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This 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

• tomhoward 2y ago
  In 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 ago
    The 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 ago
      that website/project looks pretty dead
    • tomhoward 2y ago
      I’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.
      • gumby 2y ago
        In another comment I wrote that you probably need a BOM less than $0.50. At that price you don’t have a massive OS like Linux, you need something embedded that can run in a few KB. But a bunch of small devices can be managed by a huge device running Linux — maybe even something as expensive as a Raspberry Pi. (Apart from some time trying to sell in the Ag sector I spent a lot of time on embedded devices)
        • tomhoward 2y ago
          Well I already have a firmware version that can run in a few KB, which my father developed in Motorola assembly and that ran most of the soil moisture monitoring devices sold to the big-volume wine grape producers in Australia (mostly in Riverland SA supplying Treasury etc) from the late 90s till about 2010, after which newer products using Zigbee and cellular IoT took over (though we worked together on our own newer versions supporting Bluetooth LE and Cat-M1 up until his retirement a couple of years ago). I hear you that $20 is high - but the status quo in this business now is monitoring devices that sell for AUD $600+, and with LTE-M or LoRa comms modules that cost over AUD $60 alone. I'm forever thinking about ways you could drive the cost down further. I'd love it if there were a way to get the on-plant modules under $1. Feel free to get in touch if you want to discuss further.
          • HeyLaughingBoy 2y ago
            BLE mesh and solar power should get your BoM cost below $20, but I don't see any way that you're going to hit a sub $1 price point. Assuming your mesh can cover the entire field (reasonable if you have one monitoring point every few plants), you can have one or a small handful of LTE-M basestation points to handle the data uplinks. It's an interesting problem and I am sure reference designs already exist. Maybe talk to someone at Nordic.
            • tomhoward 2y ago
              Yeah I think that's right. It's a matter of trading off the water cost savings (and produce quality/yield gains) per plant vs unit cost per device, to determine the optimal density of devices. As I said in the previous comment, right now, high-value crop growers like wine grape growers pay $700-$1000 or more per site (including reader/comms module and sensors), and generally only install one monitoring point per block (I have a system running at one of Australia's top boutique/biodynamic wine makers and at current prices he can only cost-justify having one 10 monitoring sites over his 70 acres of vines). So, whatever we can do to drive down the cost to $20 or less should deliver big wins. > Maybe talk to someone at Nordic Yep, we're working with hardware engineers who are well connected to people at Nordic.
  • schaefer 2y ago
    If you use an Olla, the plants self regulate their water intake. See the book gardening with less water by David A. Bainbridge
    • declan_roberts 2y ago
      Great for backyard tomato plants, not a commercial farming option for tens of thousands of acres.
      • gumby 2y ago
        Not the way farms are run today, sure. But if it’s worth it, farms will adapt.
        • throwaway2037 2y ago
          It seems much more labour intensive compared to drip irrigation that essentially run long hoses in each row. Can you command on this comparison?
  • cookiengineer 2y ago
    This sounds like the optimum use case for LoRa, doesn't it?
    • tomhoward 2y ago
      LoRa gets talked about plenty for ag monitoring, and sure it can be great for certain use cases. Optional support for LoRa is certainly something we want to support (via device variants or plug-on comms modules). For the use case invoked in this subthread (an individual monitoring device on each plant), I don’t think it’s the best. We’re currently working with Nordic nRF52xx/53xx/54xx modules, which have dual ARM cores and built-in 2.4GHz radio, so, support for protocols like Bluetooth Mesh, Zibgee, Thread. That means you can have a single module that can handle mesh comms with neighboring devices, as well as sensor reading, machine learning and output control. You wouldn’t need a separate comms module to communicate back to a base station or a high post and antenna for long-range comms. So it offers big savings on the device production side and the installation time/cost side.
      • HeyLaughingBoy 2y ago
        Ha. Didn't see this post before I responded to your other one :-)
      • AlotOfReading 2y ago
        Are you not concerned about the battery life running edge ML on these chips? I imagine battery replacement will be a large part of the TCO for farmers. When I've done similar projects in the past, we did the edge compute on a more expensive box that could be more conveniently accessed by users. It was also the system collected and summarized data into reports, so having the data locally helped.
        • tomhoward 2y ago
          Yeah absolutely. You’d certainly need solar power on your devices, and the more data processing they’re doing the more battery and solar power you’ll need. So you’d centralize the more intensive processing on a unit with more power, and have smaller node devices on the plants doing simpler tasks - just reading from sensors and uploading data, and/or receiving commands to switch things on/off. They’d be solar powered too but the batteries and solar panels can be smaller. These are all the trade offs you’re constantly working with in this game.
  • gumby 2y ago
    I wonder if in a large farm it will be worth running hoses and deploying a frob next to each device vs having an electric robot with a refillable tank walking the rows. Such a robot is still SF today, so deploying a frob with each seedling would be the only choice at the moment (or continue current irrigation practices). The frobs have to be cheap enough to be consumables.
    • HeyLaughingBoy 2y ago
      My gut tells me that the robot will cost less in the long run. It also doesn't seem like a hard problem (yeah, easy to say) since row crops are planted at fixed spacings and detecting that the thing next you is a plant and not a rabbit should not be a difficult task. The combination of GPS mapping (planter knows where it was during planting), known plant & row spacing, and basic visual imaging should simplify the problem. So why isn't it done today? Probably still cheaper to rely on the weather or center pivot irrigation.
      • hondo77 2y ago
        Scale, I imagine. Orchards are big. How many robot waterers would you need when you have to spend time at each individual tree (or groups of trees) to water it/them? How far is it to the nearest refill? Put another way, drip is massively parallel. Robot waterers, not so much.
        • HeyLaughingBoy 2y ago
          Oh, I wasn't thinking orchards. I thought OP was talking about row crops which can't feasibly be irrigated with hoses.
          • krisoft 2y ago
            > I thought OP was talking about row crops which can't feasibly be irrigated with hoses. Are we talking about irrigation pivots[1] here? Because those are a known technology. If we are thinking about robots driving up and down the rows and watering plants from a tank, and then returning to some central location to re-fill their tank that feels like a "carrying water for elephants" situation. I suspect the logistics won't work out. Could try to run some numbers on it of course. Is that how you are thinking about it? 1: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7j1lMs7fcIQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7j1lMs7fcIQ
  • gumby 2y ago
    $20 is a lot (I assume that’s the customer price buying them in volume). You have to save a lot of water / increase yield enough to justify that. That suggests a BOM well under a buck, probably less than $0.50. I spent some time in this sector (at one company irrigation of almonds and stone fruit, another in wine) and the margins are very tight. Fortunately the farmers have sharp pencils.
    • gnuser 2y ago
      When you think about it, farming is the perfect physical application of scaling.
• algoatecorn 2y ago
  We're not moving away from nitrogen fertilizers. Ever. Why? Look at the following three graphs: global population, staple crop yield, and nitrogen fertilizer application. Now overlay them. That's why. Also, there are myriad chemical inputs that cannot be removed simply due to free labor. Sure, a robot can pluck weeds, but what about fungal and bacterial diseases?
  • dukeyukey 2y ago
    There are absolutely automated systems out there to handle recognition and application of whatever fertiliser/fungicide is needed. Not cheap of course, but prices will come down.
• sandworm101 2y ago
  >> 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. Not even close. The sorts of critters and diseases that pesticides combat cannot be mitigated by plucking things off plants, nor can nitrogen fertilizer be replaced with elbow grease. Identifying and removing (burning) infected plants would help, but only if each plants was isolated from its neighbors, otherwise you are just back to burning fields once infection is detected. Growing each potato inside its own little box cannot scale. For many farmers the "right amount of water" ends up being however much is available. Crop fields are not home gardens. The amounts of water needed are measured in acre-feet. Metering it out to each corn stalk individually would certainly help, but likely fails the cost/benefit analyses at scale. A corn field has roughly 50,000 plants per acre, and commercial farm several hundred acres. That will be a heck of a lot of plastic tubing to install/maintain.
• onlyrealcuzzo 2y ago
  > so when the labor is free we shouldn’t need them. Short of the singularity happening - "labor" (even Robotic) - at this scale - is not going to be anywhere near free. I mean, in some ways, "labor" is already "free" in agriculture if you compare current cost of labor per yield vs what you would get before the industrial revolution. The average labor cost to farm an acre of wheat pre-industrial revolution was 50-100 hours. Today, it's <1. Short of the singularity, we are not getting a 100x improvement from here in our lifetime. There's not only so many 100x improvements you can make until you need a perpetual motion machine traveling faster than light...
• conradolandia 2y ago
  This sounds beautiful. Also sounds like you have never worked a farm nor know anything practical about working fields and crops.
• methuselah_in 2y ago
  And please enlighten me what will happen to countries where people are dependent on farming? Rather creating new varities of crops that are more chemical resistant?
• fennecbutt 2y ago
  Lmao, I'd love for this utopia, which has been completely achievable for decades now but you know...prevented by endlessly chasing profit and making the rich richer. So many people are guilty of it on HN as well; as rich tech workers your hackles raise when I suggest things like making owning second homes illegal. We're all part of the problem.
• mkmk 2y ago
  Out of curiosity how does nitrogen fertilizer offset labor?
  • bfdm 2y ago
    Directly, as a substitute for more labour intensive sources like manure, compost or crop rotation. Indirectly by increasing yield per acre per day.
    • universa1 2y ago
      But in the end you have to replace at least some of the nitrogen (and other nutrients) you are taking from the field in some way. And without a major shift in consumption patterns (less meat) this will mean fertilizer, as the alternatives usually lead to a much lower yield.
      • dmurray 2y ago
        Meat farming replaces artificial fertilizer, by providing a source of manure, so doesn't that relationship run the other way? But having 1/4 of the land under soy beans or other locally appropriate nitrogen-fixing plants doesn't seem like it would hurt yields too much.
      • jon_richards 2y ago
        I was very disappointed on my last trip to Iowa to see that most farmers weren't even bothering with cover crops.
        • eru 2y ago
          I wonder whether genetic engineering can give nitrogen fixing abilities to plants that currently lack this ability?
          • mjh2539 2y ago
            It's not the plants themselves that fix nitrogen but endosymbiotic microorganisms in the soil.
• tda 2y ago
  And more, smaller, robots vs large tractors could put an end to monocultures. Monoculture is the result of optimizing for minimal human labour, not an optimization for yields. So when labour is free, mixed fields are the way to maximize profits
  • algoatecorn 2y ago
    That's false. Homogeneity makes it easier to harvest, process, and store crops. It also drives perfect competition which brings cost down on the commodity market.
    • samatman 2y ago
      Harvesting, processing, and storing, are human labor.
      • algoatecorn 2y ago
        They involve human labor, just like every industrial process in existence. What's your point?
    • gumby 2y ago
      Yes, the GP’s reasoning is faulty (actually, “imperfect” would be a better term), but things aren’t as clear as you put it either. Homogeneity helps with trading commodities, no question. And commodities reduce risk by allowing a very wide fan out on both sides of a two sided market…which has advantages and disadvantages for all participants. More along your argument, it also lets the farmer use capital better in the short term (you buy the equipment you need for your monocrop). But if you have multimodal devices you have the opportunity to take advantage of more flexibility. You can do crop rotation to use less chemicals or to take advantage of trends in the commodity market. You can have a different mix of crops for the same reason (half corn, half row crops, though they re typically worth less). You have more flexibility to adapt to climate change. The commodity markets can handle all this, in fact they help enable it. This isn’t magic wand — crop rotation doesn’t make sense if, say, you have an orchard. But mechanization also caused us to abandon growing multiple crops in the same field, which can have benefits and improve yield. It was just way too labor intensive. If we go back to individual “labor” (automated in this case) it could be worthwhile.
• stoneman24 2y ago
  In a recent episode of Countryfile [1](popular UK BBC1 program on the country and farming) the resident farmer was mentioning both crop rotation and the issue of black grass invading his wheat fields. The black grass was slowly out competing his cash crop and would difficult to remove (perhaps taking the entire field out of any production for a year or the use of chemicals). Having a horde of little robots might greatly assist in manually keeping other plants at bay without indiscriminately affecting the field with chemicals (extra one-use expense, robots would last many years). [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Countryfile https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Countryfile
  • ensocode 2y ago
    I am searching for solutions in this field. Do you have any links to any consumer hardware for this. like drones which can cut down small invasive plants which were selected by AI?
    • pbmonster 2y ago
      Have you looked at laser weeding? A camera looks at the plants, an ML model identifies which plants are crop and which are weeds, and then a laser burns the weeds just enough so they die from water loss. Research: https://ethz.ch/en/industry/industry/news/data/2022/03/laser-based-weeding-robot.html https://ethz.ch/en/industry/industry/news/data/2022/03/laser... Commercial product (first one I found, there are countless others): https://carbonrobotics.com/ https://carbonrobotics.com/
    • doubloon 2y ago
      Tertill cuts weeds but the ai is “if object is tall and firm enough to trip my bumper, turn”
      • rurban 2y ago
        I do work in this field. The AI and the sensors are much better than that. It can recognize each plant, builds a 3D model, a growth model and does disease detection. It controls robots, lighting (in vertical farming) and water. Colleagues from the university did the drone things, and Lora sensors, but they are still way too expensive for the average farmers here in Germany. We should concentrate on the SW, and the Chinese on the HW.
• seanmcdirmid 2y ago
  Robot labor isn’t free. You pay in capital costs, energy costs to run them, and ongoing maintenance costs if you use them a lot. Environmentally, these costs might be more or less than the chemicals they replace, but it isn’t am obvious comparison. Changing farming methods along with automation might work better, like vertical farming techniques.
  • gumby 2y ago
    Non-subsistence farming is basically all cap ex at this point. Farmers have Ag Ec degrees and think about cap ex first. With the price of energy on a secular decline, imagine a world with ubiquitous renewables. The robots can go to a charge point and recharge themselves.
  • fakedang 2y ago
    Sorry, but in every example of vertical farming I've seen, there's nothing that actually works. Nearly all of the farms and companies I've visited and been exposed to use a lot more water and energy (in all forms) compared to a conventional farm. The only appeal I see are for places with limited agricultural land space such as Singapore or the Netherlands, or arid regions such as the Middle East or Central Asia. Even then, it's much cheaper for most of these places to simply import from abroad.
  • ahartmetz 2y ago
    Vertical farming is complete bullshit for most plants. I don't know why people keep talking about it. Plant growth is (for most plants) limited by available energy, which comes in the form of sunlight. Sunlight is extremely bright compared to artificial light sources and extremely cheap, i.e. free. Replacing it makes no economic sense in most situations. If we talk about producing a lot of calories to feed the starving, even most reservations go out of the window, because staple crops are staples because they are very efficient at turning sunlight into chemical energy and they need all the sunlight they can get.
    • InSteady 2y ago
      It's weird, vertical farming has gotten so much hype but really only makes sense for luxury products like microgreens, and still only makes sense if you specifically want to grow them in an expensive, dense city. Even things like mature lettuces, tomatoes, and strawberries have been tried extensively and simply don't make economic sense to grow indoors in stacks the vast majority of cases.
• zo1 2y ago
  I disagree. I think we should have more human labor take over farming but on an individual level that's working much much closer to the consumption source. Think having your own farmer and food-producer in your own house or property, or perhaps shared with your small flock of neighbors. Way too-many of the problems plaguing society atm can be solved by reducing transport and eliminating all the huge intermediate steps between our food (other other food-related products) and ourselves. Just think about how much effort is put into something simple like flour or butter or cheese (nevermind all the crazy processed stuff). The food will be more natural, it'll be healthier and with less additives, we'll be be contributing less to AGI/automation and creating actual valuable jobs, we'll be reducing the amount of plastic, fuel and electricity used for transport, storage, processing, packaging, labelling, accounting, lawyering. Every one of the major food production + distribution industries has huge support networks.
  • abdullahkhalids 2y ago
    You are getting downvoted, but presumably, in Russia a significant amount of food is being produced in small family farms/gardens called Dacha [1], with a typical size of only 600 m^2 [4]. Since, original sources are all Russian, it's hard to fully verify via secondary sources, but there are claims that (1) as much as 77% of all vegetables and 59% of all meat [2] or (2) as much as 50% of all food [3] produced in Russia is on these farms. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dacha https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dacha [2] https://thebovine.wordpress.com/2009/08/09/in-1999-35-million-small-family-plots-produced-90-of-russias-potatoes-77-of-vegetables-87-of-fruits-59-of-meat-49-of-milk-way-to-go-people/ https://thebovine.wordpress.com/2009/08/09/in-1999-35-millio... [3] https://mospace.umsystem.edu/xmlui/handle/10355/84725 https://mospace.umsystem.edu/xmlui/handle/10355/84725 [4] https://www.notechmagazine.com/2020/03/a-dacha-for-everyone-community-gardens-and-food-security-in-russia.html https://www.notechmagazine.com/2020/03/a-dacha-for-everyone-...
  • hamlsandwich 2y ago
    Local, small-scale food production used to be the only way food was produced - people didn't eat better then, and there were many, many fewer people to feed. There's huge variability in what can be grown where, especially if you want to reduce the amount and number of inputs that are imported from further afield. There are places that can support all the crops and livestock that provide a healthy, balanced, and sustainable human diet, but not everywhere can. What if you want to eat flour in a place where grain crops aren't tenable, or butter where cows, sheep and goats don't do well? Producing food this way also means that we need to build houses on fertile land that's good for growing things. That happens a _lot_ where I live, and I hate the site of previously productive soil disappearing under concrete house-slabs.
• zeegroen 2y ago
  This already exists! There's a company called Carbon Robotics that has a prototype of a robot that eliminates individual weeds with a lazer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_2s-0wgQWXM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_2s-0wgQWXM I'm also looking forward to this technology being widely available and helping solve the issue of herbicide run-off, and later additionally the same for pesticides and fertilization.
• boringg 2y ago
  None of the inputs to farming will ever be free. Whomever owns the robots will be charging for their labour you are only substituting one form for another. Potentially it might workout better for production numbers still tbd. Farmers these days are beholden to the agri tech companies for costs and maintenance. That is a great dream to have. In the energy world it was supposed that prices would go to close to zero with fully adopted solar but thats an equivalent far fetched dream.