24 ms·

Open Source Farming Robot

714 points by pedrodelfino 2y ago

deleted 2y ago
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pedrodelfino 2y ago
Previous thread from 2021: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27628101 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27628101 A lot of advances since then.
- dang 2y ago
  Thanks! Macroexpanded: Open Source Farming Robot - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27628101 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27628101 - June 2021 (227 comments) FarmBot Genesis XL - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19002022 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19002022 - Jan 2019 (1 comment)
0cf8612b2e1e 2y ago
Cool project, but $2800 for the basic kit is a lot to stomach given how many things can go wrong with robotics.
- kyriakos 2y ago
  My first thought was exactly this. How reliable can it be to run autonomously and how long before parts start breaking down. On the other hand this is cheaper than apple vision pro.
  - ansible 2y ago
    It doesn't really look like it can handle weather or ordinary dirt getting into the belt drive and rails. Automating the watering isn't hard with existing technology. if it can't remove weeds, I don't see what's the point.
f0e4c2f7 2y ago
Would be interested to hear the experiences of someone who has used this.
ChrisMarshallNY 2y ago
My brother told me about this, years ago. It’s a very cool project.
__MatrixMan__ 2y ago
It's written in Elixir. Maybe it's just a grass-is-greener thing but the more Kubernetes I have to stomach, the more interested I become in BEAM languages like Elixir. Not like they're alternatives exactly, but I get the feeling that the BEAM way is to solve the ops problems in a way resembles how you solved your dev problems. More holistic, less ad hoc.
- e1gen-v 2y ago
  Can you elaborate? I’m intrigued.
  - mikepurvis 2y ago
    Not a huge erlang person but I think the idea is that redundancy and robustness is managed by the BEAM process on each host, so that layer is much higher in the stack. Compared with k8s where it’s like okay die if something goes wrong and the container orchestrator makes you a whole new chroot as if you just rebooted.
    - SoftTalker 2y ago
      And multihost is included out of the box, you don't really need to do anything special.
  - __MatrixMan__ 2y ago
    Well, you're hearing it from a guy who has written hardly any Elixir or any other BEAM language. (For a proper intro I recommend this video https://youtu.be/JvBT4XBdoUE https://youtu.be/JvBT4XBdoUE). Less practitioner, more fanboy. So I may not be the best source. But I'll try anyhow. The BEAM is a virtual machine, I guess kinda like the JVM. So just like you can write Java or Kotlin or Clojure or a million other JVM languages, so too can you write Erlang or Elixir or Gleam (I like the look of Gleam)... And expect similar interoperability. The BEAM has its roots in the telecom world. So while Sun Microsystems was doing the Java thing to make webservers or applets or whatever for the JVM, Ericcson was doing Erlang things to make things like long distance phone calls happen on the BEAM. (I'm not a fan of Java, I just think it's a decent thing to compare with in this case) The BEAM folks take a different approach to concurrency than is common elsewhere. BEAM processes are much more lightweight than OS processes, so while it might be insane to run a separate copy of your server for each user, it's less insane to run a separate BEAM process for each user. BEAM processes interact through message passing. Of course most other processes do to, but only because the developer built it that way. With the BEAM it's built in, each process periodically checks its mailbox for a message which matches its criteria, and if there's no message, it sleeps until it is revisited by the scheduler. There's no async/await business. They're all single threaded and sequential. Instead, you achieve coordination by having many of them, some of which are in charge of starting/stopping/organizing others. (I guess they build structures out of these things called "supervision trees" but I don't precisely know what that is). This has all grown up in a world where nodes are expected to be physically separate (like either end of a phone call) so you end up with a bit more fault tolerance than if each process is expected to be on the same machine. In Kubernetes you've got this mountain of yaml which you craft to tell the container orchestrator how to treat your app. And then you've got your app itself which is probably not written in yaml. So I find it very jarring to switch between my dev hat and my ops hat. And Kubernetes... That's Google's baby, right, so it makes sense that it doesn't feel the same as the underlying app. As a cloud provider, they need a rather high wall between the app and the infra. But I think it causes all kinds of problems. At least in my world, the apps are either in Python or Go, so when there's a problem someone will come along and solve it with yaml-glue to add an additional container which may or may not resemble the app which has the problem. My brain struggles to hop from Python to Yaml to Go (and there's usually some bash in there too). The BEAM, by contrast, expects processes to start and stop other processes. So your orchestration logic and your application logic are in the same language. You don't have to express your wishes in yaml and then navigate all of these superfluous layers (e.g. the container entrypoint script, port forwarding, in-cluster DNS, etc) to have your wish granted. That kind of communication is handled by the BEAM's inbuilt message passing system. If I got to rebuild our stack from scratch I'd use Kubernetes as a cloud-provider-agnostic interface to get access to compute, but instead of expressing anything about the app in YAML, I'd handle all of that extra stuff (e.g. log scraping, metric aggregation, whatever hacky fix is needed today...), I'd handle it in the BEAM, right alongside my app. People like to say "build security into the app" or "build observability into the app", but standard practice is to bolt on solutions that don't resemble the app at all. My (probably flawed) perspective is that if you scratch those itches within the BEAM, then you're going to end up with fewer superfluous layers of abstraction. Also fewer distinct niches that you now must find a specialist to fill when the old one quits. Also, you end up more in control of your app because since you more or less wrote the orchestrator, you're relying less on the cloud provider to be a reliable puppet master. --- It's slow going, one class per semester, but I've been taking biology classes on the side. I sometimes think about making a break for it and trying to build something like farmbot but for driving a microscope, or a pipette, or maintaining the temperature/pH/etc in a bioreactor. These are, for now, just dreams. Sorry for the diatribe, but you did ask me to elaborate :)
donw 2y ago
For some values of "open source": the datasets used for information about the plants and such are unavailable as of the last time I checked.
- nvy 2y ago
  You can probably get anything you need from practicalplants
  - donw 2y ago
    That looks useful, thanks!
- throwaway346434 2y ago
  Not unavailable so much as unmaintained. Various APIs still exist and are callable. https://github.com/Growstuff/growstuff/blob/e8bc72dc900e2593eb32600dd8bcaa09218aa8e4/app/services/openfarm_service.rb#L6 https://github.com/Growstuff/growstuff/blob/e8bc72dc900e2593...
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wmoxam 2y ago
More like gardenbot
myprotegeai 2y ago
How many Farmbots would I need to feed 2 adults and 2 children year round? What challenges might I run into? Edit: Found a link to yield analysis https://farm.bot/pages/yield https://farm.bot/pages/yield It appears the answer is however many Farmbots cover 549 square meters
- serf 2y ago
  so 31 farmbots at 3m x 6m? a bit steep still, plus the maintenance nightmare of keeping 31 machines working.. it's a fun farm to envisage though. p.s. I don't think that this gantry has very harsh stiffness requirements; I guess one could scale the thing to a larger size reasonably easy -- akin to a configurable MPCNC machine.
  - delichon 2y ago
    Seems like to scale well the gantry needs to be able to travel between grow boxes, like on a continuous track.
  - deleted 2y ago
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- _heimdall 2y ago
  You'd be better off doing the farming the old fashioned way if the goal is to feed a family. Farming is a terrible business to be in today, but that's mainly due to the abysmal profit margins. When your goal is to feed your family rather than turn a profit, that stops mattering. Most people with any yard or outdoor space could get to the point of growing/raising a large portion of their own food without too much investment or work. A garden doesn't have to be manicured and ready for Instagram, it just needs to produce quality food. Meat and dairy would be the outlier lowering that % if you eat a lot of it, though chickens work well with a modest sized yard and finding a local dairy or farm for meat is still a big improvement on grocery store meat and dairy.
  - Loughla 2y ago
    I've talked about this on this site over the years. My family is close to providing enough food on its own little farm for the whole family, all year (except dairy products and wheat products). It has taken decades. And about 15 acres. And honestly I don't know how many hours. Tens and tens of thousands. You can grow a small amount of your own food "without too much investment or work". To replace a substantial portion of your food with home grown takes a shit load of work and time.
nickhodge 2y ago
But why?
- djbusby 2y ago
  Bots are cool. Farming is cool. Cool^2
- brigadier132 2y ago
  why not?
  - owlninja 2y ago
    To each their own, but small gardens like this are about the journey, not the destination.
    - nvy 2y ago
      Building a garden robot and eating robo-spinach sounds like a super dank journey to me
    - brigadier132 2y ago
      You just stated two contradictory things :). > To each their own I agree. Some people might just want to be in control of where there food comes from. > but small gardens like this are about the journey, not the destination Again, to each their own. Also, coding a robot to automate gardening is a journey as well.
    - nozzlegear 2y ago
      I have a garden that I enjoy, but after years of trial I've learned to only plant hardy native plants and wild flowers because I have a black thumb for vegetables. My main issue is a lack of patience -- I don't want to go out to water everything or monitor if things are getting as much sunlight as I thought they would. But for the last couple years I'd been considering setting up a raspberry pi, some moisture sensors and some kind of drip system as a fun summer project to add on top of my flower garden, so that'd be a journey for me.
deleted 2y ago
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taylorfinley 2y ago
I can't help but feel like this is a satirical send up of "tech bros solve farming," except it's not satire. I am a software engineer, I also runs a small family farm. I have 3d printers and laser cutters and lots of aluminum extrusion and raspberry pis... but I keep those things indoors, away from the dirt, sun, and rain. I can't imagine a real farmer using a contraption like this. Tools have to be reliable to last. I have to replace my solid steel shovels every few years because they wear out, how is this supposed to work?
- garbagewoman 2y ago
  Whats your point, that its not durable enough? Based on what? It doesn’t have a shovel attachment either as far as i can tell
  - thatcat 2y ago
    Lol dirt is going to get in all of it and it's very hard to clean extruded aluminum rails, not to mention how small those wheels were. How's it driven - belts / gears? How often are you going to disassemble and maintain this thing? what's the maintenance schedule like? I would bet it is more demanding than planting a 4x8 raised bed. That said I still love the project. I don't think the point is to grow plants maximally efficiently at this point, it's a early release of something cool and it's open source.
- torlok 2y ago
  I'm both as well. Imagine all that maintenance of keeping a hobby electronics project outside, all just to remove maybe 5% of the effort of growing vegetables. You can't even grow anything tall with it. If they have a solid planning software that accounts for crop rotation, companion planting, etc. then that's already a much better value proposition.
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getpost 2y ago
It sill looks like the software is written by people who don't know how to care for plants. You don't spray water on leaves as shown in the video; you'll just end up with fungus infestation. You water the soil and nourish the microorganisms that facilitate nutrient absorption in roots. But, I don't see any reason the technology can't be adapted to do the right thing.
- SoftTalker 2y ago
  Doesn't rain fall on the leaves as much as the soil?
  - r2_pilot 2y ago
    Isn't the point of being smart human beings is that we do things better than what occurs in nature?
    - NilMostChill 2y ago
      That assumes that rain falling on leaves serves no purpose.
      - stale2002 2y ago
        Nature isn't perfect and has disadvantages compared to us. We don't have to invent ex post facto explanations for why something is the case in nature or why there is some un-intuitive reason as for why the natural way is better.
        twojacobtwo 2y ago
        Nor are we perfect and we've been wrong about much in nature more often than we've been right over the past many millennia. The previous poster didn't imply either case regardless. The post simply pointed out an assumption being made. Frankly, I prefer the way that thinks of 'ex post facto' explanations for nature. At least that keeps us hypothesizing and not sitting there tooting our own horns.
tareqx3 2y ago
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chfritz 2y ago
Very cool. Do you have a way to see the farm live (via video streaming) in the app or the web?
abdullahkhalids 2y ago
The idea of introducing robotics to farming is very attractive. It doesn't seem like this is a scalable solution for farming, but a sufficient one for gardening. They started this project a decade ago. But robotics has advanced quite a bit in that time. Surely, today it is much more viable to have four wheeled robots watering, weeding etc at the same precision this product can. Then why build a gantry.
- defrost 2y ago
  Your points are largely valid and there are many examples of mobile robust at scale autonomous robot vehicles for "big farms" today, it's still a growing market domain with much innovation. > Then why build a gantry. Part of at scale agriculture is growing seedlings (fruit trees, etc), conducting ANOVA trials (small plots to test many seed varieties). There's a good chunk of "big agriculture" taking place in warehouse sized greenhouses with roller topped tables, big sliding trays, tightly packed young plants, overhead gantries for cameras | sprays | lifting hooks, etc. This is a lightweight garden bed gantry .. but there is a place for big gantries in agriculture.
- taneq 2y ago
  So that you’re not rolling around on the soil and compacting it, or squashing seedlings?
  - wokwokwok 2y ago
    Come on, there are obvious solutions to this like having lanes, same as farm use for machinery right now. :p Having a roomba like (yes, obviously different to the standard look of a robot vacuum cleaner; but a small autonomous robot; eg a watering can on tank treads, or a bb8 rolling ball) bot with a docking station out of the weather seems enormously more sustainable and scalable.
- __MatrixMan__ 2y ago
  Gantries can go places that tractors can't, like up and down the side of a building.
- 2y ago
aaron695 2y ago
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wiradikusuma 2y ago
Looking at the pricing and the area the robot covers, isn't it too expensive? I mean, with that land size, it can be easily done by a human in a few minutes? And I'm guessing most people who grow crops at that size do it for a hobby, which means they don't mind doing the work?
owenpalmer 2y ago
Would be interesting if they could get it to work in a circular pattern with multiple layers, where one FarmBot traverses each ring of the garden's "onion". For an optimized garden to feed a family, you need 549 square meters[0], which is a circle with a diameter of 26.4 meters (86.7 ft). That's all the vegetables for your entire family, mostly automated. That's a future I would love to see, even though it's way less efficient than industrial farming. [0] https://farm.bot/pages/yield https://farm.bot/pages/yield
- _kb 2y ago
  That seems like an efficient approach for a commercial scale version. The form would essentially mirror center-pivot irrigation [1] so you can keep a fixed point for delivering energy, water, fertiliser etc and cover larger circular patch with a series of smaller linear robots. Each span could also be modular to adapt to different sizes as suitable for the landscape. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Center-pivot_irrigation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Center-pivot_irrigation
- torlok 2y ago
  > That's all the vegetables for your entire family, mostly automated. This thing only drills the seeds and waters the plants.
_Marak_ 2y ago
you can buy a soaker hose with a timer its like twenty bucks
fareesh 2y ago
Is there an open source robot repository somewhere a-la github?
aussieguy1234 2y ago
I'd like to see a farming robot using the new SAM model from meta.
gohai 2y ago
Make sure to check out Telegarden by Ken Goldberg and Joseph Santarromana, from 1995-2004: https://goldberg.berkeley.edu/garden/Ars/ https://goldberg.berkeley.edu/garden/Ars/
antoniojtorres 2y ago
This worries me from a positioning standpoint. I imagine a large amount of people with a garden bed, even a large one, garden because they like it, this would get in the way of that. The device doesn’t appear like it would scale well to anything large enough, and even then it would compete with much more sophisticated solutions that do this. I feel like it’s actual market may end up being pretty narrow, not that it isn’t it a cool idea, it is, but it just gave me that gut reaction that it falls squarely in the uncanny valley between industrial users and hobbyists.
- defrost 2y ago
  It makes more sense targeted towards "people that like robots" rather than "people that want to grow their own food". I'm in a rural area and my first thought seeing this was "Good kit to play with for a growing teenager interested in agricultural automation" rather than "Serious industrial end use tooling".
  - rahkiin 2y ago
    My partner likes gardening. I like robots. This might work for us. That’s a narrow audience though..
- Maxion 2y ago
  It could be useful in some research, allowing precise control of e.g. watering and automated photography of the plants. But that's about it.
- snickmy 2y ago
  Do you have any link to more sophisticated solutions ? genuine ask
  - CapstanRoller 2y ago
    www.deere.com
  - Loughla 2y ago
    Legitimately look into custom farming practices. The level of automation, data, and general technology in use in farming today is amazing.
vertis 2y ago
Snippets from my partners reactions: "Aimed at prosumers...uh...more nerdsumers" "Oh I just saw the price, $4000 to avoid an hours work"
ragebol 2y ago
I've always wondered why this robot uses a gantry system. Would be less intrusive and thus easier to work alongside a human if it was a polar system, with a single pole in the middle/corner, like a tower crane. Simpler mechanically as well I suppose
- daemonologist 2y ago
  I toyed with a cable-bot (like what is used for top-down shots at sporting events) for gardening. Needs three towers and probably difficult to make sturdy enough for watering but way cheaper at large scales than anything rigid and relatively more portable.
  - ragebol 2y ago
    Sturdy enough for watering should not be too hard I guess. I'd say weeding it harder, depending on the method. Pulling out weeds with roots and all (most effective IME) requires some force and torque.
mherrmann 2y ago
Having watched Clarkson's Farm, I can't help but feel that farming is extremely antiquated. The sensitivity to unexpected weather and the low profit margins despite the high investments of time and money seem terrible. I can't see us as an advanced species doing this in 100 years, except for specialty experiences.
- torlok 2y ago
  Modern farming is anything but antiquated. A lot of science goes into it, and it's the most efficient use of national resources to produce food. The downsides you mentioned is purely the fault of the market, not farming itself.
  - mherrmann 2y ago
    I understand that a lot of science and technology goes into modern farming, and that it's much better than it used to be. You did not address one of the main downsides I mentioned, which is that it still seems to be extremely reliant on the weather.
    - torlok 2y ago
      It also makes use of the sun and rain for free, unlike controlled setups. Weather is an issue, but it's not an issue everywhere at once. Even now with the progressing climate change farmers are adapting. You have introduction of regenerative farming to mitigate erosion and help with water retention, planting wind barriers, more resistant plant varieties, and much more. It's all designed to help mitigate weather fluctuations. Startups growing wheat under UV lighting are not going to feed the planet.
- CapstanRoller 2y ago
  >Having watched Clarkson's Farm, I can't help but feel that farming is extremely antiquated. That's like saying you watched The Bachelor and now have Opinions about marriage.
  - 2y ago
torlok 2y ago
This is a Juicero of farming. The whole setup is easily replaced with a raised garden bed and a drip hose. Hearing about this a few years back, I was hoping it would at least do some weed control, but no.
- Maxion 2y ago
  It is indeed a juicero of farming. It costs 4 grand for something that can handle a single garden bed. This is not suitable for even small commerical growers, they'd need hundreds of these things. All commercial growers in my latitude start by sprouting their plants indoors, using e.g. soil blocks. Very little is direct sown. If you practice no-till, weeding isn't even that big of a task. This thing definitely does not provide value.
  - prattatx 2y ago
    Value for me is to scratch the zombie apocalypse itch. One feature request is some form of animal and pest protection. Squirrels and cardinals eat a majority percentage of the veggies in my raised bed here in Austin. I think some bats eat the vegetables as well but that’s difficult to validate.
    - torlok 2y ago
      How does it scratch that itch. This thing can plant seeds and water the plants. You can just run a hose through your raised bed and have a timer on your water valve. This thing won't grow food for you. If you're worried about the apocalypse, then start researching how seeds are produced, because your apocalypse garden plan will probably die right there.
    - Vegenoid 2y ago
      You believe that this thing will have more usefulness in an apocalypse scenario? I think that anything high-tech immediately becomes far less useful if the infrastructure that supports modern electronics and computers collapses.
    - badcppdev 2y ago
weweweoo 2y ago
Seems like a cool project, but not something I would pay thousands of dollars for as a hobbyist gardener. By the looks of it, might work for smaller plants, but not much use in growing larger varieties of tomato or cucumber for example. Really the only thing I would trust and want to automate is watering when I'm away, and that can be done much cheaper. The most burdensome part right now in my greenhouse is actually keeping the large plants in check, prevent them from growing too much by taking away right leaves/branches. The robot probably wouldn't do too much to help with that. Weeds are a problem outside, but that's way too large of an area to cover with this kind of robots.
- john_minsk 2y ago
  Interesting. A while ago I heard about a project to use laser with AI to grow salmon and protect from parasites[1] Would it be a terrible idea to destroy weeds with laser shots? Or crops don't provide enough margin for such advance tech? 1. https://www.stingray.no/delousing-with-laser/?lang=en https://www.stingray.no/delousing-with-laser/?lang=en
matthewiiiv 2y ago
This is very cool and I immediately wanted one. Hobby gardening is not exactly cost effective but I can think of cheaper ways to outsource growing vegetables...
constantcrying 2y ago
Seems an interesting engineering project, but like a terrible product. Who is the customer? If you like gardening, why would you pay thousands of dollars so that you don't need to do it? If you don't like gardening, you obviously wouldn't be interested in having a robot do it for you. I just can't imagine who would buy this. Gardening can be done very cheap and I believe that most people do it because they like spending time outside, working with their hands, being involved with the food they eat and saving a bit of money. Why would such a person want to have a robot which does away with that? On an industrial scale this thing is of course totally useless.
- naasking 2y ago
  > If you don't like gardening, you obviously wouldn't be interested in having a robot do it for you Why? Do people who don't like gardening not like gardens or fresh produce? I just don't see how you reached this conclusion.
  - constantcrying 2y ago
    I gave a list of reasons for why people might light to do gardening. In that list zero of the points benefit from having a robot do it for you. Why do you just ask the most banal questions instead of reading my post and responding to the argument I made? >Do people who don't like gardening not like gardens or fresh produce? I just don't see how you reached this conclusion. Yes, if you don't ready post you don't know how I reached that conclusion. If you just like fresh produce go to a farmers market.
    - naasking 2y ago
      Nothing you wrote in this or the original post implies that people who don't like gardening wouldn't want to have a garden on their own property managed by a robot.
      - constantcrying 2y ago
        Having a product for gardening and selling it to people who don't like gardening is genuinely retarded. With this robot you still have to do gardening, only somewhat less. If you don't like gardening why would you spend 2k on a robot doing it for you instead of buying the produce?
hkt 2y ago
I used to love things like this, now I realise that actually caring for living things is quite nice and life affirming, and spending yet more time behind a screen really is not. 40 hours+ per week obligate online-time plus recreation is not a great way to live life. Our working lives are too long and our hours per week are too many. The sooner we learn to touch grass regularly, the better. Robots are evidently not the way to do this.
rammer 2y ago
The amount of work required in getting this up and running and maintaining it could never pay for itself. The capital cost alone would take decades to pay back of ever.
CapstanRoller 2y ago
How many actual farmers are involved with this project, or were at least consulted? This thing looks like an out-of-touch nerd hobby project, not a real tool one would use in the real world of farming. The "Commercial Production" link goes to a page mostly consisting of... art projects. https://farm.bot/pages/research https://farm.bot/pages/research
Brosper 2y ago
I think it's like, "I want to help in an industry I don't know anything about". This is not scalable. I understand that this person would like to help, but this is not the help that Farmers and needed. I wonder if he asked farmers about their problems before creating this project.
- quijoteuniv 2y ago
  I do not understand why so much negativity against an open source project. And anyway game changing seldom comes within the same industry.
  - James_K 2y ago
    The negativity comes from the fact that it's obviously stupid to spend $4000 on an AI robot that waters plants on a single small plot of land. The selling point of this product is "I want fresh food but I don't want to garden" which is much better served by going to a market and buying the food from a farmer.
    - quijoteuniv 2y ago
      I would argue that negativity comes from you even if the project is not that great yet. But i see passion, openness and someone trying to tackle a very big problem. What did you do today? I tell you what I did… i have been negative with post that are negative about a project. So peace on earth and hopefully we can make together a better world.
      - James_K 2y ago
        Okay Mr. High Horse. My issue with them isn't passion, it's pride. Every other week some tech-minded person will look at something which works perfectly well and think "I know nothing about this but I'm sure it could be improved with a robot". The robot is almost always a bad idea because it doesn't take into account the actual needs and wants of the people it's being sold to, and sometimes those people are forced to use it anyway. The only reason it exists is because its creators know about technology and when all you have is a hammer your problems start to look like nails.
willguest 2y ago
How many harvests would it take to offset the emissions that go into producing a kit? My guess is that this uses more steel per sapling than almost any other method of tending to a vegetable
- NotGMan 2y ago
  Why always this obsession with emissions? People don't want poisoned food from pesticides etc... primarly.
- henearkr 2y ago
  Why do you tie emissions to steel contents. This system is electricity-based, whereas traditional agriculture is fuel-intensive. Even fertilizer production is fuel-intensive, and this system avoids using any. Multiply by the time scale you want the system to last, and you get your emissions savings. Steel contents is a one-off emissions investment. Now if you want to compare this system to an other electricity-based, renewable energy only, agriculture, say with electric trucks etc, that'd be interesting.
jimnotgym 2y ago
I don't want to be accused of pedantry...but isn't this a gardening robot? I don't see how it scales to fields. I don't really see what problem it solves. Growing in a raised bed with drip irrigation looks a lot less hassle than setting up a giant cnc watering machine. If you mulch once a year you don't need to add nutrients to a no dog bed at all.
gunalx 2y ago
If it was just a automated irrigation system and a camera with some detection for seeing if the plants look oka and can send a ping if a human needs to intervene. I remember hearing about this year's ago, and find it really cool, but it probably does to little, or is to expensive to be able to justify.
klntsky 2y ago
ROI shouldn't be calculated based on the costs of transportation, because no one goes to the store to buy just vegetables (and not everyone drives to the store, it's a purely suburban american thing). Not to mention 'CO2 costs' that you don't pay at all
- luckylion 2y ago
  > and not everyone drives to the store, it's a purely suburban american thing I live in a german town at the edge of a large city, the grocery stores are evenly distributed among this town, max 15 minutes by foot or 5 by bike. I love my bike and use it all the time. On a nice day, there will be 20 bikes and 60 cars at the store. On a rainy day there will be 2 bikes and 80 cars at the store. "Only americans take the car to the store" is a myth that you shouldn't spread.
nmeofthestate 2y ago
The promo video - Industrial Farming Bad, Take Back Control, epic movie trailer soundtrack - is a real hoot, given the product it's selling.
- elric 2y ago
  I found it to be incredibly annoying, with overly dramatic music and narration, not to mention nonsensical claims. This kind of thing immediately turns me off to any product.
cactusplant7374 2y ago
Does it kill weeds? Is watering the only thing it does?
madmask 2y ago
Looks like a thing that takes away the pleasure from gardening/small scale farming.
apexalpha 2y ago
This looks fun but not really useful. My hope would be that in 20 years everyone has a little bot that 24/7 runs a garden for you and provides every family with 80% of their vegetable need. Imagine the amount of acreage we could return to nature / co2 sinking.
- Waterluvian 2y ago
  Every family having to have a robot instead of a handful of tractors for every ten thousand families or so. And that is likely a less optimal use of acreage. I think what you might actually be advocating for is “people should convert more residential land into gardens” which is always fun. I love my garden as a hobby. We keep trying to un-invent the division of labour. Edited for unnecessary pre-coffee poor behaviour. Sorry.
  - siffin 2y ago
    [flagged]
    - agumonkey 2y ago
      you know good sites / books about this ? or active groups
    - ecocentrik 2y ago
      Just imagine all the packaging material that would be required to get everyone a new farm bot every few years.
      - siffin 2y ago
        I am, it's not very much, and compared with the packaging for food in every market, it's just a rounding error. The thing about growing food locally, is that you don't need individually package your apples in plastic. You just harvest it, then eat it, in it's healthiest possible form, while also not doing insane polluting.
    - 2y ago
kingkawn 2y ago
it is so so easy to grow that much of a garden, this is a complete waste
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
j_m_b 2y ago
We could do with a lot less grass lawns and a lot more gardens. Even just growing flowers adds tremendously to the local ecosystem of insects, while adding beauty to your life. If this gets more people thinking about gardening, I'm all for it!
theo1996 2y ago
this is very wastefull and stupid, you can buy a auto prinkler with a timer for 100 euros, and seeding can be done by hand in the same time the bot does it.
BigParm 2y ago
Lol @ most of you who think this is real. It's a troll post w Sora or something. Turn your fucking brain on. By the time you fuck around with that, you could have done the garden by hand 20 times.
d_burfoot 2y ago
I would love to contribute to something like this for cattle ranching. Track your herd with a mapping app, analyze the cows' vital signs, estimate how much land you need for grazing, etc.
hengheng 2y ago
My retirement project is going to be this but at larger scale. Remove the tires from two old bicycles to run them on rails, build a gantry between them mounted to seatposts and handlebars. Probably drive it with chains on winches for robustness. Use movable wall elements so that the pick and place machine can set up both shade and increased illumination. Maybe have portable rain protection too. Maybe deploy close-up UV and IR lamps. I'd like to know the max size that a single gantry can serve, see how high its utilization can be. My guess is that it all can pay off once it's big enough. I just don't know where that point is. 100ft long? 200ft? 300? And 20ft wide?
GlenTheMachine 2y ago
Farmer and roboticist here. There is a lot of discussion in a lot of threads about the design of the robot to water "from the top" by spraying the leaves instead of watering directly on the roots, and whether that's a good or bad thing, and whether the designers of the robot thought about it. Here's the problem with watering the leaves: yes, plants ultimately get their water from rain. But under normal conditions, the rain comes in sporadically in large quantities -- not every day -- and soaks into the soil, which is where the plants actually pick it up. Flood irrigation does largely the same thing. Spray irrigation doesn't attempt to water the soil that deeply, it tends to give the plants just what they need for the next 24-48 hours, and that encourages wilt and fungal infections. Also, domesticated vegetable crops are far more susceptible to wilt and fungal infections than natives, and than grain crops, which are at the end of the day grasses. So you can in the same garden have perfectly healthy corn but all of your melons and squash have such bad fungal infections that the leaves are literally white. You can criticize the selection of vegetables for yield and not hardiness, but the fact is this is where we are with vegetable crops. This is an interesting project, but IMHO it isn't practical, and there isn't any way to make it practical. The X-Y gantry design, for gardening, has a number of intractable problems, watering from the top being just one of them. Another is that the design doesn't scale. You can't make this thing handle a 25 by 100 foot grade bed, which is the size you'd need to even start making a serious dent in the nutritional needs of one person. It can't really weed, and there's no way to modify the design to make it weed effectively; you'd have to add degrees of freedom to the gantry so that it could reach down to soil level and grasp roots (or, alternatively, to very selectively apply an herbicide). Garden crops grow to dramatically different heights; micro greens will be a few inches about the soil, zucchini will be three feet high, tomatoes can be 4-5 feet, and corn depending on cultivar can be as much as 9 feet tall. And finally, watering and weeding, if you know what you're doing are actually the easiest parts of the problem. Preparing the bed so you don't have to weed is a lot more work. To do that, you plant your crops and then apply large amounts of mulch. If you've never prepared beds, shoveled dirty barn straw for mulch or tried to wrangle weed barrier cloth on a hot, humid day, you haven't lived, my friend. That's the physically hard part. THe mentally hard part is diagnosing problems in your crops before they become problems. Noticing that those shiny weird insects flying around are squash vine borer. Looking at the underside of leaves and seeing squash beetle eggs or going around your tomatoes with a blacklight looking for cutworms. If you want to apply robotics to gardens, you either need a low mobile base, or you need to carefully lay out rows with fixed spacing, and have a high mobile base that can clear the height of the crops, and can take a variety of attachments, e.g. tillers to handle weed control. Which means you need think about monocropping. Which starts to look like the mid 20th century basic garden tractor, the International Harvester Farmall Cub, just with maybe an electric power plant and an autonomy appliqué kit. THis makes sense because the mid 20th century was the last time people in North America practiced gardening as a survival mechanism, and the Farmall Cub was the result of 50 years of practical design by people who knew how to garden when it counted.
Havoc 2y ago
A single bed isn't exactly an ungodly amount of effort to do by hand. Think there is more potential industrial scale. i.e. run the arm over half a mile rather than a couple of feet
indus 2y ago
Isn’t your headline deceptive? Open source farming bot and the next CTA is order now for $2700?
driverdan 2y ago
I'm surprised no one has mentioned hydroponics. For $2800 you can build a very nice, large, and mostly automated hydroponics setup. It would have higher yields, no weeding, minimal pests if indoors, better nutrient control, a smaller footprint, more reliability, and less complexity.
- pcarolan 2y ago
  Do you have a good resource for getting a system started? Particularly outdoors / backyard scale?
  - driverdan 2y ago
    There is a lot of good content on YouTube. The top search results tend to be decent. Indoor vs outdoor tend to be mostly the same minus the lights.
- jejeyyy77 2y ago
  what are benefits of soil vs hydroponics?
  - atrus 2y ago
    Soil farming (think small family farm) in a field has the advantage of being stupidly cheap. Free sun, free water, free nutrients, as long as you're not going for 150% yields like the big mono-farms do. The tradeoff is lack of consistency. It's easy to have a bad season that gives you shit yields. Plus it's a ton of work. There's a reason we've worked so hard to automate so much of that. Hydro gives you a significant amount of control. Exact amount and wavelength of light, exact timing and amount of nutrients, exact temperature, humidity, co2, wind, etc. All with significantly higher costs. There's a reason that those "hydroponics in a skyscraper" basically grow lettuce, because it's the same growing profile as weed, which is a high profit crop.
greenie_beans 2y ago
nah, part of the fun of gardening is interacting with plants
alsodumb 2y ago
This project sucks ass - I know some research groups (non-engineering, they were more ag programs) who purchased it from them for a few thousand dollars and pretty much shelved it after a few months - unreliable hardware, buggy software, minimal support - all in all it would probably have been much more easier if we hired a bunch of engineering undergrads to build something like this from scratch.
- kumarvvr 2y ago
  I thought you could use this as a springboard to improve and customize further, then put back those improvements into the open source project.
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
cl42 2y ago
A lot of people are criticizing this product. Does anyone know what "best in class" small-scale farming or gardening projects are? Very curious! Also any community recommendations would be great.
- lucideer 2y ago
  > Does anyone know what "best in class" small-scale farming or gardening projects are? I think you're misinterpreting the criticisms. It's not "this particular product is a bad implementation compared to other one-size-fits-all tech-solutionism products", but rather "a one-size-fits-all tech-solutionism approach to this problem space doesn't make any sense" This is a very typical tech-industry "everything looks like a nail" type issue: going into an area you don't understand with a solution to problems that don't exist. A small subset of problems here: 1. A robot should automate things you do often/regularly - developing complex machinery do to one-off seasonal steps steps like seeding & pulling is immensely wasteful - that's going to raise the cost of the product a lot just in order to automate tasks you rarely do. 2. It doesn't do those tasks well: the pulling examples are contrived & the failure rates look high. 3. The watering mechanism is developed to suit the robot design rather than designing the robot around optimal watering strategies - this completely ignores generations of optimising watering approaches. The watering mechanism is actively harmful to many crops. 4. Very unadaptable to different plants' needs. TL;DR: There is no best of class product in this area because only someone who doesn't understand the problem space would try to develop a product to do this.
  - cl42 2y ago
    This is incredibly helpful, thank you! If you have resources I can read or learn from about all this, please share them. You've clearly got wisdom in this space!
simpaticoder 2y ago
It is curious to market a device as an improvement in self-sufficiency and design it to require an internet-connected centralized webapp.
robxorb 2y ago
The main criticism against this seems to be it doesn't kill weeds. But it's an open system, with standardised, autonomously selectable attachments. Can someone come up with an attachment or two for it that could control weeds?
avodonosov 2y ago
Exactly what functions does it perform? Watering? Weeding? Can it remove slugs, caterpillars, etc?
ensocode 2y ago
Seems a bit like Vertical Farming, innovative but way to expensive tech. Anyway good luck!
fennecfoxy 2y ago
Terrible design. Modular hydroponic pods have always been a better idea and if someone handed me 100 million I'd use it to develop standardised farming skyscrapers/towers to hydroponically grow food in towns/local communities with minimal water, electricity usage and human intervention. It's so crazy that we have the tech to do this sort of thing now, but don't. We could do so much if things weren't so profit focussed and the wealthy weren't able to skim most of it off to dump into tax havens.
- pbmonster 2y ago
  > develop standardised farming skyscrapers/towers to hydroponically grow food in Land use for vegetable farming is really not an issue. Just build your hydroponics setup on the ground, you'll cut costs by an order of magnitude. If you actually want to reduce land use, get people to eat less meat. The crops that use the most land by far are corn and soy, and most of those ends up just being fed to livestock.
craftoman 2y ago
These guys are charging €3000 for a kit that cost less than €400 if you order each item individually. They’re ripping off the customers.
greenhearth 2y ago
Nice, I will have enough tomatoes for a whole week before they rot away.
tmaier 2y ago
My garden bed has a slug problem. How can FarmBot help me with this? Is there a tool, like a grabber, that automatically catches intruders and carries them away?
silexia 2y ago
Everyone should absolutely do a small garden in their yard instead of grass or other wasteful landscaping. As a farmer, this looks like it would be massively expensive per acre and massively wasteful of environmental resources. I currently farm 5,000 acres including 400 irrigated acres for $300,000 per year. I grow enough food to feed thousands of people a year. You would need 200 of these systems to farm one acre. I could not find a list price on the website, but based on my knowledge of CNC machine pricing, each machine probably costs in the neighborhood of $10,000. So this machine would cost $2,000,000 per acre to farm. Insanity. Government bureaucrats want you to starve to death, so I am sure money will go to this and be taken from ordinary farmers. The system also appears to be an environmental disaster... Enormous amounts of heavily machined aluminum, stainless steel, and plastic to do tiny bits of work already done far more efficiently in other ways.

714 points by pedrodelfino 2y ago

deleted 2y ago

[deleted]

Previous thread from 2021: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27628101 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27628101 A lot of advances since then.

dang 2y ago
Thanks! Macroexpanded: Open Source Farming Robot - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27628101 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27628101 - June 2021 (227 comments) FarmBot Genesis XL - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19002022 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19002022 - Jan 2019 (1 comment)

0cf8612b2e1e 2y ago

Cool project, but $2800 for the basic kit is a lot to stomach given how many things can go wrong with robotics.

kyriakos 2y ago
My first thought was exactly this. How reliable can it be to run autonomously and how long before parts start breaking down. On the other hand this is cheaper than apple vision pro.
- ansible 2y ago
  It doesn't really look like it can handle weather or ordinary dirt getting into the belt drive and rails. Automating the watering isn't hard with existing technology. if it can't remove weeds, I don't see what's the point.

f0e4c2f7 2y ago

Would be interested to hear the experiences of someone who has used this.

ChrisMarshallNY 2y ago

My brother told me about this, years ago. It’s a very cool project.

__MatrixMan__ 2y ago

It's written in Elixir. Maybe it's just a grass-is-greener thing but the more Kubernetes I have to stomach, the more interested I become in BEAM languages like Elixir. Not like they're alternatives exactly, but I get the feeling that the BEAM way is to solve the ops problems in a way resembles how you solved your dev problems. More holistic, less ad hoc.

e1gen-v 2y ago
Can you elaborate? I’m intrigued.
- mikepurvis 2y ago
  Not a huge erlang person but I think the idea is that redundancy and robustness is managed by the BEAM process on each host, so that layer is much higher in the stack. Compared with k8s where it’s like okay die if something goes wrong and the container orchestrator makes you a whole new chroot as if you just rebooted.
  - SoftTalker 2y ago
    And multihost is included out of the box, you don't really need to do anything special.
- __MatrixMan__ 2y ago
  Well, you're hearing it from a guy who has written hardly any Elixir or any other BEAM language. (For a proper intro I recommend this video https://youtu.be/JvBT4XBdoUE https://youtu.be/JvBT4XBdoUE). Less practitioner, more fanboy. So I may not be the best source. But I'll try anyhow. The BEAM is a virtual machine, I guess kinda like the JVM. So just like you can write Java or Kotlin or Clojure or a million other JVM languages, so too can you write Erlang or Elixir or Gleam (I like the look of Gleam)... And expect similar interoperability. The BEAM has its roots in the telecom world. So while Sun Microsystems was doing the Java thing to make webservers or applets or whatever for the JVM, Ericcson was doing Erlang things to make things like long distance phone calls happen on the BEAM. (I'm not a fan of Java, I just think it's a decent thing to compare with in this case) The BEAM folks take a different approach to concurrency than is common elsewhere. BEAM processes are much more lightweight than OS processes, so while it might be insane to run a separate copy of your server for each user, it's less insane to run a separate BEAM process for each user. BEAM processes interact through message passing. Of course most other processes do to, but only because the developer built it that way. With the BEAM it's built in, each process periodically checks its mailbox for a message which matches its criteria, and if there's no message, it sleeps until it is revisited by the scheduler. There's no async/await business. They're all single threaded and sequential. Instead, you achieve coordination by having many of them, some of which are in charge of starting/stopping/organizing others. (I guess they build structures out of these things called "supervision trees" but I don't precisely know what that is). This has all grown up in a world where nodes are expected to be physically separate (like either end of a phone call) so you end up with a bit more fault tolerance than if each process is expected to be on the same machine. In Kubernetes you've got this mountain of yaml which you craft to tell the container orchestrator how to treat your app. And then you've got your app itself which is probably not written in yaml. So I find it very jarring to switch between my dev hat and my ops hat. And Kubernetes... That's Google's baby, right, so it makes sense that it doesn't feel the same as the underlying app. As a cloud provider, they need a rather high wall between the app and the infra. But I think it causes all kinds of problems. At least in my world, the apps are either in Python or Go, so when there's a problem someone will come along and solve it with yaml-glue to add an additional container which may or may not resemble the app which has the problem. My brain struggles to hop from Python to Yaml to Go (and there's usually some bash in there too). The BEAM, by contrast, expects processes to start and stop other processes. So your orchestration logic and your application logic are in the same language. You don't have to express your wishes in yaml and then navigate all of these superfluous layers (e.g. the container entrypoint script, port forwarding, in-cluster DNS, etc) to have your wish granted. That kind of communication is handled by the BEAM's inbuilt message passing system. If I got to rebuild our stack from scratch I'd use Kubernetes as a cloud-provider-agnostic interface to get access to compute, but instead of expressing anything about the app in YAML, I'd handle all of that extra stuff (e.g. log scraping, metric aggregation, whatever hacky fix is needed today...), I'd handle it in the BEAM, right alongside my app. People like to say "build security into the app" or "build observability into the app", but standard practice is to bolt on solutions that don't resemble the app at all. My (probably flawed) perspective is that if you scratch those itches within the BEAM, then you're going to end up with fewer superfluous layers of abstraction. Also fewer distinct niches that you now must find a specialist to fill when the old one quits. Also, you end up more in control of your app because since you more or less wrote the orchestrator, you're relying less on the cloud provider to be a reliable puppet master. --- It's slow going, one class per semester, but I've been taking biology classes on the side. I sometimes think about making a break for it and trying to build something like farmbot but for driving a microscope, or a pipette, or maintaining the temperature/pH/etc in a bioreactor. These are, for now, just dreams. Sorry for the diatribe, but you did ask me to elaborate :)

donw 2y ago

For some values of "open source": the datasets used for information about the plants and such are unavailable as of the last time I checked.

nvy 2y ago
You can probably get anything you need from practicalplants
- donw 2y ago
  That looks useful, thanks!
throwaway346434 2y ago
Not unavailable so much as unmaintained. Various APIs still exist and are callable. https://github.com/Growstuff/growstuff/blob/e8bc72dc900e2593eb32600dd8bcaa09218aa8e4/app/services/openfarm_service.rb#L6 https://github.com/Growstuff/growstuff/blob/e8bc72dc900e2593...

deleted 2y ago

[deleted]

wmoxam 2y ago

More like gardenbot

myprotegeai 2y ago

How many Farmbots would I need to feed 2 adults and 2 children year round? What challenges might I run into? Edit: Found a link to yield analysis https://farm.bot/pages/yield https://farm.bot/pages/yield It appears the answer is however many Farmbots cover 549 square meters

serf 2y ago
so 31 farmbots at 3m x 6m? a bit steep still, plus the maintenance nightmare of keeping 31 machines working.. it's a fun farm to envisage though. p.s. I don't think that this gantry has very harsh stiffness requirements; I guess one could scale the thing to a larger size reasonably easy -- akin to a configurable MPCNC machine.
- delichon 2y ago
  Seems like to scale well the gantry needs to be able to travel between grow boxes, like on a continuous track.
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
_heimdall 2y ago
You'd be better off doing the farming the old fashioned way if the goal is to feed a family. Farming is a terrible business to be in today, but that's mainly due to the abysmal profit margins. When your goal is to feed your family rather than turn a profit, that stops mattering. Most people with any yard or outdoor space could get to the point of growing/raising a large portion of their own food without too much investment or work. A garden doesn't have to be manicured and ready for Instagram, it just needs to produce quality food. Meat and dairy would be the outlier lowering that % if you eat a lot of it, though chickens work well with a modest sized yard and finding a local dairy or farm for meat is still a big improvement on grocery store meat and dairy.
- Loughla 2y ago
  I've talked about this on this site over the years. My family is close to providing enough food on its own little farm for the whole family, all year (except dairy products and wheat products). It has taken decades. And about 15 acres. And honestly I don't know how many hours. Tens and tens of thousands. You can grow a small amount of your own food "without too much investment or work". To replace a substantial portion of your food with home grown takes a shit load of work and time.

nickhodge 2y ago

But why?

djbusby 2y ago
Bots are cool. Farming is cool. Cool^2
brigadier132 2y ago
why not?
- owlninja 2y ago
  To each their own, but small gardens like this are about the journey, not the destination.
  - nvy 2y ago
    Building a garden robot and eating robo-spinach sounds like a super dank journey to me
  - brigadier132 2y ago
    You just stated two contradictory things :). > To each their own I agree. Some people might just want to be in control of where there food comes from. > but small gardens like this are about the journey, not the destination Again, to each their own. Also, coding a robot to automate gardening is a journey as well.
  - nozzlegear 2y ago
    I have a garden that I enjoy, but after years of trial I've learned to only plant hardy native plants and wild flowers because I have a black thumb for vegetables. My main issue is a lack of patience -- I don't want to go out to water everything or monitor if things are getting as much sunlight as I thought they would. But for the last couple years I'd been considering setting up a raspberry pi, some moisture sensors and some kind of drip system as a fun summer project to add on top of my flower garden, so that'd be a journey for me.

deleted 2y ago

[deleted]

taylorfinley 2y ago

I can't help but feel like this is a satirical send up of "tech bros solve farming," except it's not satire. I am a software engineer, I also runs a small family farm. I have 3d printers and laser cutters and lots of aluminum extrusion and raspberry pis... but I keep those things indoors, away from the dirt, sun, and rain. I can't imagine a real farmer using a contraption like this. Tools have to be reliable to last. I have to replace my solid steel shovels every few years because they wear out, how is this supposed to work?

garbagewoman 2y ago
Whats your point, that its not durable enough? Based on what? It doesn’t have a shovel attachment either as far as i can tell
- thatcat 2y ago
  Lol dirt is going to get in all of it and it's very hard to clean extruded aluminum rails, not to mention how small those wheels were. How's it driven - belts / gears? How often are you going to disassemble and maintain this thing? what's the maintenance schedule like? I would bet it is more demanding than planting a 4x8 raised bed. That said I still love the project. I don't think the point is to grow plants maximally efficiently at this point, it's a early release of something cool and it's open source.
torlok 2y ago
I'm both as well. Imagine all that maintenance of keeping a hobby electronics project outside, all just to remove maybe 5% of the effort of growing vegetables. You can't even grow anything tall with it. If they have a solid planning software that accounts for crop rotation, companion planting, etc. then that's already a much better value proposition.

deleted 2y ago

[deleted]

getpost 2y ago

It sill looks like the software is written by people who don't know how to care for plants. You don't spray water on leaves as shown in the video; you'll just end up with fungus infestation. You water the soil and nourish the microorganisms that facilitate nutrient absorption in roots. But, I don't see any reason the technology can't be adapted to do the right thing.

SoftTalker 2y ago
Doesn't rain fall on the leaves as much as the soil?
- r2_pilot 2y ago
  Isn't the point of being smart human beings is that we do things better than what occurs in nature?
  - NilMostChill 2y ago
    That assumes that rain falling on leaves serves no purpose.
    - stale2002 2y ago
      Nature isn't perfect and has disadvantages compared to us. We don't have to invent ex post facto explanations for why something is the case in nature or why there is some un-intuitive reason as for why the natural way is better.
      - twojacobtwo 2y ago
        Nor are we perfect and we've been wrong about much in nature more often than we've been right over the past many millennia. The previous poster didn't imply either case regardless. The post simply pointed out an assumption being made. Frankly, I prefer the way that thinks of 'ex post facto' explanations for nature. At least that keeps us hypothesizing and not sitting there tooting our own horns.

tareqx3 2y ago

[dead]

chfritz 2y ago

Very cool. Do you have a way to see the farm live (via video streaming) in the app or the web?

abdullahkhalids 2y ago

The idea of introducing robotics to farming is very attractive. It doesn't seem like this is a scalable solution for farming, but a sufficient one for gardening. They started this project a decade ago. But robotics has advanced quite a bit in that time. Surely, today it is much more viable to have four wheeled robots watering, weeding etc at the same precision this product can. Then why build a gantry.

defrost 2y ago
Your points are largely valid and there are many examples of mobile robust at scale autonomous robot vehicles for "big farms" today, it's still a growing market domain with much innovation. > Then why build a gantry. Part of at scale agriculture is growing seedlings (fruit trees, etc), conducting ANOVA trials (small plots to test many seed varieties). There's a good chunk of "big agriculture" taking place in warehouse sized greenhouses with roller topped tables, big sliding trays, tightly packed young plants, overhead gantries for cameras | sprays | lifting hooks, etc. This is a lightweight garden bed gantry .. but there is a place for big gantries in agriculture.
taneq 2y ago
So that you’re not rolling around on the soil and compacting it, or squashing seedlings?
- wokwokwok 2y ago
  Come on, there are obvious solutions to this like having lanes, same as farm use for machinery right now. :p Having a roomba like (yes, obviously different to the standard look of a robot vacuum cleaner; but a small autonomous robot; eg a watering can on tank treads, or a bb8 rolling ball) bot with a docking station out of the weather seems enormously more sustainable and scalable.
__MatrixMan__ 2y ago
Gantries can go places that tractors can't, like up and down the side of a building.
2y ago

aaron695 2y ago

[dead]

wiradikusuma 2y ago

Looking at the pricing and the area the robot covers, isn't it too expensive? I mean, with that land size, it can be easily done by a human in a few minutes? And I'm guessing most people who grow crops at that size do it for a hobby, which means they don't mind doing the work?

owenpalmer 2y ago

Would be interesting if they could get it to work in a circular pattern with multiple layers, where one FarmBot traverses each ring of the garden's "onion". For an optimized garden to feed a family, you need 549 square meters[0], which is a circle with a diameter of 26.4 meters (86.7 ft). That's all the vegetables for your entire family, mostly automated. That's a future I would love to see, even though it's way less efficient than industrial farming. [0] https://farm.bot/pages/yield https://farm.bot/pages/yield

_kb 2y ago
That seems like an efficient approach for a commercial scale version. The form would essentially mirror center-pivot irrigation [1] so you can keep a fixed point for delivering energy, water, fertiliser etc and cover larger circular patch with a series of smaller linear robots. Each span could also be modular to adapt to different sizes as suitable for the landscape. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Center-pivot_irrigation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Center-pivot_irrigation
torlok 2y ago
> That's all the vegetables for your entire family, mostly automated. This thing only drills the seeds and waters the plants.

_Marak_ 2y ago

you can buy a soaker hose with a timer its like twenty bucks

fareesh 2y ago

Is there an open source robot repository somewhere a-la github?

aussieguy1234 2y ago

I'd like to see a farming robot using the new SAM model from meta.

gohai 2y ago

Make sure to check out Telegarden by Ken Goldberg and Joseph Santarromana, from 1995-2004: https://goldberg.berkeley.edu/garden/Ars/ https://goldberg.berkeley.edu/garden/Ars/

antoniojtorres 2y ago

This worries me from a positioning standpoint. I imagine a large amount of people with a garden bed, even a large one, garden because they like it, this would get in the way of that. The device doesn’t appear like it would scale well to anything large enough, and even then it would compete with much more sophisticated solutions that do this. I feel like it’s actual market may end up being pretty narrow, not that it isn’t it a cool idea, it is, but it just gave me that gut reaction that it falls squarely in the uncanny valley between industrial users and hobbyists.

defrost 2y ago
It makes more sense targeted towards "people that like robots" rather than "people that want to grow their own food". I'm in a rural area and my first thought seeing this was "Good kit to play with for a growing teenager interested in agricultural automation" rather than "Serious industrial end use tooling".
- rahkiin 2y ago
  My partner likes gardening. I like robots. This might work for us. That’s a narrow audience though..
Maxion 2y ago
It could be useful in some research, allowing precise control of e.g. watering and automated photography of the plants. But that's about it.
snickmy 2y ago
Do you have any link to more sophisticated solutions ? genuine ask
- CapstanRoller 2y ago
  www.deere.com
- Loughla 2y ago
  Legitimately look into custom farming practices. The level of automation, data, and general technology in use in farming today is amazing.

vertis 2y ago

Snippets from my partners reactions: "Aimed at prosumers...uh...more nerdsumers" "Oh I just saw the price, $4000 to avoid an hours work"

ragebol 2y ago

I've always wondered why this robot uses a gantry system. Would be less intrusive and thus easier to work alongside a human if it was a polar system, with a single pole in the middle/corner, like a tower crane. Simpler mechanically as well I suppose

daemonologist 2y ago
I toyed with a cable-bot (like what is used for top-down shots at sporting events) for gardening. Needs three towers and probably difficult to make sturdy enough for watering but way cheaper at large scales than anything rigid and relatively more portable.
- ragebol 2y ago
  Sturdy enough for watering should not be too hard I guess. I'd say weeding it harder, depending on the method. Pulling out weeds with roots and all (most effective IME) requires some force and torque.

mherrmann 2y ago

Having watched Clarkson's Farm, I can't help but feel that farming is extremely antiquated. The sensitivity to unexpected weather and the low profit margins despite the high investments of time and money seem terrible. I can't see us as an advanced species doing this in 100 years, except for specialty experiences.

torlok 2y ago
Modern farming is anything but antiquated. A lot of science goes into it, and it's the most efficient use of national resources to produce food. The downsides you mentioned is purely the fault of the market, not farming itself.
- mherrmann 2y ago
  I understand that a lot of science and technology goes into modern farming, and that it's much better than it used to be. You did not address one of the main downsides I mentioned, which is that it still seems to be extremely reliant on the weather.
  - torlok 2y ago
    It also makes use of the sun and rain for free, unlike controlled setups. Weather is an issue, but it's not an issue everywhere at once. Even now with the progressing climate change farmers are adapting. You have introduction of regenerative farming to mitigate erosion and help with water retention, planting wind barriers, more resistant plant varieties, and much more. It's all designed to help mitigate weather fluctuations. Startups growing wheat under UV lighting are not going to feed the planet.
CapstanRoller 2y ago
>Having watched Clarkson's Farm, I can't help but feel that farming is extremely antiquated. That's like saying you watched The Bachelor and now have Opinions about marriage.
- 2y ago

torlok 2y ago

This is a Juicero of farming. The whole setup is easily replaced with a raised garden bed and a drip hose. Hearing about this a few years back, I was hoping it would at least do some weed control, but no.

Maxion 2y ago
It is indeed a juicero of farming. It costs 4 grand for something that can handle a single garden bed. This is not suitable for even small commerical growers, they'd need hundreds of these things. All commercial growers in my latitude start by sprouting their plants indoors, using e.g. soil blocks. Very little is direct sown. If you practice no-till, weeding isn't even that big of a task. This thing definitely does not provide value.
- prattatx 2y ago
  Value for me is to scratch the zombie apocalypse itch. One feature request is some form of animal and pest protection. Squirrels and cardinals eat a majority percentage of the veggies in my raised bed here in Austin. I think some bats eat the vegetables as well but that’s difficult to validate.
  - torlok 2y ago
    How does it scratch that itch. This thing can plant seeds and water the plants. You can just run a hose through your raised bed and have a timer on your water valve. This thing won't grow food for you. If you're worried about the apocalypse, then start researching how seeds are produced, because your apocalypse garden plan will probably die right there.
  - Vegenoid 2y ago
    You believe that this thing will have more usefulness in an apocalypse scenario? I think that anything high-tech immediately becomes far less useful if the infrastructure that supports modern electronics and computers collapses.
  - badcppdev 2y ago

weweweoo 2y ago

Seems like a cool project, but not something I would pay thousands of dollars for as a hobbyist gardener. By the looks of it, might work for smaller plants, but not much use in growing larger varieties of tomato or cucumber for example. Really the only thing I would trust and want to automate is watering when I'm away, and that can be done much cheaper. The most burdensome part right now in my greenhouse is actually keeping the large plants in check, prevent them from growing too much by taking away right leaves/branches. The robot probably wouldn't do too much to help with that. Weeds are a problem outside, but that's way too large of an area to cover with this kind of robots.

john_minsk 2y ago
Interesting. A while ago I heard about a project to use laser with AI to grow salmon and protect from parasites[1] Would it be a terrible idea to destroy weeds with laser shots? Or crops don't provide enough margin for such advance tech? 1. https://www.stingray.no/delousing-with-laser/?lang=en https://www.stingray.no/delousing-with-laser/?lang=en

matthewiiiv 2y ago

This is very cool and I immediately wanted one. Hobby gardening is not exactly cost effective but I can think of cheaper ways to outsource growing vegetables...

constantcrying 2y ago

Seems an interesting engineering project, but like a terrible product. Who is the customer? If you like gardening, why would you pay thousands of dollars so that you don't need to do it? If you don't like gardening, you obviously wouldn't be interested in having a robot do it for you. I just can't imagine who would buy this. Gardening can be done very cheap and I believe that most people do it because they like spending time outside, working with their hands, being involved with the food they eat and saving a bit of money. Why would such a person want to have a robot which does away with that? On an industrial scale this thing is of course totally useless.

naasking 2y ago
> If you don't like gardening, you obviously wouldn't be interested in having a robot do it for you Why? Do people who don't like gardening not like gardens or fresh produce? I just don't see how you reached this conclusion.
- constantcrying 2y ago
  I gave a list of reasons for why people might light to do gardening. In that list zero of the points benefit from having a robot do it for you. Why do you just ask the most banal questions instead of reading my post and responding to the argument I made? >Do people who don't like gardening not like gardens or fresh produce? I just don't see how you reached this conclusion. Yes, if you don't ready post you don't know how I reached that conclusion. If you just like fresh produce go to a farmers market.
  - naasking 2y ago
    Nothing you wrote in this or the original post implies that people who don't like gardening wouldn't want to have a garden on their own property managed by a robot.
    - constantcrying 2y ago
      Having a product for gardening and selling it to people who don't like gardening is genuinely retarded. With this robot you still have to do gardening, only somewhat less. If you don't like gardening why would you spend 2k on a robot doing it for you instead of buying the produce?

hkt 2y ago

I used to love things like this, now I realise that actually caring for living things is quite nice and life affirming, and spending yet more time behind a screen really is not. 40 hours+ per week obligate online-time plus recreation is not a great way to live life. Our working lives are too long and our hours per week are too many. The sooner we learn to touch grass regularly, the better. Robots are evidently not the way to do this.

rammer 2y ago

The amount of work required in getting this up and running and maintaining it could never pay for itself. The capital cost alone would take decades to pay back of ever.

CapstanRoller 2y ago

How many actual farmers are involved with this project, or were at least consulted? This thing looks like an out-of-touch nerd hobby project, not a real tool one would use in the real world of farming. The "Commercial Production" link goes to a page mostly consisting of... art projects. https://farm.bot/pages/research https://farm.bot/pages/research

Brosper 2y ago

I think it's like, "I want to help in an industry I don't know anything about". This is not scalable. I understand that this person would like to help, but this is not the help that Farmers and needed. I wonder if he asked farmers about their problems before creating this project.

quijoteuniv 2y ago
I do not understand why so much negativity against an open source project. And anyway game changing seldom comes within the same industry.
- James_K 2y ago
  The negativity comes from the fact that it's obviously stupid to spend $4000 on an AI robot that waters plants on a single small plot of land. The selling point of this product is "I want fresh food but I don't want to garden" which is much better served by going to a market and buying the food from a farmer.
  - quijoteuniv 2y ago
    I would argue that negativity comes from you even if the project is not that great yet. But i see passion, openness and someone trying to tackle a very big problem. What did you do today? I tell you what I did… i have been negative with post that are negative about a project. So peace on earth and hopefully we can make together a better world.
    - James_K 2y ago
      Okay Mr. High Horse. My issue with them isn't passion, it's pride. Every other week some tech-minded person will look at something which works perfectly well and think "I know nothing about this but I'm sure it could be improved with a robot". The robot is almost always a bad idea because it doesn't take into account the actual needs and wants of the people it's being sold to, and sometimes those people are forced to use it anyway. The only reason it exists is because its creators know about technology and when all you have is a hammer your problems start to look like nails.

willguest 2y ago

How many harvests would it take to offset the emissions that go into producing a kit? My guess is that this uses more steel per sapling than almost any other method of tending to a vegetable

NotGMan 2y ago
Why always this obsession with emissions? People don't want poisoned food from pesticides etc... primarly.
henearkr 2y ago
Why do you tie emissions to steel contents. This system is electricity-based, whereas traditional agriculture is fuel-intensive. Even fertilizer production is fuel-intensive, and this system avoids using any. Multiply by the time scale you want the system to last, and you get your emissions savings. Steel contents is a one-off emissions investment. Now if you want to compare this system to an other electricity-based, renewable energy only, agriculture, say with electric trucks etc, that'd be interesting.

jimnotgym 2y ago

I don't want to be accused of pedantry...but isn't this a gardening robot? I don't see how it scales to fields. I don't really see what problem it solves. Growing in a raised bed with drip irrigation looks a lot less hassle than setting up a giant cnc watering machine. If you mulch once a year you don't need to add nutrients to a no dog bed at all.

gunalx 2y ago

If it was just a automated irrigation system and a camera with some detection for seeing if the plants look oka and can send a ping if a human needs to intervene. I remember hearing about this year's ago, and find it really cool, but it probably does to little, or is to expensive to be able to justify.

klntsky 2y ago

ROI shouldn't be calculated based on the costs of transportation, because no one goes to the store to buy just vegetables (and not everyone drives to the store, it's a purely suburban american thing). Not to mention 'CO2 costs' that you don't pay at all

luckylion 2y ago
> and not everyone drives to the store, it's a purely suburban american thing I live in a german town at the edge of a large city, the grocery stores are evenly distributed among this town, max 15 minutes by foot or 5 by bike. I love my bike and use it all the time. On a nice day, there will be 20 bikes and 60 cars at the store. On a rainy day there will be 2 bikes and 80 cars at the store. "Only americans take the car to the store" is a myth that you shouldn't spread.

nmeofthestate 2y ago

The promo video - Industrial Farming Bad, Take Back Control, epic movie trailer soundtrack - is a real hoot, given the product it's selling.

elric 2y ago
I found it to be incredibly annoying, with overly dramatic music and narration, not to mention nonsensical claims. This kind of thing immediately turns me off to any product.

cactusplant7374 2y ago

Does it kill weeds? Is watering the only thing it does?

madmask 2y ago

Looks like a thing that takes away the pleasure from gardening/small scale farming.

apexalpha 2y ago

This looks fun but not really useful. My hope would be that in 20 years everyone has a little bot that 24/7 runs a garden for you and provides every family with 80% of their vegetable need. Imagine the amount of acreage we could return to nature / co2 sinking.

Waterluvian 2y ago
Every family having to have a robot instead of a handful of tractors for every ten thousand families or so. And that is likely a less optimal use of acreage. I think what you might actually be advocating for is “people should convert more residential land into gardens” which is always fun. I love my garden as a hobby. We keep trying to un-invent the division of labour. Edited for unnecessary pre-coffee poor behaviour. Sorry.
- siffin 2y ago
  [flagged]
  - agumonkey 2y ago
    you know good sites / books about this ? or active groups
  - ecocentrik 2y ago
    Just imagine all the packaging material that would be required to get everyone a new farm bot every few years.
    - siffin 2y ago
      I am, it's not very much, and compared with the packaging for food in every market, it's just a rounding error. The thing about growing food locally, is that you don't need individually package your apples in plastic. You just harvest it, then eat it, in it's healthiest possible form, while also not doing insane polluting.
  - 2y ago

kingkawn 2y ago

it is so so easy to grow that much of a garden, this is a complete waste

deleted 2y ago

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j_m_b 2y ago

We could do with a lot less grass lawns and a lot more gardens. Even just growing flowers adds tremendously to the local ecosystem of insects, while adding beauty to your life. If this gets more people thinking about gardening, I'm all for it!

theo1996 2y ago

this is very wastefull and stupid, you can buy a auto prinkler with a timer for 100 euros, and seeding can be done by hand in the same time the bot does it.

BigParm 2y ago

Lol @ most of you who think this is real. It's a troll post w Sora or something. Turn your fucking brain on. By the time you fuck around with that, you could have done the garden by hand 20 times.

d_burfoot 2y ago

I would love to contribute to something like this for cattle ranching. Track your herd with a mapping app, analyze the cows' vital signs, estimate how much land you need for grazing, etc.

hengheng 2y ago

My retirement project is going to be this but at larger scale. Remove the tires from two old bicycles to run them on rails, build a gantry between them mounted to seatposts and handlebars. Probably drive it with chains on winches for robustness. Use movable wall elements so that the pick and place machine can set up both shade and increased illumination. Maybe have portable rain protection too. Maybe deploy close-up UV and IR lamps. I'd like to know the max size that a single gantry can serve, see how high its utilization can be. My guess is that it all can pay off once it's big enough. I just don't know where that point is. 100ft long? 200ft? 300? And 20ft wide?

GlenTheMachine 2y ago

Farmer and roboticist here. There is a lot of discussion in a lot of threads about the design of the robot to water "from the top" by spraying the leaves instead of watering directly on the roots, and whether that's a good or bad thing, and whether the designers of the robot thought about it. Here's the problem with watering the leaves: yes, plants ultimately get their water from rain. But under normal conditions, the rain comes in sporadically in large quantities -- not every day -- and soaks into the soil, which is where the plants actually pick it up. Flood irrigation does largely the same thing. Spray irrigation doesn't attempt to water the soil that deeply, it tends to give the plants just what they need for the next 24-48 hours, and that encourages wilt and fungal infections. Also, domesticated vegetable crops are far more susceptible to wilt and fungal infections than natives, and than grain crops, which are at the end of the day grasses. So you can in the same garden have perfectly healthy corn but all of your melons and squash have such bad fungal infections that the leaves are literally white. You can criticize the selection of vegetables for yield and not hardiness, but the fact is this is where we are with vegetable crops. This is an interesting project, but IMHO it isn't practical, and there isn't any way to make it practical. The X-Y gantry design, for gardening, has a number of intractable problems, watering from the top being just one of them. Another is that the design doesn't scale. You can't make this thing handle a 25 by 100 foot grade bed, which is the size you'd need to even start making a serious dent in the nutritional needs of one person. It can't really weed, and there's no way to modify the design to make it weed effectively; you'd have to add degrees of freedom to the gantry so that it could reach down to soil level and grasp roots (or, alternatively, to very selectively apply an herbicide). Garden crops grow to dramatically different heights; micro greens will be a few inches about the soil, zucchini will be three feet high, tomatoes can be 4-5 feet, and corn depending on cultivar can be as much as 9 feet tall. And finally, watering and weeding, if you know what you're doing are actually the easiest parts of the problem. Preparing the bed so you don't have to weed is a lot more work. To do that, you plant your crops and then apply large amounts of mulch. If you've never prepared beds, shoveled dirty barn straw for mulch or tried to wrangle weed barrier cloth on a hot, humid day, you haven't lived, my friend. That's the physically hard part. THe mentally hard part is diagnosing problems in your crops before they become problems. Noticing that those shiny weird insects flying around are squash vine borer. Looking at the underside of leaves and seeing squash beetle eggs or going around your tomatoes with a blacklight looking for cutworms. If you want to apply robotics to gardens, you either need a low mobile base, or you need to carefully lay out rows with fixed spacing, and have a high mobile base that can clear the height of the crops, and can take a variety of attachments, e.g. tillers to handle weed control. Which means you need think about monocropping. Which starts to look like the mid 20th century basic garden tractor, the International Harvester Farmall Cub, just with maybe an electric power plant and an autonomy appliqué kit. THis makes sense because the mid 20th century was the last time people in North America practiced gardening as a survival mechanism, and the Farmall Cub was the result of 50 years of practical design by people who knew how to garden when it counted.

Havoc 2y ago

A single bed isn't exactly an ungodly amount of effort to do by hand. Think there is more potential industrial scale. i.e. run the arm over half a mile rather than a couple of feet

indus 2y ago

Isn’t your headline deceptive? Open source farming bot and the next CTA is order now for $2700?

driverdan 2y ago

I'm surprised no one has mentioned hydroponics. For $2800 you can build a very nice, large, and mostly automated hydroponics setup. It would have higher yields, no weeding, minimal pests if indoors, better nutrient control, a smaller footprint, more reliability, and less complexity.

pcarolan 2y ago
Do you have a good resource for getting a system started? Particularly outdoors / backyard scale?
- driverdan 2y ago
  There is a lot of good content on YouTube. The top search results tend to be decent. Indoor vs outdoor tend to be mostly the same minus the lights.
jejeyyy77 2y ago
what are benefits of soil vs hydroponics?
- atrus 2y ago
  Soil farming (think small family farm) in a field has the advantage of being stupidly cheap. Free sun, free water, free nutrients, as long as you're not going for 150% yields like the big mono-farms do. The tradeoff is lack of consistency. It's easy to have a bad season that gives you shit yields. Plus it's a ton of work. There's a reason we've worked so hard to automate so much of that. Hydro gives you a significant amount of control. Exact amount and wavelength of light, exact timing and amount of nutrients, exact temperature, humidity, co2, wind, etc. All with significantly higher costs. There's a reason that those "hydroponics in a skyscraper" basically grow lettuce, because it's the same growing profile as weed, which is a high profit crop.

greenie_beans 2y ago

nah, part of the fun of gardening is interacting with plants

alsodumb 2y ago

This project sucks ass - I know some research groups (non-engineering, they were more ag programs) who purchased it from them for a few thousand dollars and pretty much shelved it after a few months - unreliable hardware, buggy software, minimal support - all in all it would probably have been much more easier if we hired a bunch of engineering undergrads to build something like this from scratch.

kumarvvr 2y ago
I thought you could use this as a springboard to improve and customize further, then put back those improvements into the open source project.
deleted 2y ago
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cl42 2y ago

A lot of people are criticizing this product. Does anyone know what "best in class" small-scale farming or gardening projects are? Very curious! Also any community recommendations would be great.

lucideer 2y ago
> Does anyone know what "best in class" small-scale farming or gardening projects are? I think you're misinterpreting the criticisms. It's not "this particular product is a bad implementation compared to other one-size-fits-all tech-solutionism products", but rather "a one-size-fits-all tech-solutionism approach to this problem space doesn't make any sense" This is a very typical tech-industry "everything looks like a nail" type issue: going into an area you don't understand with a solution to problems that don't exist. A small subset of problems here: 1. A robot should automate things you do often/regularly - developing complex machinery do to one-off seasonal steps steps like seeding & pulling is immensely wasteful - that's going to raise the cost of the product a lot just in order to automate tasks you rarely do. 2. It doesn't do those tasks well: the pulling examples are contrived & the failure rates look high. 3. The watering mechanism is developed to suit the robot design rather than designing the robot around optimal watering strategies - this completely ignores generations of optimising watering approaches. The watering mechanism is actively harmful to many crops. 4. Very unadaptable to different plants' needs. TL;DR: There is no best of class product in this area because only someone who doesn't understand the problem space would try to develop a product to do this.
- cl42 2y ago
  This is incredibly helpful, thank you! If you have resources I can read or learn from about all this, please share them. You've clearly got wisdom in this space!

simpaticoder 2y ago

It is curious to market a device as an improvement in self-sufficiency and design it to require an internet-connected centralized webapp.

robxorb 2y ago

The main criticism against this seems to be it doesn't kill weeds. But it's an open system, with standardised, autonomously selectable attachments. Can someone come up with an attachment or two for it that could control weeds?

avodonosov 2y ago

Exactly what functions does it perform? Watering? Weeding? Can it remove slugs, caterpillars, etc?

ensocode 2y ago

Seems a bit like Vertical Farming, innovative but way to expensive tech. Anyway good luck!

fennecfoxy 2y ago

Terrible design. Modular hydroponic pods have always been a better idea and if someone handed me 100 million I'd use it to develop standardised farming skyscrapers/towers to hydroponically grow food in towns/local communities with minimal water, electricity usage and human intervention. It's so crazy that we have the tech to do this sort of thing now, but don't. We could do so much if things weren't so profit focussed and the wealthy weren't able to skim most of it off to dump into tax havens.

pbmonster 2y ago
> develop standardised farming skyscrapers/towers to hydroponically grow food in Land use for vegetable farming is really not an issue. Just build your hydroponics setup on the ground, you'll cut costs by an order of magnitude. If you actually want to reduce land use, get people to eat less meat. The crops that use the most land by far are corn and soy, and most of those ends up just being fed to livestock.

craftoman 2y ago

These guys are charging €3000 for a kit that cost less than €400 if you order each item individually. They’re ripping off the customers.

greenhearth 2y ago

Nice, I will have enough tomatoes for a whole week before they rot away.

tmaier 2y ago

My garden bed has a slug problem. How can FarmBot help me with this? Is there a tool, like a grabber, that automatically catches intruders and carries them away?

silexia 2y ago

Everyone should absolutely do a small garden in their yard instead of grass or other wasteful landscaping. As a farmer, this looks like it would be massively expensive per acre and massively wasteful of environmental resources. I currently farm 5,000 acres including 400 irrigated acres for $300,000 per year. I grow enough food to feed thousands of people a year. You would need 200 of these systems to farm one acre. I could not find a list price on the website, but based on my knowledge of CNC machine pricing, each machine probably costs in the neighborhood of $10,000. So this machine would cost $2,000,000 per acre to farm. Insanity. Government bureaucrats want you to starve to death, so I am sure money will go to this and be taken from ordinary farmers. The system also appears to be an environmental disaster... Enormous amounts of heavily machined aluminum, stainless steel, and plastic to do tiny bits of work already done far more efficiently in other ways.