11 ms·

This is an improvement within the current paradigm of "big ag", but IMHO tech is opening the possibility of a completely different way of doing things. For exam

This is an improvement within the current paradigm of "big ag", but IMHO tech is opening the possibility of a completely different way of doing things. For example, this comment which is below the linked video imagines a robot-maintained food forest, I think it's on point because I, too, believe that the future is swarms of small robots rather than a few big tractors: > Imagine, a few years down the line, applying these principles to maintaining an edible polyculture ecosystem-farm. Not necessarily a big machine going through a flat field, but small drones tending to trees, vines, herbs, plants, pollinators and water features all in the location that is best for them based on local features. It could micromanage weeding and harvesting, but also composting, planting, grafting and nurturing keystone species and rare species while avoiding pesticide, nitrogen imbalance and soil compaction. A productive farm could look like the garden of Eden.

_aavaa_ 4y ago
Next up, swarms of robot bees to do the pollination: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hated_in_the_Nation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hated_in_the_Nation
- conviencefee999 4y ago
  Ironically this is actually one of the bigger problems to solve for in the generation and is one that has not been solved for.
  - _aavaa_ 4y ago
    I don't think there's any irony in it. That's exactly why they were used in the show.
  - quixoticelixer- 4y ago
    This is not one of the bigger problems to solve for our generation. European honey bees are not going anywhere.
    - conviencefee999 4y ago
      No it has more to do with creating robots at this size that can take and complete complex tasks not the honey bees.
bluGill 4y ago
> the future is swarms of small robots rather than a few big tractors: You are missing something important: soil compaction is a sub linear function of weight. which means that larger tractors that cover more area with the same tire tracks are must friendly for the soil, compared to many small tractors. Because of this factor larger is better. Eventually we may get to the point where the tractor runs on tracks, to allow even bigger tractors that touch a smaller are of soil. Sure flying drones will have less soil compaction, and they will have a place in the future, but keeping something in the air uses vastly more energy than wheels on the ground.
lancesells 4y ago
I feel this dream of robots everywhere gets us farther from a garden of Eden. To cultivate the earth we're going to mine other parts of it? I'm not suggesting getting rid of the tools that improve quality of life but does automating one aspect not cause 100 other things down the line? There's mining, factories, repairing, replacing. Maybe instead of robots we work on getting people to have gardens on their property, in cities use the rooftops, stop importing foods from across the globe, etc.
fangorn 4y ago
Sounds like we need a G.E.C.K.!
- worldsayshi 4y ago
  And G.E.C.K. kind of sounds like http://opensourceecology.org http://opensourceecology.org
  - CuriousCosmic 4y ago
    Oh lovely. OSE is still doing good. I remember reading up on the project a decade or so ago back when it was basically just a wiki and a handful of engineers. The project is pretty well thought out and extremely ambitious. I can only hope they continue to make good progress on it.
AOsborn 4y ago
Absolutely, swarms make a lot of sense. Also, the key difference between a 'hard' challenge like self-driving cars and something like self-sustaining agriculture is that the reliability doesn't need to be 100%. An achievable target could be something like 'one human to operate the location'. Things will break, software will glitch, maintenance will be required - but that will be OK, as long as the issues can be corrected in a reasonable length of time.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- ForrestN 4y ago
  Furthermore, with the right sensors, there's an opportunity for the swarm to self-correct without human intervention based on results. It doesn't have to be exactly right at the moment, because any ill effects will be noticeable and fixable well after a mistake is made.
0xbadcafebee 4y ago
I keep saying I want a laser on a turret that zaps cabbage moths, snails, japanese beetles, squash bugs. Do I need it? No... but it would reduce my labor and losses while increasing profit. There's so much opportunity for improvement, but we need the R&D money and start-ups to be there too. Please, VCs, spend your money on these projects!
tomxor 4y ago
> applying these principles to maintaining an edible polyculture ecosystem-farm Yup, actually if you read between the edits toward the end of the video I think this is in the minds of those working on it, not sure why it wasn't focused on more, perhaps because it sounds less immediately practical... once the automation is somewhat intelligent, the need for a monoculture for viable large scale agriculture is diminished. In fact at a certain point of sophistication, especially when harvesting a polyculture becomes viable, it will probably flip and become significantly more profitable long term to abandon monoculture... since the soil health will improve over time which also improves yields.
worldsayshi 4y ago
I feel like what you're describing is still in the realm of sci fi because of limitations in robot autonomy that we have expected to break through many times without success. If we succeed with autonomous driving we will probably succeed in these domains as well. As well as many other domains.
- Ancalagon 4y ago
  Also I think maintenance of 1000 tiny drones is going to be a lot more difficult than that of one big tractor
  - ForrestN 4y ago
    This isn't intuitive to me. If one big tractor has a failure, the whole operation shuts down. If 1/1000 drones breaks, swap in a spare and move it to some kind (potentially automate-able) repair area. If the ideal number of drones is 1000 operationally, you just need to figure out how much of a margin of extra reserves you need to keep things operating. But even with a .1% lower capacity, you'd probably not notice anything, especially compared with 100% lower capacity.
    - crazygringo 4y ago
      I think the worry is that with 1,000 drones, if you have 10 breaking daily, that's probably a full-time job for someone to be repairing them, especially if they have to go out retrieving them. One big tractor isn't a full-time job's worth of maintenance.
      - ForrestN 4y ago
        I guess I don't really understand your assumptions. Why would 1 massive machine capable of doing all the various tasks of managing this farm require less maintenance than 1000 presumably much simpler, smaller machines? Assuming other things besides mobility break, I don't think retrieval would be much more of an issue, or that we'd have reason to expect the failure rate to be higher for each smaller, simpler drone than for the giant, super-complex one. To get the same work done, the behemoth would have to move much faster, have many more specialize tools and sensors all in the same rig, and would not be swappable for regular maintenance without pausing the entire workflow. Small drones could go back to base in shifts (again with some margin of extra drones) so that there are always 1000 actively working.
dools 4y ago
That’s what farmbot is going for
ForrestN 4y ago
I love this vision and hope it becomes the dominant telos for all of the work underway in this area. In addition to "beautiful farm," imagine a world where farms, parks, wildlife preserves, decarbonization centers, and biological research hubs are all the same place? No reason these swarms can't be optimizing/managing a native ecosystem food-forest with high yield in mind... and likewise easy to imagine unobtrusive, silent robots that don't stand in the way of the ecosystem's normal functioning.
robotresearcher 4y ago
> the future is swarms of small robots A key problem with small autonomous robots is their energy supply and mass. Batteries have low energy density. Actuators have bad power to weight ratios too. Living things are enormously more efficient. So much so that the intuition apparently offered by watching animals usually does not apply. This is extremely true for swarm robotics, inspired by ants, termites, etc. Swarm critters rely on the emergent effects of lots of behavior to make up for their limited sensing and computation. By 'limited' I mean relative to a mammal or bird. Lots of behavior means lots of energy spent moving and doing: exactly what is prohibitively expensive for a robot. Computation and sensing is getting better, smaller and cheaper much faster than batteries and actuators. This trend favors smarter robots that think carefully (cheap) and do the right thing (expensive per shot).
- snapplebobapple 4y ago
  Not to mention by making it pulled by tractor you get something that complements the existing o̶l̶i̶g̶o̶p̶o̶l̶i̶s̶t̶s̶ large players so it's more like you can do something with them to scale yourself out rather than compete against them to scale yourself out. It's much smarter making something tractor pulled from a business economics perspective, not just from a physics perspective.
- 8n4vidtmkvmk 4y ago
  what if we make them bigger than insects but still relatively small? just an arm on a track. heck, we can put the energy in the track too. boom, no battery.
  - travisgriggs 4y ago
    There are some interesting things being done with pivot spans. Hummingbird runs nozzles back and forth on rails suspended from each pivot span. But they’re difficult to keep running. Ag is hard. It’s dusty. The weather can be brutal. Stuff gets left out year round. The turnover is high. Schedules are dynamic and unforgiving (when the weather turns, you have to adapt your whole operation). There’s not a lot of highly technical staff to maintain things; bailing wire and bandaids is a real thing. The tradition of “hacking things” to keep them working comes from farmers. The more complicated your machinery, the more your MTBF product goes up. So complicated units don’t scale well. If a single sprinkler on a pivot fails or misbehaves, there’s nearly 400 of them and there’s some overlap. If your “robot” stalls out with some grit or a power supply issue or a bricked update, or leaky hydraulics, you just lost 1/10 of your pivot. Pray it happens on an inner span, rather than an outer one.
karaokeyoga 4y ago
Reading the comments in this thread reminded me of "Silent Running" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silent_Running https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silent_Running). Droids (albeit 70s-style), agro-tech, and post-apocalyptic sci-fi. It's dated but enjoyable.
- bradknowles 4y ago
  I'm glad I wasn't the only one thinking that. Of course, that movie does have certain other implications and side effects....
- kwhitefoot 4y ago
  > dated but enjoyable. And very, very sad.
askvictor 4y ago
I wonder how long it will take weeds to evolve to being 'invisible' to the robots' eyes.
- JoeAltmaier 4y ago
  Well, the invisible ones will thrive immediately. So, 1 generation.
  - MikePlacid 4y ago
    How do you know they are not thriving already?
    - JoeAltmaier 4y ago
      All competition removed. This sprayer is designed to promote the growth of {everything it doesn't kill}. Those 'weeds' will have as much benefit from the spot-spraying as the crop. Which is either significant, or it's negligible (and this sprayer is useless, so probably not that)
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
munbun 4y ago
Subsequently sending us into a future forecasted by Michael Crichton’s Prey
rmason 4y ago
Watching that video made me joyful. I was an agronomist in the early nineties walking soybean fields twelve hours a day mapping weeds and then going back to the office making what's called postemerge chemical recommendations to get most of the weeds that I had observed. During those hot days having then written software for a hobby I thought there has to be a better way. Could a sprayer map weeds and apply chemicals in a single pass? I did an in depth investigation talking to tech people and university experts to see if what I imagined was possible. What I found out was that we were decades away from the tech making it possible. A couple of years later Monsanto came out with Roundup resistant soybeans and my soybean field walking was greatly reduced overnight. Problem with this one solution fits all was that soybean yields dipped with the resistant beans for farmers that previously had good weed control and we began to develop more Roundup resistant weeds. I did notice that this company is working with high value crops only. I believe the reason is the tech currently is quite expensive. Though in time the cost should come down as more farmers use it. One problem for the Eastern states is the use of shields on the boom. The company that I worked for experimented with shields on our commercial sprayers. In fact we were the first people to do it East of the Rocky Mountains. We bought them because we wanted to be able to spray on windy days. The shields had problems and were parked in the weeds in a single crop season.
- diordiderot 4y ago
  The best parts of that job was when you stood still for a minute late in the season, completely oblivious to the stream of fire ants pouring into your boots
  - tomcam 4y ago
    In my case the hornets nest I stepped on while admiring our huge 250+ year-old walnut tree
  - rmason 4y ago
    I could tell stories for hours. The scariest one: I did a lot of soil testing. Refused to go out on November 15th, the start of deer season, after the 4WD pickup I was using was shot up in a field. I hugged the floorboard as shots went through the truck and just over me. How a bright yellow pickup could be confused with a deer is beyond me.
leobg 4y ago
We had such a system. It was called slavery. Lots of cheap labor. And still we arranged our crops in the style of vineyards, so as to reduce to travel time of workers between plants.
jillesvangurp 4y ago
Yes, the current ways of doing intensive farming are hard on the land and ultimately very wasteful. If you look at the progress in pesticide free organic farming and indoor/vertical farming, what they have in common is that they leverage a more data driven approach where you simply don't need to pre-emptively correct problems if you can manage the environment in which you grow plants better. Avoiding the conditions that cause pests and weeds to get out control is much more efficient than dealing with them after things get out of control. Basically, intensive agriculture is compensating for its destructive nature by just brutally suppressing any "undesirable" growth. In nature, pests target the weaker plants. Basically, you stress out plants by mismanaging them and they are fair game for a wide range of fungi, insects, etc. E.g. under or over watering them, depleting the soil, etc. all stress plants out. If you have unhealthy soil, it's hard to have healthy plants growing in it. Intensive agriculture starts with disrupting the soil (by plowing it). This causes the soil to degrade over time and releases captured carbon into the atmosphere. The natural response is for aggressive weeds to start growing in disrupted soil. To "fix" this, farmers use a mix of pesticides and fertilizers. The pesticides kill a lot more than just the pests and weeds and then further degrades the soil and the bio diversity in and on it. And finally the fertilizer is just bleeding out of the land straight into the ground water and surrounding areas. It works but it is resource intensive. You need lots of water, chemicals, energy, etc to grow a single crop at the cost of literally anything else. Basically modern intensive farming grows mono cultures on top of artificially created deserts. Organic farming avoids doing that. Try not to disrupt the soil. Kill off (and compost) weaker plants rather than trying to rescue them. Use nature to keep pests and weeds in check. Etc. It works but it is more labor intensive. You need people to look after things. You get healthier and tastier produce (cooks love organically grown stuff for this reason). However, automating that labor makes it more scalable. That's the opportunity here.
- madacol 4y ago
  > If you look at the progress in pesticide free organic farming and indoor/vertical farming By what measure is vertical farming more efficient?. I've heard the contrary regarding green house gas emissions, it is still less efficient in most crops, it consumes too much power and that overcompensates any efficiency gained in other areas It's interesting that this conclusion can change drastically if electricity becomes 10-100x more efficient
blubbi 4y ago
Not a drone yet, but hey, less than 200kg are pretty much flyweight in farming ;) https://dahliarobotics.com/video https://dahliarobotics.com/video It doesn't even need to use herbicides because it removes weeds mechanically. We actually build it to also fit into Europe's small(er) scale farms as well. Regarding the energy issues mentioned multiple times in various threads here: We managed to make it solar powered and battery buffered to work autonomously for more than a working day. Disclosure: Co-funder of the company
BiteCode_dev 4y ago
If only there were swarms of self replicating autonomous systems that can heal, recharge and defend themselves without input and adapt to new situations, while being stress tested for free for millions of years. But I'm dreaming, certainly if it would have existed humans would have tried to leverage them a long time ago.
- bsaul 4y ago
  A Sci-Fi fan biology researcher friend of mine joked a long time ago that the culmination of cybertech is biotech.
- ben_w 4y ago
  Snark aside, as useful as the birds and the bees are, they've got their own goals, and those goals aren't always aligned with ours — hence the use of pesticides and insecticides, or indeed scarecrows, in the first place.
  - BiteCode_dev 4y ago
    Of course but it's not like if collaboration, coercion, manipulation and environment crafting were ineffective tools to influence life. It used to be our fav tools, now we just don't go in that direction much anymore. We could study, teach, bread, terraform, integrate and so on at a much larger scale and with better tech. It's just... It doesn't look like a product.
machiaweliczny 4y ago
I think future is bioengineering new organisms/robots that balance ecosystem. So simply modified biological organisms that can’t reproduce

_aavaa_ 4y ago

Next up, swarms of robot bees to do the pollination: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hated_in_the_Nation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hated_in_the_Nation

conviencefee999 4y ago
Ironically this is actually one of the bigger problems to solve for in the generation and is one that has not been solved for.
- _aavaa_ 4y ago
  I don't think there's any irony in it. That's exactly why they were used in the show.
- quixoticelixer- 4y ago
  This is not one of the bigger problems to solve for our generation. European honey bees are not going anywhere.
  - conviencefee999 4y ago
    No it has more to do with creating robots at this size that can take and complete complex tasks not the honey bees.

bluGill 4y ago

> the future is swarms of small robots rather than a few big tractors: You are missing something important: soil compaction is a sub linear function of weight. which means that larger tractors that cover more area with the same tire tracks are must friendly for the soil, compared to many small tractors. Because of this factor larger is better. Eventually we may get to the point where the tractor runs on tracks, to allow even bigger tractors that touch a smaller are of soil. Sure flying drones will have less soil compaction, and they will have a place in the future, but keeping something in the air uses vastly more energy than wheels on the ground.

lancesells 4y ago

I feel this dream of robots everywhere gets us farther from a garden of Eden. To cultivate the earth we're going to mine other parts of it? I'm not suggesting getting rid of the tools that improve quality of life but does automating one aspect not cause 100 other things down the line? There's mining, factories, repairing, replacing. Maybe instead of robots we work on getting people to have gardens on their property, in cities use the rooftops, stop importing foods from across the globe, etc.

fangorn 4y ago

Sounds like we need a G.E.C.K.!

worldsayshi 4y ago
And G.E.C.K. kind of sounds like http://opensourceecology.org http://opensourceecology.org
- CuriousCosmic 4y ago
  Oh lovely. OSE is still doing good. I remember reading up on the project a decade or so ago back when it was basically just a wiki and a handful of engineers. The project is pretty well thought out and extremely ambitious. I can only hope they continue to make good progress on it.

AOsborn 4y ago

Absolutely, swarms make a lot of sense. Also, the key difference between a 'hard' challenge like self-driving cars and something like self-sustaining agriculture is that the reliability doesn't need to be 100%. An achievable target could be something like 'one human to operate the location'. Things will break, software will glitch, maintenance will be required - but that will be OK, as long as the issues can be corrected in a reasonable length of time.

deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
ForrestN 4y ago
Furthermore, with the right sensors, there's an opportunity for the swarm to self-correct without human intervention based on results. It doesn't have to be exactly right at the moment, because any ill effects will be noticeable and fixable well after a mistake is made.

0xbadcafebee 4y ago

I keep saying I want a laser on a turret that zaps cabbage moths, snails, japanese beetles, squash bugs. Do I need it? No... but it would reduce my labor and losses while increasing profit. There's so much opportunity for improvement, but we need the R&D money and start-ups to be there too. Please, VCs, spend your money on these projects!

tomxor 4y ago

> applying these principles to maintaining an edible polyculture ecosystem-farm Yup, actually if you read between the edits toward the end of the video I think this is in the minds of those working on it, not sure why it wasn't focused on more, perhaps because it sounds less immediately practical... once the automation is somewhat intelligent, the need for a monoculture for viable large scale agriculture is diminished. In fact at a certain point of sophistication, especially when harvesting a polyculture becomes viable, it will probably flip and become significantly more profitable long term to abandon monoculture... since the soil health will improve over time which also improves yields.

worldsayshi 4y ago

I feel like what you're describing is still in the realm of sci fi because of limitations in robot autonomy that we have expected to break through many times without success. If we succeed with autonomous driving we will probably succeed in these domains as well. As well as many other domains.

Ancalagon 4y ago
Also I think maintenance of 1000 tiny drones is going to be a lot more difficult than that of one big tractor
- ForrestN 4y ago
  This isn't intuitive to me. If one big tractor has a failure, the whole operation shuts down. If 1/1000 drones breaks, swap in a spare and move it to some kind (potentially automate-able) repair area. If the ideal number of drones is 1000 operationally, you just need to figure out how much of a margin of extra reserves you need to keep things operating. But even with a .1% lower capacity, you'd probably not notice anything, especially compared with 100% lower capacity.
  - crazygringo 4y ago
    I think the worry is that with 1,000 drones, if you have 10 breaking daily, that's probably a full-time job for someone to be repairing them, especially if they have to go out retrieving them. One big tractor isn't a full-time job's worth of maintenance.
    - ForrestN 4y ago
      I guess I don't really understand your assumptions. Why would 1 massive machine capable of doing all the various tasks of managing this farm require less maintenance than 1000 presumably much simpler, smaller machines? Assuming other things besides mobility break, I don't think retrieval would be much more of an issue, or that we'd have reason to expect the failure rate to be higher for each smaller, simpler drone than for the giant, super-complex one. To get the same work done, the behemoth would have to move much faster, have many more specialize tools and sensors all in the same rig, and would not be swappable for regular maintenance without pausing the entire workflow. Small drones could go back to base in shifts (again with some margin of extra drones) so that there are always 1000 actively working.

dools 4y ago

That’s what farmbot is going for

ForrestN 4y ago

I love this vision and hope it becomes the dominant telos for all of the work underway in this area. In addition to "beautiful farm," imagine a world where farms, parks, wildlife preserves, decarbonization centers, and biological research hubs are all the same place? No reason these swarms can't be optimizing/managing a native ecosystem food-forest with high yield in mind... and likewise easy to imagine unobtrusive, silent robots that don't stand in the way of the ecosystem's normal functioning.

robotresearcher 4y ago

> the future is swarms of small robots A key problem with small autonomous robots is their energy supply and mass. Batteries have low energy density. Actuators have bad power to weight ratios too. Living things are enormously more efficient. So much so that the intuition apparently offered by watching animals usually does not apply. This is extremely true for swarm robotics, inspired by ants, termites, etc. Swarm critters rely on the emergent effects of lots of behavior to make up for their limited sensing and computation. By 'limited' I mean relative to a mammal or bird. Lots of behavior means lots of energy spent moving and doing: exactly what is prohibitively expensive for a robot. Computation and sensing is getting better, smaller and cheaper much faster than batteries and actuators. This trend favors smarter robots that think carefully (cheap) and do the right thing (expensive per shot).

snapplebobapple 4y ago
Not to mention by making it pulled by tractor you get something that complements the existing o̶l̶i̶g̶o̶p̶o̶l̶i̶s̶t̶s̶ large players so it's more like you can do something with them to scale yourself out rather than compete against them to scale yourself out. It's much smarter making something tractor pulled from a business economics perspective, not just from a physics perspective.
8n4vidtmkvmk 4y ago
what if we make them bigger than insects but still relatively small? just an arm on a track. heck, we can put the energy in the track too. boom, no battery.
- travisgriggs 4y ago
  There are some interesting things being done with pivot spans. Hummingbird runs nozzles back and forth on rails suspended from each pivot span. But they’re difficult to keep running. Ag is hard. It’s dusty. The weather can be brutal. Stuff gets left out year round. The turnover is high. Schedules are dynamic and unforgiving (when the weather turns, you have to adapt your whole operation). There’s not a lot of highly technical staff to maintain things; bailing wire and bandaids is a real thing. The tradition of “hacking things” to keep them working comes from farmers. The more complicated your machinery, the more your MTBF product goes up. So complicated units don’t scale well. If a single sprinkler on a pivot fails or misbehaves, there’s nearly 400 of them and there’s some overlap. If your “robot” stalls out with some grit or a power supply issue or a bricked update, or leaky hydraulics, you just lost 1/10 of your pivot. Pray it happens on an inner span, rather than an outer one.

karaokeyoga 4y ago

Reading the comments in this thread reminded me of "Silent Running" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silent_Running https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silent_Running). Droids (albeit 70s-style), agro-tech, and post-apocalyptic sci-fi. It's dated but enjoyable.

bradknowles 4y ago
I'm glad I wasn't the only one thinking that. Of course, that movie does have certain other implications and side effects....
kwhitefoot 4y ago
> dated but enjoyable. And very, very sad.

askvictor 4y ago

I wonder how long it will take weeds to evolve to being 'invisible' to the robots' eyes.

JoeAltmaier 4y ago
Well, the invisible ones will thrive immediately. So, 1 generation.
- MikePlacid 4y ago
  How do you know they are not thriving already?
  - JoeAltmaier 4y ago
    All competition removed. This sprayer is designed to promote the growth of {everything it doesn't kill}. Those 'weeds' will have as much benefit from the spot-spraying as the crop. Which is either significant, or it's negligible (and this sprayer is useless, so probably not that)

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

munbun 4y ago

Subsequently sending us into a future forecasted by Michael Crichton’s Prey

rmason 4y ago

Watching that video made me joyful. I was an agronomist in the early nineties walking soybean fields twelve hours a day mapping weeds and then going back to the office making what's called postemerge chemical recommendations to get most of the weeds that I had observed. During those hot days having then written software for a hobby I thought there has to be a better way. Could a sprayer map weeds and apply chemicals in a single pass? I did an in depth investigation talking to tech people and university experts to see if what I imagined was possible. What I found out was that we were decades away from the tech making it possible. A couple of years later Monsanto came out with Roundup resistant soybeans and my soybean field walking was greatly reduced overnight. Problem with this one solution fits all was that soybean yields dipped with the resistant beans for farmers that previously had good weed control and we began to develop more Roundup resistant weeds. I did notice that this company is working with high value crops only. I believe the reason is the tech currently is quite expensive. Though in time the cost should come down as more farmers use it. One problem for the Eastern states is the use of shields on the boom. The company that I worked for experimented with shields on our commercial sprayers. In fact we were the first people to do it East of the Rocky Mountains. We bought them because we wanted to be able to spray on windy days. The shields had problems and were parked in the weeds in a single crop season.

diordiderot 4y ago
The best parts of that job was when you stood still for a minute late in the season, completely oblivious to the stream of fire ants pouring into your boots
- tomcam 4y ago
  In my case the hornets nest I stepped on while admiring our huge 250+ year-old walnut tree
- rmason 4y ago
  I could tell stories for hours. The scariest one: I did a lot of soil testing. Refused to go out on November 15th, the start of deer season, after the 4WD pickup I was using was shot up in a field. I hugged the floorboard as shots went through the truck and just over me. How a bright yellow pickup could be confused with a deer is beyond me.

leobg 4y ago

We had such a system. It was called slavery. Lots of cheap labor. And still we arranged our crops in the style of vineyards, so as to reduce to travel time of workers between plants.

jillesvangurp 4y ago

Yes, the current ways of doing intensive farming are hard on the land and ultimately very wasteful. If you look at the progress in pesticide free organic farming and indoor/vertical farming, what they have in common is that they leverage a more data driven approach where you simply don't need to pre-emptively correct problems if you can manage the environment in which you grow plants better. Avoiding the conditions that cause pests and weeds to get out control is much more efficient than dealing with them after things get out of control. Basically, intensive agriculture is compensating for its destructive nature by just brutally suppressing any "undesirable" growth. In nature, pests target the weaker plants. Basically, you stress out plants by mismanaging them and they are fair game for a wide range of fungi, insects, etc. E.g. under or over watering them, depleting the soil, etc. all stress plants out. If you have unhealthy soil, it's hard to have healthy plants growing in it. Intensive agriculture starts with disrupting the soil (by plowing it). This causes the soil to degrade over time and releases captured carbon into the atmosphere. The natural response is for aggressive weeds to start growing in disrupted soil. To "fix" this, farmers use a mix of pesticides and fertilizers. The pesticides kill a lot more than just the pests and weeds and then further degrades the soil and the bio diversity in and on it. And finally the fertilizer is just bleeding out of the land straight into the ground water and surrounding areas. It works but it is resource intensive. You need lots of water, chemicals, energy, etc to grow a single crop at the cost of literally anything else. Basically modern intensive farming grows mono cultures on top of artificially created deserts. Organic farming avoids doing that. Try not to disrupt the soil. Kill off (and compost) weaker plants rather than trying to rescue them. Use nature to keep pests and weeds in check. Etc. It works but it is more labor intensive. You need people to look after things. You get healthier and tastier produce (cooks love organically grown stuff for this reason). However, automating that labor makes it more scalable. That's the opportunity here.

madacol 4y ago
> If you look at the progress in pesticide free organic farming and indoor/vertical farming By what measure is vertical farming more efficient?. I've heard the contrary regarding green house gas emissions, it is still less efficient in most crops, it consumes too much power and that overcompensates any efficiency gained in other areas It's interesting that this conclusion can change drastically if electricity becomes 10-100x more efficient

blubbi 4y ago

Not a drone yet, but hey, less than 200kg are pretty much flyweight in farming ;) https://dahliarobotics.com/video https://dahliarobotics.com/video It doesn't even need to use herbicides because it removes weeds mechanically. We actually build it to also fit into Europe's small(er) scale farms as well. Regarding the energy issues mentioned multiple times in various threads here: We managed to make it solar powered and battery buffered to work autonomously for more than a working day. Disclosure: Co-funder of the company

BiteCode_dev 4y ago

If only there were swarms of self replicating autonomous systems that can heal, recharge and defend themselves without input and adapt to new situations, while being stress tested for free for millions of years. But I'm dreaming, certainly if it would have existed humans would have tried to leverage them a long time ago.

bsaul 4y ago
A Sci-Fi fan biology researcher friend of mine joked a long time ago that the culmination of cybertech is biotech.
ben_w 4y ago
Snark aside, as useful as the birds and the bees are, they've got their own goals, and those goals aren't always aligned with ours — hence the use of pesticides and insecticides, or indeed scarecrows, in the first place.
- BiteCode_dev 4y ago
  Of course but it's not like if collaboration, coercion, manipulation and environment crafting were ineffective tools to influence life. It used to be our fav tools, now we just don't go in that direction much anymore. We could study, teach, bread, terraform, integrate and so on at a much larger scale and with better tech. It's just... It doesn't look like a product.

machiaweliczny 4y ago

I think future is bioengineering new organisms/robots that balance ecosystem. So simply modified biological organisms that can’t reproduce