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How 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
This page has a section titled "Cups, Not Calories". It hurts my soul that anybody producing a table such as that is using something as vague as a "cup" in their calculations.
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That assumes that rain falling on leaves serves no purpose.
Nature isn't perfect and has disadvantages compared to us. We don't have to invent ex post facto explanations for why something is the case in nature or why there is some un-intuitive reason as for why the natural way is better.
Frankly, I prefer the way that thinks of 'ex post facto' explanations for nature. At least that keeps us hypothesizing and not sitting there tooting our own horns.
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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.
The 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.
It 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?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
That assumes that rain falling on leaves serves no purpose.
Nature isn't perfect and has disadvantages compared to us. We don't have to invent ex post facto explanations for why something is the case in nature or why there is some un-intuitive reason as for why the natural way is better.
Wow we have completely different world views. I think nature is perfect and it's us who have gone too far away from it to notice and hence we are far from perfection as well. Ideally we should not be comparing us to nature since we are part of it. But somewhere deep down we know we are not aligned with it so we end up comparing it to humans which seems pretty grandiose on our end.
Would 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…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
That assumes that rain falling on leaves serves no purpose.
Nature isn't perfect and has disadvantages compared to us. We don't have to invent ex post facto explanations for why something is the case in nature or why there is some un-intuitive reason as for why the natural way is better.
That's assuming that we are somehow outside of nature.
> We don't have to invent ex post facto explanations for why something is the case in nature or why there is some un-intuitive reason as for why the natural way is better.
We don't have to , no , but we do , because that's how we learn.
Nobody was claiming the "natural" way was better, just that it might serve a purpose.
It 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.
Water on the leaves isn’t bad if you’re watering in the morning where it’ll soon evaporate in the sunlight.
How 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
so 31 farmbots at 3m x 6m? a bit steep still, plus the maintenance nightmare of keeping 31 machines working.. it's a fun farm to envisage though. p.s. I don't think that this gantry has very harsh stiffness requirements; I guess one could scale the thing to a larger size reasonably easy -- akin to a configurable MPCNC machine.