7 ms·
Slightly 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
by majoe 2y ago
Slightly 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.
- sshine 2y agoTheir instinct is to stay put, which means they don't run when the tractor comes. A drone flies over the field, maps where the fawns are staying put, sends a message to automated tractors to reroute. This is probably the most "feel good" application of drones. That and detecting landmines.
- Muromec 2y agoThat’s exactly the opposite of what thermal drones are use most of the other time
- 867-5309 2y agothose fawns could be lying on a lot of oil
- infecto 2y agoIs it? I believe the commercial application for drones with thermal cameras is fairly well establish at this point. You can spot a lot of things in buildings, transmission lines, etc.
- baq 2y agoThe ops point is that after you spot them you call in old fashioned artillery.
- mschuster91 2y agoBesides deer protection and wildlife management in general, they're used in SAR and police - especially in mountainous or forest areas, it's just soooo much faster to send a quick-response team with thermal drones than to travel by foot or wait for a chopper to show up. Obviously in rough weather you still need a legit chopper, but for stuff like "find someone who didn't return from a hike/called for an emergency without knowing where he precisely is" they're just fine. On the infrastructure side, you can use thermal drones in construction planning to detect if/where a building is losing heat, spot (beginning) defects in industrial installations and inspect if a power line is still working acceptably. DJI also pairs the thermal camera with a decent photo camera so you don't need to send up two drones for the job.
- olex 2y agoAnecdote on this: I've been flying R/C planes and drones in some publicly accessible fields with friends for years. Some farmers were a bit confrontational when they saw us (sometimes understandably so, we were always careful but the occasional crash and aircraft retrieval in the middle of a field _did_ happen...). But a few of them were interested, and asked if we could arrange to take some pictures and videos of the fields at specific times, to search for fawns before harvest or similar things. We were happy to oblige, and in return got access to even nicer, non-public areas to gather and fly from regularly. Win-win for all involved.
- defrost 2y agoThere's business in routine agricultural overflights for year to year comparison and records, with multispectral cameras (expensive) for ANOVA plots when cross breeding for new crops with resistance, for rock outcrop plotting | individual large rock recording for { later pickup | hazard enty into tractor maps } etc. A lot of that is done locally here ( large grain fields in Australia ).
- Vox_Leone 2y agoI am putting together a computer vision dataset for detection, identification, classification and counting for cattle herds of Indian breeds, which are the strength of Brazilian livestock farming [where there are still a lot of cattle in free-range pastures]. The dataset will also be useful for monitoring illegal livestock farming in protected areas, such as the Amazon. The scarcity of images of these types of cattle on the Internet, where European varieties are prevalent, forces me to negotiate with local farmers to fly my drones in order to obtain the images. It's not an easy job. Most are confrontational and hostile. I move forward with great difficulty but I will not give up. Soon at cownt.com.br. Edited for clarity.
- freilanzer 2y ago> - 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. Very unfortunate for cows that they're able to produce milk for human consumption.
- eru 2y agoEvolutionary speaking, being tasty and able to produce milk for human consumption has been an extremely successful strategy for cows. Of course, the individual cow might (or might not!) disagree.
- inglor_cz 2y agoNow imagine how unfortunate it is to be a big, challenging game for human hunt... Compared to aurochs, the cows are thriving. (On a side note, I just saw a mounted skeleton of an aurochs yesterday, in the Danish National Museum in Copenhagen. That beast was huge, and it would look even more overwhelming to medieval or Iron Age people, who were on average shorter than us; I am 6 ft and that animal was as tall as me. That is probably why it was so prestigious to hunt one, I can't even imagine a close combat with that. But it was hunted to extinction.)
- ClumsyPilot 2y ago> Compared to aurochs, the cows are thriving This depends on the level of empathy you have for cows. If you empathise with them as you would with humans, imagine making the same argument to justify slavery One could argue industrial farms are fate worse than death
- freilanzer 2y agoThis is what I wanted to convey with my original comment. It seems people think having millions of enslaved cows living in horrible conditions is an advantage for cows compared with "less successful species". I imagine the cows see it very differently.
- langsoul-com 2y agoFarming has always been innovative, except where an extreme abundance exists, like flood farming.
- eru 2y agoThanks to modern capitalism, there's no such thing as a (localised) extreme abundance. Extremely fertile land will be bid up, until it's productivity per-dollar-value will be equivalent to other land. So we will always have incentives for innovation. (I specifically say 'localised', because on a global level we are living in extreme abundance by historic standards.)
- ClumsyPilot 2y agoThis doesn’t really make sense, Local resources exist in abundance because transportation cost is not zero. Iceland has more geothermal power than it knows what to do with, north of Canada has abundance of fresh water but it’s uneconomical to move it to California, etc.
- throwaway2037 2y ago> Iceland has more geothermal power than it knows what to do with Build more aluminum smelters and data centers!
- eru 2y agoYes. (And they are already doing that.) You can also build a high voltage direct current undersea cable to some other bigger grid.
- Nasrudith 2y agoI suppose it depends on how you define 'extreme' as a matter of boring tautological semantics. If extreme is defined as 'enough that it is worth extracting to anybody who discovers it'. Sort of like how ore is defined. Basically there being a limit to abundance before it is too extreme to exist sustainably (without being extracted). You can have Cerro de Potosi, a very silver rich mountain sustainably exist. But a mountain made of solid gold? That would be extracted from until gold devalued itself.
- mywacaday 2y agoThere are also collars that monitor temperature and gait analysis to identify infection and hoof problems. Cows get automatically segregated at milking time for inspection. A monitor is also available that goes over the tail and monitors when a cow begins calving and alerts the farmer, traditionally farmers would wake up every hour or two to check on cows that were close. Successful farmers have always always on the cutting edge of anything that can increase margins or efficiency, they have to be it's a tough business.
- ragnaruss 2y agoI know quite a few people in the industry, and some near the top of big players and the common thing I've heard said is "We have so much data on such a granular level, we don't even know how to exploit most of it".
- dukeyukey 2y agoIs there anything happening with self-driving tractors? I'd expect that in the absence of speed and most of the typical hazards cars on the roads face, when doing pretty rote stuff like spraying, harvesting row crops, or tilling a field we'd be able to automate it pretty easily.
- bluGill 2y agoA lot is going on. 15 years ago farmers were putting the dog in the tractor - it worked so long as there were no deer or other things in the field. Safety is just as hard as for cars though and so progress is just as slow. I work for john deere. But I don't have non public information and I don't speak for the company.