4 ms·

One of my favorite OSS projects is farmbot. I wish more people knew about it. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8r0CiLBM1o8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8r0Ci

One of my favorite OSS projects is farmbot. I wish more people knew about it. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8r0CiLBM1o8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8r0CiLBM1o8

mikro2nd 8y ago
Farmbot is a toy. A nice toy, to be sure, but a toy for rich urbanites who want a little veggie garden and it'll never be anything more than that. It goes nowhere near addressing the scale of real-world farming and I see no way it ever can. The concept won't even scale to small-scale market gardening -- the 1- to 10-hectare scale. I'm not saying that farm-robotics in general can't work or scale -- it's a something I'm convinced stands a good chance of tackling the enormous fossil-fuel subsidy that factory farming is so dependent upon -- but the Farmbot thing... /stiffles a giggle/.
- jmathai 8y ago
  What makes you think that? These first few iterations are expensive (in the thousands of dollars) and require assembly but those are not difficult problems to address over time. Are you saying people wouldn't want to have an automated home garden in their back yard if they could afford it?
  - mikro2nd 8y ago
    No, I precisely said that it's a nice thing to have an automated home-garden for people that can afford it. I like the Farmbot. But it is Never. Going. To. Automate. Real. Large-scale. Farming. Never. Real farming -- the modern, factory kind of thing -- the stuff that provides the overwhelming bulk of food (maize, soya, wheat) -- happens on a massive scale over hundreds to thousands of hectares, and the Farmbot concept -- essentially a 2-D plotter with various head attachments -- is just never going to begin to automate that sort of scale. (Downvote me all you want.) Very large mobile robots might work, though I wonder about how the power requirements are going to be met. To my mind swarms of smaller robots seem to be the best bet, but I haven't seen a lot of work going on in that space. Lettuces and Beetroots are nice. I grow a hell of a lot of those myself. But they don't feed the planet.
    - dragonwriter 8y ago
      > Very large mobile robots might work My (distant and loose, to be sure) understanding of modern farm machinery is that they largely have, compared to just a few decades ago, though the robots still have operator seats and look very much the non-automated versions that preceded them.
      - mikro2nd 8y ago
        Yes, that is pretty-much the current state of play - already existing mechanical platforms that have had some more-or-less clever automation (mainly guidance) added. My thinking is that a smaller-machine, swarm approach might allow us to eliminate the fossil-fuel subsidy. Big machinery is much harder to do without diesel. With small machines, many of them cooperating, renewable energy fueling is much more (I think) approachable. (I may be wrong.) If we're going to win this climate thing, one of the elephants in the room is decarbonising agriculture.
- noonespecial 8y ago
  That sounds suspiciously like the "just get a horse" argument about the first cars.

One of my favorite OSS projects is farmbot. I wish more people knew about it. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8r0CiLBM1o8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8r0CiLBM1o8

mikro2nd 8y ago

Farmbot is a toy. A nice toy, to be sure, but a toy for rich urbanites who want a little veggie garden and it'll never be anything more than that. It goes nowhere near addressing the scale of real-world farming and I see no way it ever can. The concept won't even scale to small-scale market gardening -- the 1- to 10-hectare scale. I'm not saying that farm-robotics in general can't work or scale -- it's a something I'm convinced stands a good chance of tackling the enormous fossil-fuel subsidy that factory farming is so dependent upon -- but the Farmbot thing... /stiffles a giggle/.

jmathai 8y ago
What makes you think that? These first few iterations are expensive (in the thousands of dollars) and require assembly but those are not difficult problems to address over time. Are you saying people wouldn't want to have an automated home garden in their back yard if they could afford it?
- mikro2nd 8y ago
  No, I precisely said that it's a nice thing to have an automated home-garden for people that can afford it. I like the Farmbot. But it is Never. Going. To. Automate. Real. Large-scale. Farming. Never. Real farming -- the modern, factory kind of thing -- the stuff that provides the overwhelming bulk of food (maize, soya, wheat) -- happens on a massive scale over hundreds to thousands of hectares, and the Farmbot concept -- essentially a 2-D plotter with various head attachments -- is just never going to begin to automate that sort of scale. (Downvote me all you want.) Very large mobile robots might work, though I wonder about how the power requirements are going to be met. To my mind swarms of smaller robots seem to be the best bet, but I haven't seen a lot of work going on in that space. Lettuces and Beetroots are nice. I grow a hell of a lot of those myself. But they don't feed the planet.
  - dragonwriter 8y ago
    > Very large mobile robots might work My (distant and loose, to be sure) understanding of modern farm machinery is that they largely have, compared to just a few decades ago, though the robots still have operator seats and look very much the non-automated versions that preceded them.
    - mikro2nd 8y ago
      Yes, that is pretty-much the current state of play - already existing mechanical platforms that have had some more-or-less clever automation (mainly guidance) added. My thinking is that a smaller-machine, swarm approach might allow us to eliminate the fossil-fuel subsidy. Big machinery is much harder to do without diesel. With small machines, many of them cooperating, renewable energy fueling is much more (I think) approachable. (I may be wrong.) If we're going to win this climate thing, one of the elephants in the room is decarbonising agriculture.
noonespecial 8y ago
That sounds suspiciously like the "just get a horse" argument about the first cars.