6 ms·

managing giant monocultures with a few giant machines (that may or may not be human controlled) is not what this article is about; it is about the huge potentia

by tda 8y ago

managing giant monocultures with a few giant machines (that may or may not be human controlled) is not what this article is about; it is about the huge potential that smallish robots have for farming. More diverse crops, less pesticides, less damage to soil, less energy use, mixed instead of mono cultures. Really exciting if this takes off, such a win for the environment, the landscape, and ultimately for everyone of us

joe_the_user 8y ago
Sure, this might allow family farms to expand but it could also monoculture operations to diversify and become efficient through decreased pesticide and water use.
- rorykoehler 8y ago
  The biggest efficiency gains would be from not being a mono-culture.
bluGill 8y ago
Unlike what you would expect, small robots do more damage to the soil not less. Damage to soil is not linear with mass, A massive robot will do twice as much damage where it touches the ground (wheel tracks most likely, but there are other choices), but it will touch 10 times less ground to do the same work so the total averaged over all the land is much better. For the same reason, tracks generally end up doing more damage than wheels: you get somewhat less damage while going through the row, but they touch/damage far more ground when turning and that adds up.
- nathan_long 8y ago
  I don't understand your comment. Suppose the robot is the size of a person or smaller. Does a person damage the ground by walking across a field?
  - bluGill 8y ago
    Yes. Not as much as a heaver machine, but the damage is done. Of course their are also process to heal that work better on a human footprint (or deer hoofprint) than a machine print.
- mr_overalls 8y ago
  This. . . doesn't sound convincing to me. Soil displacement is a function of machine weight AND surface area of tires/treads. Additionally, I'd expect the sharp edges of steel treads to disturb soil much worse than a similarly-weighted tractor with rubber tires. Without doing extensive calculations, my anecdotal evidence is that I've seen bulldozer track "scars" from a single path that are decades old, while the damage from thousands of bicycles collectively veering from a paved path onto grass appears to heal itself in a year or two.
  - tomcam 8y ago
    Username definitely checks out
  - bluGill 8y ago
    You say the bicycle healed in a year, but you didn't measure that (this is a guess, but is seems reasonable). It isn't enough to say the grass appears green, is it as thick and growing as fast as untouched grass nearby. A single track every 30 meters where nothing grows is less impact on the overall field's growth than 30 tracks every meter where things still grow but not as well.
  - thatcat 8y ago
    The damage to the soil occurs mostly when turning, especially 180 degrees at the row end. The extent of damage depends on the wheels ability to articulate to the proper angles. The tracked vehicle can't change angles and pushes everything around. A bicycle is a cycle and has none of the turning drag encountered in 4 wheel vehicles or skid steers.
- PeterisP 8y ago
  This seems a bit confusing - in the context of agriculture, when I hear "damage to the soil", then that implies (to me) that we're talking about the difference between the long-term soil erosion caused by plowing/tilling/cultivation versus growing different cultures for which the process requires less of such invasive activities and so doesn't erode the soil as much. The effect of large tires vs small tires vs tracks vs feet is insignificant and irrelevant, it's a rounding error compared to the effect of whether those tires/tracks will be pulling a plow/till or not.
  - bluGill 8y ago
    While I agree overall, soil compaction is something that large farms are starting to watch because it makes a measurable difference.
    - thatcat 8y ago
      This is especially true for clay type soils that don't rebound as quickly or fully when compacted. When compacted beyond a certain pressure, the roots can't break through any longer. Small robots won't cause this though, it requires pretty high pressure. Consider an even smaller robot like 1-in wheel base, would that cause compaction?
  - jelliclesfarm 8y ago
    All tillage is damaging to the soil. Period.
- deialtrous 8y ago
  That's simply not true. Low axle weight and low pressure both reduce soil compaction tremendously, to the point where it no longer causes any at all when you get small enough. This is easily measured. A garden tractor is 1000 pounds, even with normal turf tires you get no measurable compaction unless you are in mud. I can drive around my garden all day long and a penetrometer confirms absolutely no difference.
  - thatcat 8y ago
    Exactly, compaction is the result of pressure. If you're at <~ 1000 psi and there won't be compaction on any soil type in dry conditions.
    - deialtrous 8y ago
      It isn't just pressure, total weight matters too. 1000 psi is WAY too high. Keeping ground pressure as low as 10 psi is generally the recommendation for heavy equipment, but a person walking might get up as high as 20 psi and doesn't cause compaction on soil with a reasonable organic matter content (5% or more I think?). Here's a good explanation: https://extension.psu.edu/avoiding-soil-compaction https://extension.psu.edu/avoiding-soil-compaction
      - thatcat 8y ago
        Hm, my mistake, thanks for the link. Total weight is related to pressure through the formula: P = F/A. Weight is F.
        deialtrous 8y ago
        Not when you are using pneumatic tires. That gives you the pressure applied to the air in the tire, not to the ground. The tire pressure determines ground pressure.
        thatcat 8y ago
deialtrous 8y ago
We already can do all of that, we don't need robots. Most farms have been no till for years now, the idea that fields are plowed is an anachronism. This is more tech wankery, people with a particular technology trying to shoehorn it into being the "solution" to problems that are already solved easier and cheaper.
- ska 8y ago
  [...More diverse crops, less pesticides, less damage to soil, less energy use, mixed instead of mono cultures.] We already can do all of that, we don't need.. Question: If we can do all of that already, why isn't it being done (edit: assuming it isn't) ?
  - JoeAltmaier 8y ago
    Its being done all over. The biggest ecologists were always farmers, who pay the first cost of soil erosion, soil damage and energy. They fail only on the mono-culture front, though its extremely common to mix crops in hilly ground but that's for erosion control. And now the potential to use less chemicals with robotic application is taking off even with large farm equipment. Cameras identify a plant off-row as the tractor traverses the field, and either plucks it or spritzes it with a microdose of herbicide.
    - ska 8y ago
      Fair enough, I should have worded more carefully - it's an area I'm largely uninformed in and should have worded it more as a question; re-reading it sounds like an assertion so i added a tweak. It makes sense to me that farmers are best placed to optimize for current outputs (and probably poorly placed to optimize outputs).
  - deialtrous 8y ago
    Small amounts of it are being done, most farms have been no till for years for example, cover crops are the norm now instead of some weird fringe thing, stuff like that. It is not done to a greater extent for two reasons. One is because it is a business and the primary (often sole) concern is making money, so anything that isn't the normal way of doing things is avoided. There are serious financial incentives to not try anything better. In order to actually get a pay out on your crop insurance if your crop fails, you have to have followed all the "approved practices" to the letter. So if it says "spray your potatoes with fungicide every 5 days" and you can't prove that you did, you lose a few hundred thousand dollars this year. This sort of thing makes it hard to change even if you want to. Second, there's active intent to prevent people from knowing how to do things better. Almost all agricultural inputs are produced by a small number of large corporations. If farmers knew they could cut their fertilizer to 10% of what they buy now, stop buying pesticides, and spend less on fuel those corporations would lose a lot of business. So they pay "agronomists" and "soil scientists" to mislead farmers and keep them on the treadmill. There's lots of very deliberate FUD about organic agriculture, permaculture, etc, and when you've got millions of dollars invested in land and equipment, a little doubt goes a long way.

by tda 8y ago

joe_the_user 8y ago

Sure, this might allow family farms to expand but it could also monoculture operations to diversify and become efficient through decreased pesticide and water use.

rorykoehler 8y ago
The biggest efficiency gains would be from not being a mono-culture.

bluGill 8y ago

Unlike what you would expect, small robots do more damage to the soil not less. Damage to soil is not linear with mass, A massive robot will do twice as much damage where it touches the ground (wheel tracks most likely, but there are other choices), but it will touch 10 times less ground to do the same work so the total averaged over all the land is much better. For the same reason, tracks generally end up doing more damage than wheels: you get somewhat less damage while going through the row, but they touch/damage far more ground when turning and that adds up.

nathan_long 8y ago
I don't understand your comment. Suppose the robot is the size of a person or smaller. Does a person damage the ground by walking across a field?
- bluGill 8y ago
  Yes. Not as much as a heaver machine, but the damage is done. Of course their are also process to heal that work better on a human footprint (or deer hoofprint) than a machine print.
mr_overalls 8y ago
This. . . doesn't sound convincing to me. Soil displacement is a function of machine weight AND surface area of tires/treads. Additionally, I'd expect the sharp edges of steel treads to disturb soil much worse than a similarly-weighted tractor with rubber tires. Without doing extensive calculations, my anecdotal evidence is that I've seen bulldozer track "scars" from a single path that are decades old, while the damage from thousands of bicycles collectively veering from a paved path onto grass appears to heal itself in a year or two.
- tomcam 8y ago
  Username definitely checks out
- bluGill 8y ago
  You say the bicycle healed in a year, but you didn't measure that (this is a guess, but is seems reasonable). It isn't enough to say the grass appears green, is it as thick and growing as fast as untouched grass nearby. A single track every 30 meters where nothing grows is less impact on the overall field's growth than 30 tracks every meter where things still grow but not as well.
- thatcat 8y ago
  The damage to the soil occurs mostly when turning, especially 180 degrees at the row end. The extent of damage depends on the wheels ability to articulate to the proper angles. The tracked vehicle can't change angles and pushes everything around. A bicycle is a cycle and has none of the turning drag encountered in 4 wheel vehicles or skid steers.
PeterisP 8y ago
This seems a bit confusing - in the context of agriculture, when I hear "damage to the soil", then that implies (to me) that we're talking about the difference between the long-term soil erosion caused by plowing/tilling/cultivation versus growing different cultures for which the process requires less of such invasive activities and so doesn't erode the soil as much. The effect of large tires vs small tires vs tracks vs feet is insignificant and irrelevant, it's a rounding error compared to the effect of whether those tires/tracks will be pulling a plow/till or not.
- bluGill 8y ago
  While I agree overall, soil compaction is something that large farms are starting to watch because it makes a measurable difference.
  - thatcat 8y ago
    This is especially true for clay type soils that don't rebound as quickly or fully when compacted. When compacted beyond a certain pressure, the roots can't break through any longer. Small robots won't cause this though, it requires pretty high pressure. Consider an even smaller robot like 1-in wheel base, would that cause compaction?
- jelliclesfarm 8y ago
  All tillage is damaging to the soil. Period.
deialtrous 8y ago
That's simply not true. Low axle weight and low pressure both reduce soil compaction tremendously, to the point where it no longer causes any at all when you get small enough. This is easily measured. A garden tractor is 1000 pounds, even with normal turf tires you get no measurable compaction unless you are in mud. I can drive around my garden all day long and a penetrometer confirms absolutely no difference.
- thatcat 8y ago
  Exactly, compaction is the result of pressure. If you're at <~ 1000 psi and there won't be compaction on any soil type in dry conditions.
  - deialtrous 8y ago
    It isn't just pressure, total weight matters too. 1000 psi is WAY too high. Keeping ground pressure as low as 10 psi is generally the recommendation for heavy equipment, but a person walking might get up as high as 20 psi and doesn't cause compaction on soil with a reasonable organic matter content (5% or more I think?). Here's a good explanation: https://extension.psu.edu/avoiding-soil-compaction https://extension.psu.edu/avoiding-soil-compaction
    - thatcat 8y ago
      Hm, my mistake, thanks for the link. Total weight is related to pressure through the formula: P = F/A. Weight is F.
      - deialtrous 8y ago
        Not when you are using pneumatic tires. That gives you the pressure applied to the air in the tire, not to the ground. The tire pressure determines ground pressure.
        thatcat 8y ago

deialtrous 8y ago

We already can do all of that, we don't need robots. Most farms have been no till for years now, the idea that fields are plowed is an anachronism. This is more tech wankery, people with a particular technology trying to shoehorn it into being the "solution" to problems that are already solved easier and cheaper.

ska 8y ago
[...More diverse crops, less pesticides, less damage to soil, less energy use, mixed instead of mono cultures.] We already can do all of that, we don't need.. Question: If we can do all of that already, why isn't it being done (edit: assuming it isn't) ?
- JoeAltmaier 8y ago
  Its being done all over. The biggest ecologists were always farmers, who pay the first cost of soil erosion, soil damage and energy. They fail only on the mono-culture front, though its extremely common to mix crops in hilly ground but that's for erosion control. And now the potential to use less chemicals with robotic application is taking off even with large farm equipment. Cameras identify a plant off-row as the tractor traverses the field, and either plucks it or spritzes it with a microdose of herbicide.
  - ska 8y ago
    Fair enough, I should have worded more carefully - it's an area I'm largely uninformed in and should have worded it more as a question; re-reading it sounds like an assertion so i added a tweak. It makes sense to me that farmers are best placed to optimize for current outputs (and probably poorly placed to optimize outputs).
- deialtrous 8y ago
  Small amounts of it are being done, most farms have been no till for years for example, cover crops are the norm now instead of some weird fringe thing, stuff like that. It is not done to a greater extent for two reasons. One is because it is a business and the primary (often sole) concern is making money, so anything that isn't the normal way of doing things is avoided. There are serious financial incentives to not try anything better. In order to actually get a pay out on your crop insurance if your crop fails, you have to have followed all the "approved practices" to the letter. So if it says "spray your potatoes with fungicide every 5 days" and you can't prove that you did, you lose a few hundred thousand dollars this year. This sort of thing makes it hard to change even if you want to. Second, there's active intent to prevent people from knowing how to do things better. Almost all agricultural inputs are produced by a small number of large corporations. If farmers knew they could cut their fertilizer to 10% of what they buy now, stop buying pesticides, and spend less on fuel those corporations would lose a lot of business. So they pay "agronomists" and "soil scientists" to mislead farmers and keep them on the treadmill. There's lots of very deliberate FUD about organic agriculture, permaculture, etc, and when you've got millions of dollars invested in land and equipment, a little doubt goes a long way.