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Open Source Farming Robot
51–60 of 369 posts
Re: Open Source Farming Robot
#52Earlier quoted context omitted.
> We live in the southeast US now, the climate is helpful for farming. I lived in Seattle for a few years and that climate would have been much harder to work with. Because of (a lack of) winter sunlight? Or something else?
A combination of a shorter growing season and less rainfall. Seattle has an interesting rap for being extremely rainy, but their average rainfall is around 38 inches while I get around 60 inches per year here. We've had cattle on the land with us for the last two years, and though we have had to buy in hay its has been to supplement for 2-3 months rather than 5-6 months. We actually have the pasture space to grow and…
Also in the southeast, and it should be pretty easy to find someone to come and bail your hay for you and take a percentage of the hay for themselves. I believe we do 9 acres, and get two harvests. After splitting it with the bailer that's still enough to feed about 25 head of cattle through the year. Though we do supplement with some feed for nutrition reasons. (Our Nutrition, not the cows, we eat them). Late in season the bailers will also typically bring us free hay too because they will cut some fields and have extra. You would still likely need a tractor to move the hay though but you might could figure something out with a trailer. Look for the market bulletin in your area if you haven't already subscribed.
Re: Open Source Farming Robot
#53Cool project, but $2800 for the basic kit is a lot to stomach given how many things can go wrong with robotics.
My first thought was exactly this. How reliable can it be to run autonomously and how long before parts start breaking down.
On the other hand this is cheaper than apple vision pro.
Re: Open Source Farming Robot
#54How many Farmbots would I need to feed 2 adults and 2 children year round? What challenges might I run into? Edit: Found a link to yield analysis https://farm.bot/pages/yield It appears the answer is however many Farmbots cover 549 square meters
At about $110k for 8000 daily calories, you might as well just wait for android robots to be capable of farming and then buy one from a company like Figure, though you'd then have to worry about it getting hacked and trying to knife you in your sleep.
Re: Open Source Farming Robot
#55Looking at the pricing and the area the robot covers, isn't it too expensive?
I mean, with that land size, it can be easily done by a human in a few minutes? And I'm guessing most people who grow crops at that size do it for a hobby, which means they don't mind doing the work?
Re: Open Source Farming Robot
#56The idea of introducing robotics to farming is very attractive. It doesn't seem like this is a scalable solution for farming, but a sufficient one for gardening. They started this project a decade ago. But robotics has advanced quite a bit in that time. Surely, today it is much more viable to have four wheeled robots watering, weeding etc at the same precision this product can. Then why build a gantry.
Your points are largely valid and there are many examples of mobile robust at scale autonomous robot vehicles for "big farms" today, it's still a growing market domain with much innovation.
> Then why build a gantry.
Part of at scale agriculture is growing seedlings (fruit trees, etc), conducting ANOVA trials (small plots to test many seed varieties).
There's a good chunk of "big agriculture" taking place in warehouse sized greenhouses with roller topped tables, big sliding trays, tightly packed young plants, overhead gantries for cameras | sprays | lifting hooks, etc.
This is a lightweight garden bed gantry .. but there is a place for big gantries in agriculture.
Re: Open Source Farming Robot
#57Would be interesting if they could get it to work in a circular pattern with multiple layers, where one FarmBot traverses each ring of the garden's "onion".
For an optimized garden to feed a family, you need 549 square meters[0], which is a circle with a diameter of 26.4 meters (86.7 ft). That's all the vegetables for your entire family, mostly automated.
That's a future I would love to see, even though it's way less efficient than industrial farming.
Re: Open Source Farming Robot
#58Earlier quoted context omitted.
A combination of a shorter growing season and less rainfall. Seattle has an interesting rap for being extremely rainy, but their average rainfall is around 38 inches while I get around 60 inches per year here. We've had cattle on the land with us for the last two years, and though we have had to buy in hay its has been to supplement for 2-3 months rather than 5-6 months. We actually have the pasture space to grow and…
Also in the southeast, and it should be pretty easy to find someone to come and bail your hay for you and take a percentage of the hay for themselves. I believe we do 9 acres, and get two harvests. After splitting it with the bailer that's still enough to feed about 25 head of cattle through the year. Though we do supplement with some feed for nutrition reasons. (Our Nutrition, not the cows, we eat them). Late in sea…
Yep, all of that is definitely on the table. Our first year on this property we actually did talk with someone about cutting hay on a 50:50 split. He used to lease this land and built most of the fences that are still here. It didn't end up working out that summer but we're keeping that in our back pocket for later.
As far as moving hay goes, we have bough square bails the last two years and aren't afraid of hauling it around by hand. If we bring someone in to cut and bail hay wed probably just spend around the same amount the first year around to buy a round bail trailer we could pull with an ATV or mini truck.
Re: Open Source Farming Robot
#59It sill looks like the software is written by people who don't know how to care for plants. You don't spray water on leaves as shown in the video; you'll just end up with fungus infestation. You water the soil and nourish the microorganisms that facilitate nutrient absorption in roots. But, I don't see any reason the technology can't be adapted to do the right thing.
Doesn't rain fall on the leaves as much as the soil?
Yes, and rain fall causes the spread of fungal infestation as said above and it is why we farmers use drip irrigation when possible. FarmBot defenitly has a great marketing video, 3d animation and logo though!
Re: Open Source Farming Robot
#60It sill looks like the software is written by people who don't know how to care for plants. You don't spray water on leaves as shown in the video; you'll just end up with fungus infestation. You water the soil and nourish the microorganisms that facilitate nutrient absorption in roots. But, I don't see any reason the technology can't be adapted to do the right thing.
I think the idea is that using the CNC style design for everything makes it a simpler system? Watering from the soil may be better, but harder to automate to such an extreme? Automating the setup of irrigation lines with a CNC head seems like a pretty cool project though.
Drip irrigation is a once and done setup and also automated. I feel like this project is insanely cool, but ultimately not practically useful at the pricepoint.