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Many crops would not need so many pesticides if they were grown in close proximity to the other plants they naturally occur with... in some cases this is becaus

Many crops would not need so many pesticides if they were grown in close proximity to the other plants they naturally occur with... in some cases this is because other plants attract predator insects that keep other insects at bay... humans could never farm this way because harvesters just chop everything down at once... But a robot capable of recognizing all the plants could tell... and could selectively harvest just what is needed. I suspect this is a very difficult problem however just because of how varied individual plants can be... telling plants apart can be hard even for trained humans.

amelius 8y ago
How about putting different plants in different rows, e.g. plant A in even rows, plant B in odd rows.
- based2 8y ago
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/No-till_farming https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/No-till_farming
- nerdwaller 8y ago
  I definitely agree with your point, there may not be a need for a high tech solution to that problem. I would be curious what ratio of producing vs protecting rows a farmer would need. Perhaps it’s less than alternating rows, not harming yield as drastically. Perhaps 1/4 or 1/5 would do.
- ourmandave 8y ago
  If you're cash crop is plant A, then plant B needs to be cheaper than spraying herbicides and the cash value of all the plant A you could have grown instead.
  - amelius 8y ago
    Unless there are laws against spraying those herbicides. And laws could be drafted once it becomes known that these types of method are feasible.
- phillc73 8y ago
  I believe this is called intercropping, although both plants A and B are meant to be harvested. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intercropping https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intercropping
mrfusion 8y ago
Or a robot simply removes the pests one by one. If you’ve got enough robots it shouldn’t be a problem.
- MichaelMoser123 8y ago
  how fast and of what size must such a robot be so that it becomes cost efficient?
  - throwaway76543 8y ago
    There are existing prototypes of laser systems for killing fast moving insects such as mosquitos. Imagine a device on a fence pole covering the surrounding acre. There are plenty of slow moving pests, weeds and the like as well.
    - ryacko 8y ago
      Or we could eat less fresh fruit, buy more fruit for baking and already canned fruit.
      - mkl 8y ago
        Where do you think that canned and baking fruit comes from? It's grown just the same.
        Nzen 8y ago
        Presumably, canned fruit could involve less organic waste as the canner can use ugly fruit that consumers may reject for long enough that it spoils. I don't know enough to guess whether this is more energy 'efficient', given that we need glass or metal containers, in this case.
        ip26 8y ago
        Yes, but there's probably less loss & spoilage in the supply chain for canned/frozen/dried/etc.
iguy 8y ago
> humans could never farm this way ... at scale. Humans do farm this way -- I've seen fancy shade-grown coffee being grown in what looks like a jungle. But it requires a huge amount of manual labor, right now. I think we'll get there at making machines do this. Deciding whether a leaf is one of the 4 crops you're growing, or not, sounds much easier than distinguishing all the close relatives of wild plants.
- thaumasiotes 8y ago
  > Humans do farm this way Yes. There are two different senses of "efficiency" in farming (or other production). One is the amount of food you get per unit of human labor input. Supporting a fully urbanized population requires this metric to be high. But the other sense is the amount of food you get per unit of land input. A society that maximizes this metric will produce more food and have a higher population than a society maximizing the first one. But most of those people will be subsistence farmers who don't earn much more than the marginal extra food they provide by intensively caring for the land. This is why historically most of the population -- anywhere -- was rural peasants. The grotesquely inefficient capitalist who uses a workforce of 10 people and 300 acres of land to produce the yield of 50 acres of land is part of a "wealthy" society -- everyone else has more food because of his very low need for labor. But it's also a very low-population society. In a more traditional society, all the land would be farmed efficiently and the population would be much larger, but non-farmers would have much less surplus to capture.
  - nordsieck 8y ago
    > There are two different senses of "efficiency" in farming (or other production). One is the amount of food you get per unit of human labor input. Supporting a fully urbanized population requires this metric to be high. > But the other sense is the amount of food you get per unit of land input. A society that maximizes this metric will produce more food and have a higher population than a society maximizing the first one. Are you suggesting that the reason the US/Europe is not at the Malthusian limit / has a low population growth is because we don't grow enough food? You'll have to pardon my incredulity. Your point is strictly true - we are growing less food than we theoretically could grow, but that seems beside the point: we still have an enormous surplus of food.
viggity 8y ago
A robot with computer vision could easily tell apart maize from soy from squash (different colors, react under polarized light differently, leaf size, plant structure, etc). The real problem is that 1. squash has limited commercial value. 2. corn grows to 8' tall while soy is only a couple feet. The corn would block all the sun from the soy. When you plan a field full of corn it all grows at a uniform rate so each stalk gets an even amount of sun, rain. If you want the advantage of both crops, you rotate every year or two. That way the soy can perform nitrogen fixation with various bacteria and produced essentially free nitrogen fertilizer for your corn.
hourislate 8y ago
>Many crops would not need so many pesticides if they were grown in close proximity to the other plants they naturally occur with. This is the strategy JM Fortier employs in his gardening technique. In my retirement I plan on attempting to implement the market garden (a smaller version). http://www.themarketgardener.com/ http://www.themarketgardener.com/
empath75 8y ago
I suspect that a robot capable of doing that would nearly as expensive as a human doing it.
- taneq 8y ago
  The first one would be far more expensive than a human. The 100th one would be far cheaper.
  - hutzlibu 8y ago
    More like the 100th. generation ...
agumonkey 8y ago
I need a club to talk about this asap
- Iv 8y ago
  I am currently building a suspended wirebot, I have a prototype that is starting to run nicely, hopefully the website is coming up soon. I'd love to talk about farming automation experiments (that's actually the acronym of our project: FAE), the needs, the dead ends, etc...
  - agumonkey 8y ago
    Wirebot are cool but invasive (no offense) IMO. I'd be happy with a bunch of wood based rovers. Some tiny helpers to ease and accelerate grabbing fruits/plants. Things super simple but that could turn farming into painless cute thing (if possible, I'm mostly daydreaming).
    - Iv 8y ago
      That's an interesting perspective. Why do you feel them invasive? I have the opposite perception as rovers have the risk of running over valuable plants. Maybe my perception is skewed by the fact that I am surrounded by ricefields and that wheels big enough to work in that muddy soil will basically destroy the field...
      - agumonkey 8y ago
        Maybe I have the wrong picture but I thought wirebots required 4 poles and diagonal wires, which would clutter the view and feel like band aids over the field (no offense, again, I do not know how it is in reality). Yeah I didn't mean big machines, don't laugh but I have wood+lego (small, simple blocks, cute) in mind when I think about automating farming with devices. Slightly larger, not toy size, but nothing like the usual farming scale utilities. Hard to communicate this over text (especially since i'm only imagining). I'll draw some stuff one day.
p1esk 8y ago
I suspect this is a very difficult problem however just because of how varied individual plants can be... telling plants apart can be hard even for trained humans. Actually, it's not. Despite all the hype surrounding deep learning, tasks like telling similar looking plants apart is precisely what's it's good at. In fact, it will probably be better than most humans at this task. Moreover, it's simple to implement. You take off the shelf model (e.g. ResNet-50) trained on ImageNet, and finetune it on a dataset of specific plants you want it to recognize (~1000 examples of each plant). Then you can run that model on an iPhone (or even on much cheaper hardware) A much harder problem is to make the robot move through the terrain without getting stuck. But even there, looking at what Boston Dynamics is doing, it seems like we are not that far off.
- mrfusion 8y ago
  Why does it help to be trained on imagenet first? Also are there any tutorials to teach you how to do what you’re describing?
  - troquerre 8y ago
    It’s called transfer learning. The base layers of a model trained on imagenet are general enough that they’re helpful for the specific task of processing plants. The benefit is imagenet has much more training data which is why you’d train on that first and then fine-tune the model with your specific data. Fast.ai is a great beginner friendly resource.
- kaveh_h 8y ago
  Robots with legs are probably not an option, they are both costly in production and energy usage. Something more akin to https://farm.bot https://farm.bot but on a larger scale would probably work better. Maybe a hybrid solution like a CNC bot built on top a frame with wheels that could simply drive around a field and work on different quadrants would be a way forward.
  - wlesieutre 8y ago
    You could put it on a radial track built like center pivot irrigation systems. Maybe even on the same construction if you already have that.
sandworm101 8y ago
>> humans could never farm this way because harvesters just chop everything down at once Really? You think a mechanical harvester cannot be built that could handle two types of plants at once? Forget deep learning and imaging technology. Plant alternating rows and build a harvester to accommodate, straddle, one while working the other. No fancy vision tech needed.
- nradov 8y ago
  It's certainly possible to build such a machine. But it would be more mechanically complex and expensive to build and operate than existing harvesters. And it would be locked into two specific crops which might not be the combination that farmers want next year. It's hard to see how machinery like that could ever be economically viable.
  - sandworm101 8y ago
    Possible? Try a standard farming technique called "intercropping". Often a single mechanical combine harvests both plants at once, with the crops separated from each other mechanically later. Other times the plants can be separated by height and harvested on subsequent passes. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intercropping https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intercropping https://www.grainews.ca/2013/10/08/six-things-to-consider-when-intercropping/ https://www.grainews.ca/2013/10/08/six-things-to-consider-wh...
rdlecler1 8y ago
It would also be incredibly slow. You might cover a few acres per hour and would need dozens of these operating in tandum to cover a large farm.
bitwize 8y ago
> But a robot capable of recognizing all the plants could tell... and could selectively harvest just what is needed. You don't even need a robot for this. The city of Edmonton, Alberta has deployed a fleet of small weeding machines to curb pesticide use -- to wit, specially-trained weed-eating goats.
- bainsfather 8y ago
  Could you provide a link please? On pasture land I see the opposite problem - the animals eat the 'best' stuff (clover, grass) and leave the weeds (thistles, nettles, buttercups, ragwort etc). (Although partly this is because on pasture land, weeds are 'what animals do not eat' :)
  - bitwize 8y ago
    https://www.edmonton.ca/activities_parks_recreation/parks_rivervalley/goat-pilot-project.aspx https://www.edmonton.ca/activities_parks_recreation/parks_ri... Goats are known for their ability to consume a wide variety of plants, especially weeds and shrubs that other animals won't touch. These goats have been specially trained to target noxious weeds and are constantly watched by humans and dogs.
throwaway648 8y ago
Unlike human, computer is exceptionally good at remembering stuff. No need for plant recognition when you can brute force remember where you planted each individual seed.

amelius 8y ago

How about putting different plants in different rows, e.g. plant A in even rows, plant B in odd rows.

based2 8y ago
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/No-till_farming https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/No-till_farming
nerdwaller 8y ago
I definitely agree with your point, there may not be a need for a high tech solution to that problem. I would be curious what ratio of producing vs protecting rows a farmer would need. Perhaps it’s less than alternating rows, not harming yield as drastically. Perhaps 1/4 or 1/5 would do.
ourmandave 8y ago
If you're cash crop is plant A, then plant B needs to be cheaper than spraying herbicides and the cash value of all the plant A you could have grown instead.
- amelius 8y ago
  Unless there are laws against spraying those herbicides. And laws could be drafted once it becomes known that these types of method are feasible.
phillc73 8y ago
I believe this is called intercropping, although both plants A and B are meant to be harvested. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intercropping https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intercropping

mrfusion 8y ago

Or a robot simply removes the pests one by one. If you’ve got enough robots it shouldn’t be a problem.

MichaelMoser123 8y ago
how fast and of what size must such a robot be so that it becomes cost efficient?
- throwaway76543 8y ago
  There are existing prototypes of laser systems for killing fast moving insects such as mosquitos. Imagine a device on a fence pole covering the surrounding acre. There are plenty of slow moving pests, weeds and the like as well.
  - ryacko 8y ago
    Or we could eat less fresh fruit, buy more fruit for baking and already canned fruit.
    - mkl 8y ago
      Where do you think that canned and baking fruit comes from? It's grown just the same.
      - Nzen 8y ago
        Presumably, canned fruit could involve less organic waste as the canner can use ugly fruit that consumers may reject for long enough that it spoils. I don't know enough to guess whether this is more energy 'efficient', given that we need glass or metal containers, in this case.
      - ip26 8y ago
        Yes, but there's probably less loss & spoilage in the supply chain for canned/frozen/dried/etc.

iguy 8y ago

> humans could never farm this way ... at scale. Humans do farm this way -- I've seen fancy shade-grown coffee being grown in what looks like a jungle. But it requires a huge amount of manual labor, right now. I think we'll get there at making machines do this. Deciding whether a leaf is one of the 4 crops you're growing, or not, sounds much easier than distinguishing all the close relatives of wild plants.

thaumasiotes 8y ago
> Humans do farm this way Yes. There are two different senses of "efficiency" in farming (or other production). One is the amount of food you get per unit of human labor input. Supporting a fully urbanized population requires this metric to be high. But the other sense is the amount of food you get per unit of land input. A society that maximizes this metric will produce more food and have a higher population than a society maximizing the first one. But most of those people will be subsistence farmers who don't earn much more than the marginal extra food they provide by intensively caring for the land. This is why historically most of the population -- anywhere -- was rural peasants. The grotesquely inefficient capitalist who uses a workforce of 10 people and 300 acres of land to produce the yield of 50 acres of land is part of a "wealthy" society -- everyone else has more food because of his very low need for labor. But it's also a very low-population society. In a more traditional society, all the land would be farmed efficiently and the population would be much larger, but non-farmers would have much less surplus to capture.
- nordsieck 8y ago
  > There are two different senses of "efficiency" in farming (or other production). One is the amount of food you get per unit of human labor input. Supporting a fully urbanized population requires this metric to be high. > But the other sense is the amount of food you get per unit of land input. A society that maximizes this metric will produce more food and have a higher population than a society maximizing the first one. Are you suggesting that the reason the US/Europe is not at the Malthusian limit / has a low population growth is because we don't grow enough food? You'll have to pardon my incredulity. Your point is strictly true - we are growing less food than we theoretically could grow, but that seems beside the point: we still have an enormous surplus of food.

viggity 8y ago

A robot with computer vision could easily tell apart maize from soy from squash (different colors, react under polarized light differently, leaf size, plant structure, etc). The real problem is that 1. squash has limited commercial value. 2. corn grows to 8' tall while soy is only a couple feet. The corn would block all the sun from the soy. When you plan a field full of corn it all grows at a uniform rate so each stalk gets an even amount of sun, rain. If you want the advantage of both crops, you rotate every year or two. That way the soy can perform nitrogen fixation with various bacteria and produced essentially free nitrogen fertilizer for your corn.

hourislate 8y ago

>Many crops would not need so many pesticides if they were grown in close proximity to the other plants they naturally occur with. This is the strategy JM Fortier employs in his gardening technique. In my retirement I plan on attempting to implement the market garden (a smaller version). http://www.themarketgardener.com/ http://www.themarketgardener.com/

empath75 8y ago

I suspect that a robot capable of doing that would nearly as expensive as a human doing it.

taneq 8y ago
The first one would be far more expensive than a human. The 100th one would be far cheaper.
- hutzlibu 8y ago
  More like the 100th. generation ...

agumonkey 8y ago

I need a club to talk about this asap

Iv 8y ago
I am currently building a suspended wirebot, I have a prototype that is starting to run nicely, hopefully the website is coming up soon. I'd love to talk about farming automation experiments (that's actually the acronym of our project: FAE), the needs, the dead ends, etc...
- agumonkey 8y ago
  Wirebot are cool but invasive (no offense) IMO. I'd be happy with a bunch of wood based rovers. Some tiny helpers to ease and accelerate grabbing fruits/plants. Things super simple but that could turn farming into painless cute thing (if possible, I'm mostly daydreaming).
  - Iv 8y ago
    That's an interesting perspective. Why do you feel them invasive? I have the opposite perception as rovers have the risk of running over valuable plants. Maybe my perception is skewed by the fact that I am surrounded by ricefields and that wheels big enough to work in that muddy soil will basically destroy the field...
    - agumonkey 8y ago
      Maybe I have the wrong picture but I thought wirebots required 4 poles and diagonal wires, which would clutter the view and feel like band aids over the field (no offense, again, I do not know how it is in reality). Yeah I didn't mean big machines, don't laugh but I have wood+lego (small, simple blocks, cute) in mind when I think about automating farming with devices. Slightly larger, not toy size, but nothing like the usual farming scale utilities. Hard to communicate this over text (especially since i'm only imagining). I'll draw some stuff one day.

p1esk 8y ago

I suspect this is a very difficult problem however just because of how varied individual plants can be... telling plants apart can be hard even for trained humans. Actually, it's not. Despite all the hype surrounding deep learning, tasks like telling similar looking plants apart is precisely what's it's good at. In fact, it will probably be better than most humans at this task. Moreover, it's simple to implement. You take off the shelf model (e.g. ResNet-50) trained on ImageNet, and finetune it on a dataset of specific plants you want it to recognize (~1000 examples of each plant). Then you can run that model on an iPhone (or even on much cheaper hardware) A much harder problem is to make the robot move through the terrain without getting stuck. But even there, looking at what Boston Dynamics is doing, it seems like we are not that far off.

mrfusion 8y ago
Why does it help to be trained on imagenet first? Also are there any tutorials to teach you how to do what you’re describing?
- troquerre 8y ago
  It’s called transfer learning. The base layers of a model trained on imagenet are general enough that they’re helpful for the specific task of processing plants. The benefit is imagenet has much more training data which is why you’d train on that first and then fine-tune the model with your specific data. Fast.ai is a great beginner friendly resource.
kaveh_h 8y ago
Robots with legs are probably not an option, they are both costly in production and energy usage. Something more akin to https://farm.bot https://farm.bot but on a larger scale would probably work better. Maybe a hybrid solution like a CNC bot built on top a frame with wheels that could simply drive around a field and work on different quadrants would be a way forward.
- wlesieutre 8y ago
  You could put it on a radial track built like center pivot irrigation systems. Maybe even on the same construction if you already have that.

sandworm101 8y ago

>> humans could never farm this way because harvesters just chop everything down at once Really? You think a mechanical harvester cannot be built that could handle two types of plants at once? Forget deep learning and imaging technology. Plant alternating rows and build a harvester to accommodate, straddle, one while working the other. No fancy vision tech needed.

nradov 8y ago
It's certainly possible to build such a machine. But it would be more mechanically complex and expensive to build and operate than existing harvesters. And it would be locked into two specific crops which might not be the combination that farmers want next year. It's hard to see how machinery like that could ever be economically viable.
- sandworm101 8y ago
  Possible? Try a standard farming technique called "intercropping". Often a single mechanical combine harvests both plants at once, with the crops separated from each other mechanically later. Other times the plants can be separated by height and harvested on subsequent passes. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intercropping https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intercropping https://www.grainews.ca/2013/10/08/six-things-to-consider-when-intercropping/ https://www.grainews.ca/2013/10/08/six-things-to-consider-wh...

rdlecler1 8y ago

It would also be incredibly slow. You might cover a few acres per hour and would need dozens of these operating in tandum to cover a large farm.

bitwize 8y ago

> But a robot capable of recognizing all the plants could tell... and could selectively harvest just what is needed. You don't even need a robot for this. The city of Edmonton, Alberta has deployed a fleet of small weeding machines to curb pesticide use -- to wit, specially-trained weed-eating goats.

bainsfather 8y ago
Could you provide a link please? On pasture land I see the opposite problem - the animals eat the 'best' stuff (clover, grass) and leave the weeds (thistles, nettles, buttercups, ragwort etc). (Although partly this is because on pasture land, weeds are 'what animals do not eat' :)
- bitwize 8y ago
  https://www.edmonton.ca/activities_parks_recreation/parks_rivervalley/goat-pilot-project.aspx https://www.edmonton.ca/activities_parks_recreation/parks_ri... Goats are known for their ability to consume a wide variety of plants, especially weeds and shrubs that other animals won't touch. These goats have been specially trained to target noxious weeds and are constantly watched by humans and dogs.

throwaway648 8y ago

Unlike human, computer is exceptionally good at remembering stuff. No need for plant recognition when you can brute force remember where you planted each individual seed.