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I think that "mixed" farming like this article describes has a huge potential for automation by the software field. Monocrops[0] (homogeneous fields of crops l

I think that "mixed" farming like this article describes has a huge potential for automation by the software field. Monocrops[0] (homogeneous fields of crops like corn or soybeans) are easy to build automated robots for. We've been doing that for generations now, starting with combine harvesters[1]. But there are many problems with growing monocrops[2]. Pests are a problem -- they breed and spread disease. And on the soil nutrient side, you have to keep re-fertilizing (and often over-fertilize[3]) every year to keep it going. And still nutrients continue to decline in the food that Americans are eating[4]. If, as a field (of software engineers), we can figure out a way to build robots that allow growing and harvesting plants in heterogeneous environments, that will be a significant step forward to fixing these problems. I'm optimistic that it will be possible in the next decade to build it and make it profitable. :) If you don't have to use fertilizer and pests don't eat your crops because you haven't created the ideal breeding ground for pests + disease, then this problem should be solved by market forces alone. At least, I hope so! 0: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monocropping https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monocropping 1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Combine_harvester https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Combine_harvester 2: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monocropping#Monocropping_difficulty https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monocropping#Monocropping_diff... 3: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fertilizer#Environmental_effects https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fertilizer#Environmental_effec... 4: https://journals.ashs.org/hortsci/view/journals/hortsci/44/1/article-p15.xml https://journals.ashs.org/hortsci/view/journals/hortsci/44/1...

banads 6y ago
Nature abhors monoculture
jrumbut 6y ago
I think this is a problem seen in many fields, that they are designed around our ability to model them.
- reginaldo 6y ago
  That, and the fact that we don't really revisit the modeling approaches when the constraints that led to them no longer apply. For instance, incremental evolution based on a branch where work was done "by hand" into animals, simpler machines and then very complex machines might lead to a very different result than evolution from a branch where the ability to design some types of complex machines is there "from the start". Note that this is different than saying "let's completely ignore the past".
Fiahil 6y ago
There is a short explanation on why heterogeneous cropping is not the norm : Harvesting is just extremely difficult. It's not just a software automation problem, it's building the machinery and tractors, training people, gathering feedbacks... Even if you manage to repetitively grow successful combinations of produces, that's only the beginning of the journey. Farming is an far older industry than software engineering, don't you think humans already tried that in the past 10 000 years ?
- freeqaz 6y ago
  It is a hard problem. Historically, people often grew plants in heterogeneous environments because they grew their own crops. Even if it wasn't _all_ of their food, it was still a subset of their food. But it was very labor intensive. The scale of monocrop farming today with modern tractors is a very new field as well (no pun intended). With machine learning specifically, I can see a robot arm being able to farm a lot of mixed crops. This is already happening for the most labor-intensive crops like strawberries[0]. Robots are cheap and can work 24/7. I think it just a matter of time before computers advance enough to be able to perform the basic, repetitive tasks that humans are able to. 0: https://www.therobotreport.com/strawberry-picking-robot-maker-raises-75m/ https://www.therobotreport.com/strawberry-picking-robot-make...
  - Fiahil 6y ago
    This very interesting piece might be of interest for you : https://99percentinvisible.org/episode/how-to-pick-a-pepper/ https://99percentinvisible.org/episode/how-to-pick-a-pepper/ It took one of the protagonist ten years of testing to find a machine capable of harvesting special-bread peppers. The breakthrough your are looking for isn't for software engineering only - or even at all -. It's a combination of mechanical engineering, biology and hacking. Venture-led startups often lead to short-lived niche products made to impress silicon valley. It's not sustainable, and it's not the future.
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
- dtwest 6y ago
mikeg8 6y ago
I do not believe the solution is to increase robotics to support this field, I think the solution is much more about a paradigm shift from over-optimization aka mono-cultures to a more holistic approach that increases the human-nature connection. We have to heal ourselves to heal the planet and while technology can help, software engineers will not be the heroes on this front, it will be more traditional stewards of the land.
- airstrike 6y ago
  The parent is precisely arguing against mono-cultures. I don't see how your reply is really discussing any of the various relevant points he raised. Right now, all that I understand from your opinion is that you think robots are bad because of mono-cultures, but the parent would argue equating those two things is incorrect.
  - creddit 6y ago
    If you read closely their response is basically a Luddite, anti-tech response. Their problem with the parent was that it suggested using technology.
    - mikeg8 6y ago
      I'm definitely not anti-technology as a whole, but I very much think many of the environmental problems we're facing in agriculture were caused by an over reliance on technology in the first place. We abstracted ourselves out of the process too much and it has had horrible consequences.
      - freeqaz 6y ago
        There is an element of truth to this. I agree -- people are out of touch with the world around them, on average. But it's a double-edged sword. The abstraction has been hugely beneficial to society as a whole. Specialization lets us create entirely new industries. These problems can't be ignored forever though. Eventually the dollar figure behind them will motivate even the most conservative actors. If it's cheaper to use better technology, and that technology doesn't have the same side effects, then there is no reason to continue to harm. We're just not there yet.
konschubert 6y ago
Wouldn’t it be easier to just plant something else every other year? I thought this was solved literally 1000 years ago: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Three-field_system https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Three-field_system
- armenarmen 6y ago
  I was always confused by this as well. Then I spoke to a person working in agriculture, apparently chemical fertilizers are cheap enough to make crop rotation redundant.
  - AOsborn 6y ago
    As a layman I assumed that was the case. But I understand the bigger issue now is that both soil and crop nutrients are dropping in farms due to soil depletion[0]. 0: https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/soil-depletion-and-nutrition-loss/ https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/soil-depletion-an...
    - hosh 6y ago
      Yeah. And not only that, the "regenerative agriculture" mentioned in the article isn't just about sustainable practices, where we put back into the soilwhat we take out. Regenerative practices includes practices where soil fertility is built up year after year as a result of the agricultural practices. In other words, you can take a depleted land and bring it back up into productive land, and potentially, become more productive than non-regenerative practices. You can grow more than a single plant together, and depending on the combination, they can synergize in a way that helps both of them grow. Some of that is due to pest management (where one plant species deters pests that raid the other). Some add nutrients (nitrogen fixers and other dynamic accumulators). Some can grow at different canopy layers (such as growing ground cover to help retain moisture while taller plants are used as trellises for vining plants). Some plants have deep tap roots that break up compacted soil and help draw out nutrients to make them bioavailable. Many of them are pioneer plants and are considered weeds or considered invasive.
tootie 6y ago
How long until we can deploy fleets of microdrones capable of killing pests with computer vision and lasers?
- dkarp 6y ago
  Don’t forget those pests to us are food to other organisms.
  - tootie 6y ago
    But we're already killing them in vast quantities using chemical biocides. Micro Laser Drones (tm) are only killing pests that are already doomed. They just don't seep into the water table or cause cancer.
- 0xdeadbeefbabe 6y ago
  "“Unprecedented” locust invasion threatens crops in East Africa " https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22205251 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22205251 (not yet)
- IAmEveryone 6y ago
  We've kinda been doing that for a while, see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biopesticide https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biopesticide More mechanical contraptions also have a long history, and do actually include lasers: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bird_scarer#Lasers https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bird_scarer#Lasers But most pests are rather microscopic. I doubt we will ever construct silicon/metal hardware better able to operate at the level of, say, spores than the biological systems that are natural to that environment.
- totetsu 6y ago
  drones are used to disperse corn moth preditor larve in germany, and cv is being tested on mobile platforms that can target spray or dig plants.
- hosh 6y ago
  Or, I can plant things that repel specific pests, plant things that attract the natural predators of that pest, or plant sunflowers and tobacco as sacrificial plants. I can let the chickens go after the pests. I can recognize that sometimes, the pests are a solution to a different problem, and adjust things accordingly. All of those solutions are more resilient than microdrones, computer vision, and laser. These high tech solutions require a long global supply chain. They don't make them as robust as as they used to. Further, having multiple, redundant pest management systems means that when one of them fails, they won't all fail.
yaktubi 6y ago
Tree farming and automation: rm -rf /
akiselev 6y ago
From [4]: Three kinds of evidence point toward declines of some nutrients in fruits and vegetables available in the United States and the United Kingdom: ... 3) recent side-by-side plantings of low- and high-yield cultivars of broccoli and grains found consistently negative correlations between yield and concentrations of minerals and protein, a newly recognized genetic dilution effect. I think more automation is only going to make the nutrition content problem far worse. Industrial agriculture has optimized the strains largely based on consumer preference - consumers vote with their dollars for fruit that look consistently like their ideal vegetable or fruit (i.e. round, bright red tomatoes). They pay a lot of money for produce out of season so it's far more profitable to ship long distance so they have to look good and have a decent shelf life after a long transport too. We've been running breeding programs to optimize for those variables for a century or more without ever considering their impact. These evolutionary pressures combined with yield optimization seem to strongly select against nutrition, sugar content, and flavor. For example, my parents only started planting their homestead a year or two ago but already this year the peaches, raspberries, and apples are leagues better than anything I can find in stores or farmers markets and bring me back to the food I remember before I moved to the United States. I can't easily test the nutritional content but I bet it's much better, even with the over-fertilization that they have to do (despite being in California). Once we start optimizing for automation requirements as well as everything else - to justify the extra capital expense - I'm afraid the quality of the food will get even worse. Every operation, even the "organic" ones, falls prey to loss of quality beyond a certain size and it's largely because of economic pressure that I suspect will only get worse.
- EdwardDiego 6y ago
  I once bought some Californian peaches (I live in NZ). They were very large, good looking, and absolutely tasteless. Watery with only vague hints of peach flavour.
einpoklum 6y ago
The thing is, "market forces" (= large corporations) might "solve" it by relying on the use of cheap energy from fossil fuels for doing online vision processing. And then you've converted one sustainability problem into another. (Which may not be a terrible trade-off, but still.)
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
Alex3917 6y ago
On a similar note, is there any way to get money to fund amateur crop research? I know you usually need to plant at least 1,000 trees to have a decent shot at creating a new commercially viable cultivar, which I'm not interested in doing at that scale, but I'd plant and monitor 100 as a hobby if I could get someone to pay for that as 1/10th of a research plot.

banads 6y ago

Nature abhors monoculture

jrumbut 6y ago

I think this is a problem seen in many fields, that they are designed around our ability to model them.

reginaldo 6y ago
That, and the fact that we don't really revisit the modeling approaches when the constraints that led to them no longer apply. For instance, incremental evolution based on a branch where work was done "by hand" into animals, simpler machines and then very complex machines might lead to a very different result than evolution from a branch where the ability to design some types of complex machines is there "from the start". Note that this is different than saying "let's completely ignore the past".

Fiahil 6y ago

There is a short explanation on why heterogeneous cropping is not the norm : Harvesting is just extremely difficult. It's not just a software automation problem, it's building the machinery and tractors, training people, gathering feedbacks... Even if you manage to repetitively grow successful combinations of produces, that's only the beginning of the journey. Farming is an far older industry than software engineering, don't you think humans already tried that in the past 10 000 years ?

freeqaz 6y ago
It is a hard problem. Historically, people often grew plants in heterogeneous environments because they grew their own crops. Even if it wasn't _all_ of their food, it was still a subset of their food. But it was very labor intensive. The scale of monocrop farming today with modern tractors is a very new field as well (no pun intended). With machine learning specifically, I can see a robot arm being able to farm a lot of mixed crops. This is already happening for the most labor-intensive crops like strawberries[0]. Robots are cheap and can work 24/7. I think it just a matter of time before computers advance enough to be able to perform the basic, repetitive tasks that humans are able to. 0: https://www.therobotreport.com/strawberry-picking-robot-maker-raises-75m/ https://www.therobotreport.com/strawberry-picking-robot-make...
- Fiahil 6y ago
  This very interesting piece might be of interest for you : https://99percentinvisible.org/episode/how-to-pick-a-pepper/ https://99percentinvisible.org/episode/how-to-pick-a-pepper/ It took one of the protagonist ten years of testing to find a machine capable of harvesting special-bread peppers. The breakthrough your are looking for isn't for software engineering only - or even at all -. It's a combination of mechanical engineering, biology and hacking. Venture-led startups often lead to short-lived niche products made to impress silicon valley. It's not sustainable, and it's not the future.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
dtwest 6y ago

mikeg8 6y ago

I do not believe the solution is to increase robotics to support this field, I think the solution is much more about a paradigm shift from over-optimization aka mono-cultures to a more holistic approach that increases the human-nature connection. We have to heal ourselves to heal the planet and while technology can help, software engineers will not be the heroes on this front, it will be more traditional stewards of the land.

airstrike 6y ago
The parent is precisely arguing against mono-cultures. I don't see how your reply is really discussing any of the various relevant points he raised. Right now, all that I understand from your opinion is that you think robots are bad because of mono-cultures, but the parent would argue equating those two things is incorrect.
- creddit 6y ago
  If you read closely their response is basically a Luddite, anti-tech response. Their problem with the parent was that it suggested using technology.
  - mikeg8 6y ago
    I'm definitely not anti-technology as a whole, but I very much think many of the environmental problems we're facing in agriculture were caused by an over reliance on technology in the first place. We abstracted ourselves out of the process too much and it has had horrible consequences.
    - freeqaz 6y ago
      There is an element of truth to this. I agree -- people are out of touch with the world around them, on average. But it's a double-edged sword. The abstraction has been hugely beneficial to society as a whole. Specialization lets us create entirely new industries. These problems can't be ignored forever though. Eventually the dollar figure behind them will motivate even the most conservative actors. If it's cheaper to use better technology, and that technology doesn't have the same side effects, then there is no reason to continue to harm. We're just not there yet.

konschubert 6y ago

Wouldn’t it be easier to just plant something else every other year? I thought this was solved literally 1000 years ago: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Three-field_system https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Three-field_system

armenarmen 6y ago
I was always confused by this as well. Then I spoke to a person working in agriculture, apparently chemical fertilizers are cheap enough to make crop rotation redundant.
- AOsborn 6y ago
  As a layman I assumed that was the case. But I understand the bigger issue now is that both soil and crop nutrients are dropping in farms due to soil depletion[0]. 0: https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/soil-depletion-and-nutrition-loss/ https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/soil-depletion-an...
  - hosh 6y ago
    Yeah. And not only that, the "regenerative agriculture" mentioned in the article isn't just about sustainable practices, where we put back into the soilwhat we take out. Regenerative practices includes practices where soil fertility is built up year after year as a result of the agricultural practices. In other words, you can take a depleted land and bring it back up into productive land, and potentially, become more productive than non-regenerative practices. You can grow more than a single plant together, and depending on the combination, they can synergize in a way that helps both of them grow. Some of that is due to pest management (where one plant species deters pests that raid the other). Some add nutrients (nitrogen fixers and other dynamic accumulators). Some can grow at different canopy layers (such as growing ground cover to help retain moisture while taller plants are used as trellises for vining plants). Some plants have deep tap roots that break up compacted soil and help draw out nutrients to make them bioavailable. Many of them are pioneer plants and are considered weeds or considered invasive.

tootie 6y ago

How long until we can deploy fleets of microdrones capable of killing pests with computer vision and lasers?

dkarp 6y ago
Don’t forget those pests to us are food to other organisms.
- tootie 6y ago
  But we're already killing them in vast quantities using chemical biocides. Micro Laser Drones (tm) are only killing pests that are already doomed. They just don't seep into the water table or cause cancer.
0xdeadbeefbabe 6y ago
"“Unprecedented” locust invasion threatens crops in East Africa " https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22205251 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22205251 (not yet)
IAmEveryone 6y ago
We've kinda been doing that for a while, see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biopesticide https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biopesticide More mechanical contraptions also have a long history, and do actually include lasers: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bird_scarer#Lasers https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bird_scarer#Lasers But most pests are rather microscopic. I doubt we will ever construct silicon/metal hardware better able to operate at the level of, say, spores than the biological systems that are natural to that environment.
totetsu 6y ago
drones are used to disperse corn moth preditor larve in germany, and cv is being tested on mobile platforms that can target spray or dig plants.
hosh 6y ago
Or, I can plant things that repel specific pests, plant things that attract the natural predators of that pest, or plant sunflowers and tobacco as sacrificial plants. I can let the chickens go after the pests. I can recognize that sometimes, the pests are a solution to a different problem, and adjust things accordingly. All of those solutions are more resilient than microdrones, computer vision, and laser. These high tech solutions require a long global supply chain. They don't make them as robust as as they used to. Further, having multiple, redundant pest management systems means that when one of them fails, they won't all fail.

yaktubi 6y ago

Tree farming and automation: rm -rf /

akiselev 6y ago

From [4]: Three kinds of evidence point toward declines of some nutrients in fruits and vegetables available in the United States and the United Kingdom: ... 3) recent side-by-side plantings of low- and high-yield cultivars of broccoli and grains found consistently negative correlations between yield and concentrations of minerals and protein, a newly recognized genetic dilution effect. I think more automation is only going to make the nutrition content problem far worse. Industrial agriculture has optimized the strains largely based on consumer preference - consumers vote with their dollars for fruit that look consistently like their ideal vegetable or fruit (i.e. round, bright red tomatoes). They pay a lot of money for produce out of season so it's far more profitable to ship long distance so they have to look good and have a decent shelf life after a long transport too. We've been running breeding programs to optimize for those variables for a century or more without ever considering their impact. These evolutionary pressures combined with yield optimization seem to strongly select against nutrition, sugar content, and flavor. For example, my parents only started planting their homestead a year or two ago but already this year the peaches, raspberries, and apples are leagues better than anything I can find in stores or farmers markets and bring me back to the food I remember before I moved to the United States. I can't easily test the nutritional content but I bet it's much better, even with the over-fertilization that they have to do (despite being in California). Once we start optimizing for automation requirements as well as everything else - to justify the extra capital expense - I'm afraid the quality of the food will get even worse. Every operation, even the "organic" ones, falls prey to loss of quality beyond a certain size and it's largely because of economic pressure that I suspect will only get worse.

EdwardDiego 6y ago
I once bought some Californian peaches (I live in NZ). They were very large, good looking, and absolutely tasteless. Watery with only vague hints of peach flavour.

einpoklum 6y ago

The thing is, "market forces" (= large corporations) might "solve" it by relying on the use of cheap energy from fossil fuels for doing online vision processing. And then you've converted one sustainability problem into another. (Which may not be a terrible trade-off, but still.)

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

Alex3917 6y ago

On a similar note, is there any way to get money to fund amateur crop research? I know you usually need to plant at least 1,000 trees to have a decent shot at creating a new commercially viable cultivar, which I'm not interested in doing at that scale, but I'd plant and monitor 100 as a hobby if I could get someone to pay for that as 1/10th of a research plot.