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Agricultural drones are transforming rice farming in the Mekong River delta
- algoatecorn 2y agoSorry, but an overwhelming amount of people commenting in here are extremely ignorant of the modern agri-food system. The notion that robots and drones will eliminate monocultures and chemical inputs is wildly untrue. In some minor cases they will reduce the need. It amazes me that software engineers think they have the panacea for whatever faults they see in our food system without a full understanding and history of it.
- _DeadFred_ 2y agoI have a friend that owns a huge forrest. Currently seedlings come from human harvesters who go into the forest and gather cones. This doesn't necessarily represent the best candidates, but 'good' candidates that people could get to. A drone that could gather cones from any tree would add to the diversity of future forests and allow better choice candidates to be selected. Keeping ahead of beatles is a big thing for him. Better aerial detection would be good. Currently he misses stands that could have been managed better earlier. Documenting and automating what current forresters would be huge because their kids aren't interested and aren't spending the time to learn and will be managing things much more like a farm than a healthy forest if they manage at all (most likely they will just harvest it all and then sell the land).
- faceloss 2y ago[dead]
- ConstantGarden 2y ago[dead]
- GuardianAg 2y agoAt Guardian Ag we’re building aerial products for American scale farms. This tech is taking off world wide!
- latchkey 2y agoI'm back in Vietnam (Saigon) for the first time in 4 years and it has been like a time machine. Covid definitely left its mark on this country due to the severe lockdowns they went through. The most interesting change I've noticed is that nearly everyone speaks at least a little English now. Attributed to being locked inside and a lot of YouTube. It used to be difficult/expensive to get drones here, but I see DJI stores all over town now. Seeing this is super cool and speaks towards how innovative and creative Vietnamese get with whatever they can get their hands on.
- lmm 2y ago> I'm back in Vietnam (Saigon) for the first time in 4 years and it has been like a time machine. Covid definitely left its mark on this country due to the severe lockdowns they went through. The most interesting change I've noticed is that nearly everyone speaks at least a little English now. Interesting - here in Japan the consensus is that the level of English went down, as we had a few years of no tourists and no language assistants.
- latchkey 2y agoVietnamese are extremely capitalistic as part of the culture. Everything is for sale here. They realized that they make more money when they speak English to foreigners, so they studied up. I'm not even making this up, one of the kids I was talking to said that.
- dataviz1000 2y agoToday, as a tourist in Japan many restaurants and bars outside of Kyoto, Tokyo, and Osaka and some in those places will not serve me food or a whiskey highball because I am not Japanese. They say "No English" as the reason. Four African students who recently graduated from the University of Kyoto were refused entry into a bar in Kyoto as I walked by. They all speak English and Japanese fluently unlike many of their Japanese classmates. This is high contrast to Vietnam where people would stop me as I walked down the street offering me a beer poured from a pitcher, a seat at their table on the sidewalk, or food and they would try to speak English with me. I also noticed that there is a lot of cooperation between people of different countries in Asia done with English. I would not be surprised if the common language of the Chinese and Vietnamese people mentioned in the article is English. Vietnam is my favorite place in Asia. It felt like the country is trying very hard to address many of the environmental problems like moving from gas powered to electric vehicles.
- IG_Semmelweiss 2y agoI dont get it. I dont farm rice or have experience in vietnam in particular. Yet in my experience, pesticide etc has always been done thru the already existing irrigation system with a pump. Of course with advice from a technical person. The irrigation system requires an upfront investment of course but you are already going to irrigate the plot so this is is a no brainer. Therefore unless the rice grows without any irrigation system, I dont see how drones could be any more cost effective. I know rice is traditionally grown on flooded plains but that seems very risky - you are leaving your harvest in the hands of nature. Is Vietnam still growing rice subject to the whims of nature?
- zdp7 2y agoWhat you are missing is that as it grows most of the rice is not underwater. You need pesticides to protect what's above the water. Average height is about 4 feet (1.2 meters).
- kccqzy 2y agoI'm pretty sure the irrigation system is flooding the plot. You set up berms and then periodically flood the entire plot with water. This isn't subject to the whims of nature because the flooding is done intentionally by farmers.
- joezydeco 2y agoRice fields are flooded as a means of weed control, but flooded fields also generate a lot of methane. There are direct seeded crop variants coming that eliminate the need for flooding. https://www.bayer.com/en/agriculture/rice-practices https://www.bayer.com/en/agriculture/rice-practices
- Cthulhu_ 2y ago> I dont farm rice > I know rice is traditionally grown on flooded plains but that seems very risky A recurring HN trope is people who don't know about a subject feel like they have to have an opinion on it anyway. Why do you believe it's very risky / in the hands of nature? Flooded plains (aka rice paddies) have been used for thousands of years; rice is a semiaquatic plant so it needs to be submerged, and paddies are designed to retain water to not be subject to the whims of nature. Anyway, what alternative are you suggesting? Keep in mind it has to be scalable to feed billions and affordable.
- gojomo 2y agoUltimately drones may enable purely-mechanical pesticide-free removal of each individual insect/weed.
- vimax 2y agoReminds me of the mosquito laser. It would target only female mosquitos of the specific breed (they are the malaria carriers). It was only prototyped and never commercially produced. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mosquito_laser https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mosquito_laser
- redundantly 2y ago> It was only prototyped and never commercially produced. aka Vaporware
- tomrod 2y agoIndeed. These are often predictable outcomes when there is lack in economy of scale or scope.
- russell_h 2y agoI saw a video where this company is doing exactly that for weeds: https://youtube.com/watch?v=V3A6L2Dao6s https://youtube.com/watch?v=V3A6L2Dao6s Great idea, I hope it works.
- givemeethekeys 2y agoFor weeds, this is already a thing. There are weed bots that kill with fire and others that kill with lasers.
- SCUSKU 2y agoAre drones being used in the US as well? This type of labor savings seems like a pretty obvious win. Of course I’m just a CRUD monkey living in the city so I have no idea how farmers actually operate.
- SailToSki 2y agoYes! I know of at least one instance where a farmer in Colorado is using them for seeding and pesticide spray.
- owlninja 2y agoAbsolutely, and ironically, given recent news, I think DJI is one of the top manufacturers used.
- alephnerd 2y agoVN and China have a FTA (part of the ASEAN FTA) > Are drones being used in the US as well Yes. We even funded a couple prominent players in the space that got acquired a decade ago. Chicago, Champaign-Urbana, Pittsburgh, and Ames used to be hubs in this niche back then.
- bri3d 2y agoYes. Until recently though, spraying by drone was a near impossible permitting nightmare (now it’s only a minor permitting nightmare) and was inefficient because you needed a Part 107 pilot and a Visual Observer for each individual drone. But, things have gotten better. Before, spray drones over 55lb (the limit for a Small UAS in the US) had to go through an experimental aircraft registration program and be granted a tail number. Now, a select list of drones are authorized for spray operations with a special waiver instead, which is way easier.
- rukuu001 2y agoInteresting! In Australia we see drones mapping areas that need to be sprayed, then that data is downloaded into a tractor which traverses the field spraying (or adding nutrient) according to data collected by the drone. Haven't heard of spraying drones yet
- lsllc 2y agoGlad to see human ingenuity at work here! Pictures in TFA remind me of scenes from the movie The Creator.
- 6Az4Mj4D 2y agoIs there any innovation in sowing rice?
- Cthulhu_ 2y agoWhat kind of innovation are you thinking about? They have transplanting machines in various sizes if that's what you're thinking about: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rice_transplanter https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rice_transplanter.
- shostack 2y agoWhat about using drones to spread and plant seeds? Is that something being done?
- nthypes 2y agoAnyone know the model name of the drone used?
- luyu_wu 2y agoLooks like a DJI Agras model to me! Amusing considering the recent news regarding DJI being banned.
- blackoil 2y agoOne reason of them being banned is they are very good and hence very popular.
- Cthulhu_ 2y agoThe main reason is a fear - which as far as I know is unsubstantiated - that China's got backdoors in tech sold in the west. But with so many hackers and national security agencies disassembling and analyzing these things, surely they'd have found it by now? Therefore, I wouldn't be surprised if it's more about market protection. Which doesn't make much sense to me because is there a major US drone manufacturer that can't compete with DJI right now?
- ovi256 2y ago> with so many hackers and national security agencies disassembling and analyzing these things, surely they'd have found it by now This is a common misconception. With OTA updates, the backdoor can be introduced at any time in a future software version. For example, right before an attack.
- eunos 2y agoIt's a fear that US has no similarly competitive drone companies
- GuardianAg 2y agoCheck out Guardian Ag
- gumby 2y agoThis is so great. My long term dream is that robotics take over farming, individually plucking each weed or weevil, and metering just the right amount of water for each individual plant, so that all the crops are organic. Most of the chemicals (yes, including nitrogen fertilizers) offset labor, so when the labor is free we shouldn’t need them. And people won’t have to spend their lives in stoop-back work or exposed to toxic chemicals.
- tomhoward 2y agoIn case anyone’s reading this who is interested in working on it: I’m building a company/platform that does a lot of this, particularly the “metering just the right amount of water for each individual plant” part. The thing I have in mind is very low cost devices (sub-$20) with mesh radio comms, inputs to read from sensors and outputs to control irrigation, and TinyML running the devices to optimize everything in real time. I have about 10 years experience working in the field (mostly with high-value crops like wine grapes, nuts, avocados) and several iterations of prototype devices and web software, but am keen to attract people who are excited at the idea of working on this kind of thing. Anyone - particularly low-level programmers or hardware engineers - interested in working on it can contact me (email in bio).
- WillAdams 2y agoThe Open Source Ecology folks have been working on this sort of thing for a while --- check in with them? https://www.opensourceecology.org/ https://www.opensourceecology.org/
- cagenut 2y agothat website/project looks pretty dead
- tomhoward 2y agoI’ve always been supportive of open-source and plan to make much of our tech open source [1], but I’m not seeing anything on their site that’s anything like what we’re doing (it alls seems to be large machinery, no microelectronics). The thing about this field that I’ve learned over the decade I’ve been involved is that creating the tech is less than half the challenge; the distribution - building awareness, selling it, installing it, maintaining it - is a huge undertaking, and a lot of money needs to come from somewhere to make that viable. [1] I’d like to have a RTOS to run on these devices that is as approachable and familiar as common Linux distros like Ubuntu, for people to install and customise themselves, with a full open source license.
- dhruvkar 2y ago>> fly the drone with no physical effort and no direct exposure to pesticides—some of which have been associated with diseases of the eyes, ears, nose, throat, skin, and gastrointestinal tract. Slightly tangential, but what's the thinking here? We don't want to get it on us while spraying it, but then we'll eat it and it'll be fine?
- retrac 2y agoSome pesticides are short-lasting agents, which are acutely toxic, to the target pest, and also humans. But they dissipate or break down fairly quickly. Even just pure nitrogen or carbon dioxide gas can be used for pest control, and a minute of venting makes it safe after. Come to think, fully automated warehouses handling food, could be kept under an oxygen-free atmosphere. Probably impractical but it'd substantially reduce spoilage and it'd stop any rats or cockroaches pretty quick. (Of course, the history of pesticides is full of pesticides that don't actually dissipate, or break down, as much as claimed.)
- ggm 2y agoRice grows inside a husk. And, white so-called "polished" rice has the outer coat removed. So, insecticide/pesticide residue on the surface isn't such a big deal, even for brown rice. Ingesting and breathing in the concentrations of insecticide associated with spraying is orders of magnitude worse risk to the farm worker and people around, than incidental food contact risk post production/packaging. Many chemicals are also broken down in sunlight and water, or are absorbed into the rootstock, not the fruiting body. (not an agronomist or food scientist. I too wondered at the Merryl Streep ad 30 years ago where she's washing broccoli with soap..)
- tucnak 2y ago> Merryl Streep ad 30 years ago where she's washing broccoli with soap.. ???
- ggm 2y agohttps://academic.oup.com/chicago-scholarship-online/book/17329/chapter-abstract/174786621?redirectedFrom=fulltext https://academic.oup.com/chicago-scholarship-online/book/173... In 1989, Meryl Streep became the celebrity spokesperson for a Natural Resources Defense Council campaign to publicize the risks of pesticides and chemicals applied to food, especially the danger of Alar-laced apples consumed by young children.
- itqwertz 2y agoDespite this optimism, I wonder what the tradeoffs are for the drone services. Does it actually spray pesticide as thoroughly as a worker manually applying it? Can it spread seed and fertilizer as well as someone who has tended the land for decades? Is there really a difference in quality of produce?
- hamlsandwich 2y agoIt's a good question. One thing I can think of is that drones can accurately use a pre-determined map of which areas need how much of an input, in a way that would be really difficult for a human on the ground to do.
- infecto 2y agoYou are thinking way too hard about this. Vietnam is the wild west, there are some levels of cost optimization but these farmers are not usually well educated living in the poorer country side. In the country side you will just fill up your sprayer and chuck the fertilizer/pesticide packaging on the ground like your own personal landfill. Maybe you might every now and then collect some of the trash and create a fire that is no where hot enough to burn trash so it will smolder a wonderful scent for a day or so. That guy spraying in the article is most definitely not wearing any PPE, maybe a cloth mask at best, fertilizers/pesticides have not been used in Vietnam for as long as they have in the rest of the world. These drones are absolutely all benefits. - No more guy inhaling chemicals all day. - Hopefully more programmatic approach to spraying where some level of measurement is happening. - If you have business being built around spraying, they will eventually optimize around using the right amount for their service.
- aaron695 2y ago[dead]
- speedbird 2y agoBut can they mount speakers and play Ride of the Valkyries
- zensnail 2y agoYou guys reckon with a big enough drone (or a few of them) you could hoist a pivot line spin it around the center, then fly to a new field to rinse and repeat. Get rid of those monstrously huge Fixed Center Pivot that are only in use 15% of the year??
- morsch 2y agoI can see this making sense for monitoring and observation and even for very targeted application of pesticides. But bulk application of pesticides and seed, I just can't imagine land vehicles aren't more efficient in terms of energy use and longevity. Maybe rice fields are particularly unsuited to it. But buying a drone as an investment for your children... I don't think it's gonna last that long.
- KaiserPro 2y agoThis was my thought but I suspect for rice farming its easier than wheeled based devices. As you can imagine rice paddies are a bastard for wheels, because its muddy as fuck. Its not like its economical to put a cement pan underneath as some rice plants have >1m roots[1] so you can't treat it like watercress (thats a wild assertion, maybe you can) Also, the banks that hold the water to make it a paddy are unlikely to be regular or load bearing. Moreover, the fields are not laid out with a road to link them all together. So conventional tractor with thin wheels/floaters just won't work. And smaller vehicles are just impractically heavy or impossible to get into most fields. As for the AI shit, I don't think there is acutally that much. It looks a lot like its just standard drone mapping/possible machine vision to detect the state of the crops/border of the field. Would this scale up for western style large fields? no. but for small irregular terrace style fieldlets, it would [1]https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/pdf/10.1626/pps.3.281 https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/pdf/10.1626/pps.3.281
- fragmede 2y agoDo you mean that you don't think the drone's electronics won't physically last long enough to pass down to their children? The lithium ion batteries will need to be replaced every few years, and eventually the motors and control boards and other parts will need to be replaced as well (rotors), but why wouldn't they be able to pass the drone and the skills and knowledge down to their children?
- SapporoChris 2y agoTo go further, drone models will improve. Drones that last, Drones that can be repaired, the drones that can be maintained cheaply. These things should happen unless a monopoly forms...
- majoe 2y agoSlightly related, but off-topic. It's astonishing how high-tech agriculture has become without the general public noticing much of it. I recently had a longer talk with my uncle, who is a farmer in South Germany, where he told me about the newish technology he is using: - Milking robots: the process is entirely automated, the cows basically go inside the milking stations by themselves. - His newer tractors are all driving GPS based, which allows him to keep the track with a precision of about 20cm. He is now able to exactly apply the amount of fertilizer, pesticides or seeds he wants to apply and plan the amounts in advance. - A lot of data is collected for each cow and processed by an external company. This goes down to temperature measurements at each teat in the milking robot. The external company monitors each cow and plans individual treatment to prevent diseases and to optimize milk production. - He currently plans to build a manure biogas plant, which will produce enough electricity for him and then some. I really like the approach to mainly use manure instead of harvested biomass (the economics of the two are vastly different, an interesting discussion in itself). And that's just one farm. There are a lot of innovative things happening in agriculture.
- hnmullany 2y agoBiogas plants still need quite a bit of harvested biomass added tp the manure. Manure by itself has too low a Carbon/Nitrogen ratio, and without supplementation, it will over-produce Ammonia, inihibiting the anaerobic bacteria that digest the feedstock. So you have to add sileage or switchgrass.
- majoe 2y agoOh, I forgot a neat one: Drones with thermal imaging to prevent fawns to be killed by tractors.
- wrp 2y agoFawns, as in female deer? Is hitting them with tractors really a problem?
- olex 2y agoFawns as in "deer children". When young, they lie down in fields a lot, and don't have the flight instict developed yet, so if they're in the field with the "parent" deer out getting food and the tractors / harvesters come by, it can be legitimately dangerous.
- langsoul-com 2y agoI wonder if drones will change the placement of farms. Right now, farms are very wide and flat, this makes it easier for tractors and spraying pesticides. Would be interesting to see overtime.
- hliyan 2y agoTerraced paddy fields have been used for centuries in countries such as Sri Lanka (where I'm from), Bangladesh, Vietnam and Indonesia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paddy_field#/media/File:Pana_Banaue_Rice_Terraces_(Cropped).jpg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paddy_field#/media/File:Pana_B...
- pbmonster 2y agoEven if you can do all other crop tending from the air, in the end you'll still need the tractor to harvest, pulling a heavier trailer than all crop tending jobs would have required. So I think flat, reasonably level fields will stay with us for some time.
- avodonosov 2y agoTLDR: > Because drones spray or scatter the ideal concentration uniformly over a precise area, farmers require less pesticide and fertilizer than they would if applying materials by hand, says XAG engineer Long Hung. I hope Long Hung knows that for sure and not just fantasizes.
- sahinyanlik 2y agoIn the article they didn't write about side effect but In Turkey My relatives also using drones for rice farming. And trees are dying since they need to fly drones higher then trees. Birds are dying as well. Previously I remember there were so many birds but now there is none. I also remember there were frogs, snakes etc. and now there is none.
- fakedang 2y agoI doubt that it's drones causing those issues. More likely it's the poor environmental practices carried out in Turkey. Turkey is a truly beautiful country, but most of the natural beauty is falling to disuse as the government prioritizes other industry, of course with a massive dollop of corruption on the side.
- sahinyanlik 2y agoWhy you doubt that? Before drones there were no issues about birds at least. I hope Vietnam will not have same future since they are not Turkey.
- zeristor 2y agoThe Royal Society had a two day conference on farming technology. https://royalsociety.org/science-events-and-lectures/2024/06/agriculture-tof/ https://royalsociety.org/science-events-and-lectures/2024/06... There’s almost a 7 hour video posted on Vimeo on the page.
- camillomiller 2y agoMost of these high tech drones are from DJI (check out the Agra lineup). You know who has great use for that? US farmers. Instead they get an all-out ban on DJI and they’re stuck with provider-locked John Deere tractors. I really don’t understand how easy it can be to fool the American public just by saying “national security”, even when it’s clear that large parts of the public will not be best served by Washington’s “China bad!!!” policies.
- 83 2y ago>>even when it’s clear that large parts of the public will not be best served by Washington’s “China bad!!!” policies. The majority of the public do not own or fly drones. The government has bigger concerns than a few people getting burnt on their DJI purchase. Disposable drones are the future of warfare. Would you really want to subsidize China's ability to develop and manufacture them? While also letting China collect data from drones flying over your country? Better to rip that bandaid off sooner rather than later imo.
- eunos 2y agoBecause the Blobs saw how's drone perform in Ukraine war and they are spooked that US has no national champions for drones.
- markus23 2y agoSlightly related, but a bit off-topic, too :-) If you are interesting in planning agriculture, with or without drones, you can help us by filling out our survey: https://survey.permaplant.net/ https://survey.permaplant.net/