Autonomous Robots Plant, Tend, and Harvest Entire Crop of Barley
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Autonomous Robots Plant, Tend, and Harvest Entire Crop of Barley
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Re: Autonomous Robots Plant, Tend, and Harvest Entire Crop of Barley
#2Automate the supply chains. Start with what is essential then move on from there.
Re: Autonomous Robots Plant, Tend, and Harvest Entire Crop of Barley
#3Automate the supply chains. Start with what is essential then move on from there.
Disagree. Automate the production, which democratizes the supply.
Minimal supply chains are necessary if you can produce crops autonomously at the point of consumption (think rooftop solar). It would be wildly inefficient to grow in each person's backyard, but not so to grow in the outer rings of urban areas.
Automated production is essential. Supply chains for abundant, distributed resources are superfluous.
Re: Autonomous Robots Plant, Tend, and Harvest Entire Crop of Barley
#4The amount of labor involved in grain crops like barley per dollar of output is minimal already - the guy running the tractor/combine/etc is mostly making sure nothing breaks and keeping an eye on things (which is important when you're operating $N00,000 worth of heavy equipment on open ground). You do need guys, however, for when things do go wrong, and for all the other farm tasks (equipment maintenance, fencing, maintaining irrigation, and so on).
Re: Autonomous Robots Plant, Tend, and Harvest Entire Crop of Barley
#5I love this so much. This is the coolest thing in the world.
Re: Autonomous Robots Plant, Tend, and Harvest Entire Crop of Barley
#6The amount of labor involved in grain crops like barley per dollar of output is minimal already - the guy running the tractor/combine/etc is mostly making sure nothing breaks and keeping an eye on things (which is important when you're operating $N00,000 worth of heavy equipment on open ground). You do need guys, however, for when things do go wrong, and for all the other farm tasks (equipment maintenance, fencing, m…
It's a very nice proof of concept. Also I bet these guys collected a lot of info important to develop robots for more finicky crops. This could be the most valuable part of the project.
Re: Autonomous Robots Plant, Tend, and Harvest Entire Crop of Barley
#7It said that the capital to do this was $200,000 -- what was the inventory of robots required to accomplish this.
What will it take to have a small fleet of robots to manage small farms - but many small farms.
What if a community of gardens and farms were dispersed around a neighborhood/small town - and the town shared the use of the autonomous robots wherever possible.
Which robots are common to all farms and which robots are specific to a given crop?
Also, the downplay the robot-management tasks (refueling, recharging, interceding in really bad weather to tell the robots "that'll do robot, no farming today" sort of stuff)
An open library of farm robots, the tasks they can do, their cost options, how much crop area /number of farms/acres they can manage, if they can multi-task between activities specific to tomatoes in one farm and corn in another etc...
That would be interesting data.
Then couple that with the open source civilization plans - and update those to make those items more intelligent for efficiencies in their designed tasks.
In 100 years, if we can get an atmosphere on mars, we just send a fully automated pre-colonizing farm fleet to prep our invasion.
Re: Autonomous Robots Plant, Tend, and Harvest Entire Crop of Barley
#8It said that the capital to do this was $200,000 -- what was the inventory of robots required to accomplish this. What will it take to have a small fleet of robots to manage small farms - but many small farms. What if a community of gardens and farms were dispersed around a neighborhood/small town - and the town shared the use of the autonomous robots wherever possible. Which robots are common to all farms and which…
It will take way longer than 100 years to gey an atmosphere ready to grow earth crops on Mars, if at all possible.
Re: Autonomous Robots Plant, Tend, and Harvest Entire Crop of Barley
#9> There’s still dirt, early mornings, dirt, more dirt
I have always wondered who are these farmers in the dirt in the early morning? Where I farm the environment is rarely suitable for 'being in the dirt' in the morning. Typically the field work starts in the mid-afternoon after the sun has had a chance to dry up the morning's dew or previous days rain. There are definitely some late nights though.
Re: Autonomous Robots Plant, Tend, and Harvest Entire Crop of Barley
#10The amount of labor involved in grain crops like barley per dollar of output is minimal already - the guy running the tractor/combine/etc is mostly making sure nothing breaks and keeping an eye on things (which is important when you're operating $N00,000 worth of heavy equipment on open ground). You do need guys, however, for when things do go wrong, and for all the other farm tasks (equipment maintenance, fencing, m…
True, but that is because the farmers have access to huge fields which let them deploy their equipment efficiently. Autonomous farming would let you theoretically use more marginal lands which are not currently suitable for manual farming.