little bit. I grew up on a farm that's still operating today, and it truly is difficult to find people to work those jobs. The farm pays just as well as any other job in my rural hometown, so from my experience, it seems to be more of an issue with the work itself. The hours are longer, and work is more sporadic/seasonal. When harvest rolls around, farmers need to get the crop out of the groun…

Certainly we need a cultural shift towards honoring ALL kinds of work, but if as you said, the work is hard, sporadic, and long hours, then of course no one wants to do it if there are other options that pay the same but lack those features.

Re: Farming robot kills 100k weeds per hour with lasers

#480

Post by marcus_holmes »

hackeraccount wrote: post #209
marcus_holmes wrote: post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wonder at what point it becomes economically feasible to breed crops that are more distinguishable from weeds? After all, this is what we did with chemical weedkillers.

I wondered about the corollary - at what point does selective pressure create a weed that's indistinguishable from a crop?

well, same, do we have weeds that have evolved resistance to roundup?
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