9 ms·

Imagine, though, a time when the automation reaches a stage where all weeding and most insect killing can be done mechanically with a robot instead of chemicall

• gbrown 9y ago
  I've daydreamed about trying exactly that on a small scale. Industrially, that would be amazing for the environment.
  • ModernMech 9y ago
    Especially if said robots can run on the weeds and bugs they are removing!
    • QAPereo 9y ago
      So basically ladybugs, but with a profit margin and TOS.
      • losteric 9y ago
        Not invented here, not relevant! /s
  • danblick 9y ago
    Have you seen farmbot.io?
    • gbrown 9y ago
      No, looks interesting, thanks.
• shanev 9y ago
  We are destroying topsoil at an alarming rate due to industrial farming that we may have no choice but to go this route.
  • thomas_howland 9y ago
    We are absolutely not. Productive farmland in the USA is fairly expensive and farmers are extremely interested in preserving its value. Most "destroyed" topsoil is due to eg suburban developments spreading into former agricultural areas, but it's still minimal in the grand scheme of things.
    • jamiegreen 9y ago
      "One-third of world’s soils are degraded: FAO" http://www.livemint.com/Politics/NVc4UYKzFxn8zeQqkydyPM/Onethird-of-worlds-soils-are-degraded-FAO.html http://www.livemint.com/Politics/NVc4UYKzFxn8zeQqkydyPM/Onet...
    • Dylanfm 9y ago
      Development of arable land is a problem, but our agricultural practices are a major one. I think shanev is speaking about the effects of modern agriculture on top soil. We should prioritise the _creation_ of soil. Instead, top soil is being degraded and then lost though erosion. There are other issues, such as the planting of monocultures, overuse of nitrogen fertilizers and so on. As climate change brings us longer droughts and larger downpours, we should be farming in ways that build top soil for more resilient farmland. (edit - adding link to http://www.fao.org/docrep/t0389e/t0389e02.htm http://www.fao.org/docrep/t0389e/t0389e02.htm)
      • shanev 9y ago
        Yes this is exactly what I was getting at. Thanks for putting it more eloquently than I did. I’m just used to getting downvoted anytime I talk about monoculture farming, soil, and climate change so I don’t put effort into it anymore. I think the pro-GMO crowd thinks talking about sustainable farming is anti-science when it actually involves more science at a macro level to understand the effects of synthetic monoculture farming on soil, and it’s effects on climate change.
        • Dylanfm 9y ago
• losteric 9y ago
  I am interested to see how the pest ecosystem evolves in response to robotic "predators"... Can insects evolve effective camouflage? Will weeds evolve to mimic cash crops? How will fungi/bacteria/viruses respond to a lack of other pests?
  • agavegoose 9y ago
    Something very similar to that has already happened - in (very often hand-weeded) rice, shattering appears to have evolved to de-domesticate the crop - making it essentially impossible for 'weedy' rice to be distinguished from the real thing - https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2013/07/130717132418.htm https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2013/07/130717132418.h... https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2988683/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2988683/
• randomdata 9y ago
  The environment perhaps, but would it really be better for the bottom line? Mechanical weed control already lost out to chemicals because the chemicals were cheaper. On top of that, chemical applicators are relatively simple and proven technology with few moving parts. Farm equipment isn't like your car that can go 100,000 miles without problem. Moving parts on farm equipment will break – constantly. On top of that, computer technology does not come cheap when it is low volume specialized systems, built to withstand the harsh environments of agriculture. I have no doubt the technology is possible, but I do wonder if it is possible in a price range that would actually improve the bottom line.
  • maxerickson 9y ago
    It only has to be cheap enough to make banning various pesticides reasonable.
    • randomdata 9y ago
      You bring up a good point that I forgot about. Some of these chemicals, like Roundup, are not just for pest control, but serve other purposes such as desiccation. Since you are going to need a chemical applicator anyway, a second machine to duplicate functionality further increases the cost ineffectiveness. Not only that, but what I am sure most would consider the most devastating type of chemical in recent times, neonicotinoids, are applied as a seed treatment, planted with the planter. Even if you could devise an advanced machine that continually keeps pests from eating the seed while it is buried beneath the ground, that requires trips over the field that are currently not required at all. It is tough to compete with no additional trips over the field. Energy and wear is expensive and potentially devastating to the environment, including issues like carbon emissions and topsoil depletion. (Neonics are already banned where I farm, but it is a good illustration of how chemicals can sometimes eliminate the need for machinery altogether and how the robo-pest terminator has to be able to compete with that)
      • zaroth 9y ago
        I think it's a myth that Roundup is used as a desiccant. However the robots are not trying to replace chemicals. As you point out, that's a losing proposition. But they can definitely reduce overall man-hours, and so provide constant value as long as they operate.
• Gustomaximus 9y ago
  I think this is the key vs the planting side. Maybe soil monitoring and watering/fertilising at a micro level. If someone can make a drone to fly around and take out pests like fruitfly that would be a massive step forward vs spraying.
• robotresearcher 9y ago
  Peter Corke and his huge team at QUT are doing great stuff in this area. They have spot-spraying robots, that zap only weeds and fertilize only crops, and also a great device that just mechanically smashes up weeds one-by-one. Peter has an admirable ability to choose projects and deliver the goods on them. Robotics needs more like him. Interview with Corke on this subject: http://robohub.org/robots-zero-tillage-robotics/ http://robohub.org/robots-zero-tillage-robotics/ Homepage with free stuff including books and MOOC: http://petercorke.com/wordpress/ http://petercorke.com/wordpress/ edit: I'm not affiliated with QUT and have no conflict of interest. I'm an academic that does related work but not in agriculture.
  • reachtarunhere 9y ago
    Peter Corke is an amazing guy. Loved his MOOC. Highly recommended if you are just curious about robotics. MATLAB is a sad aspect of it though.
    • RoboticsAU 9y ago
      Peter Corke launched a new site recently, which is based on his MOOC: https://robotacademy.net.au/ https://robotacademy.net.au/ He outlines the reasons why they shifted away from MOOCs in the Robots Podcast episode #239. I recently made a site too, for anybody interested in robotics/AI: http://roboticsaustralia.org http://roboticsaustralia.org
• gcb0 9y ago
  if you simply build a decent greenhouse it's already bug and weed free. plus your crop can survive unexpected frost. adding high maintenance robots is just silly.
  • ams6110 9y ago
    Farming crops like wheat and barley in greenhouses is not feasible at the scale of the market today.
• lightedman 9y ago
  "Imagine, though, a time when the automation reaches a stage where all weeding and most insect killing can be done mechanically with a robot instead of chemically with pesticides. " Why bother with that when we already have controlled facilities where pests simply can't gain a foot hold in the first place, making that labor totally unnecessary?
  • njarboe 9y ago
    Greenhouse the entire mid-west? With big enough structures to run tractors? Not sure the ROI is going to work out.
    • lightedman 9y ago
      I don't think you understand how indoor vertical farming works. In 1/8 of an acre you can produce an entire acre of crops, utilizing upwards of 99% less resources. To boot, you don't even need tractors to harvest. You can just pull the entire tray yourself once the NFT solution's drained from the channel. I can take 1/8th of an acre of land, and produce a full acre of wheatgrass in two weeks and harvest it myself with no mechanical methods required in less than a couple of hours. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9ZTikdxj8AI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9ZTikdxj8AI I was doing this 20 years ago in high school horticultural science class.
• dejv 9y ago
  Insects are never gonna be killed mechanically, those are too small and too many in count. Modern trend is to use biological controll: you "plant" organism that eat them or eat their eggs.
  • dejv 9y ago
    Just to expand on my comment, biological control is quite varied, but the main theme is selectivity: you don't want to destroy all the insects or butterflies, just those who do harm to your produce. So you basically have couple of forms, either some microbes, viruses or some form of insects that eat on just one type of insect or of insect class. Another main form is pheromone confusion thingies: you put them in your orchard/vineyard/market garden and it make hard for males of your target pest to find female and procreate.
  • PeterisP 9y ago
    Certain pests (mainly large beetles or their larvae) used to be controlled by removing them manually - it's more expensive than pesticides, but it was feasible (and worth it!) to do it simply by bunch of people going over the crops. This means that they could be controlled mechanically in the future.
  • njarboe 9y ago
    If you had a system that could target such small things, lasers might work.
• rasz 9y ago
  What farmers? there wont be any farmers left, just mega corporations.
• Animats 9y ago
  It's here now. Blue River makes LettuceBot, which is a machine-vision system for killing weeds in lettuce fields. The machine is towed behind a tractor, looks down at the lettuce and weeds, and zaps weeds and too-close-together lettuce plants with targeted sprays of concentrated fertilizer.[1] It's a full neural net vision system, with many cameras and software borrowed from face recognition. They train the system with pictures of weeds and pictures of good plants, and as it rolls over the field, it targets the bad stuff and sprays it. This isn't experimental. It's now owned by John Deere and is currently doing 10% of the US lettuce crop. Next, cotton. There's no problem with plants becoming resistant to weed-killers. Unless pigweed learns to look like lettuce, it's going to get zapped. It's sold as a service. For $220 an acre, Blue River comes and zaps your weeds. Now available in the Salinas Valley and Yuma, AZ. [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-YCa8RntsRE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-YCa8RntsRE