Japanese firm to open world’s first robot-run farm | Hacker News Reader

Japanese firm to open world’s first robot-run farm

theguardian.com

171 pointsevo_997 comments

> The robots will do everything from re-planting young seedlings to watering, trimming and harvesting crops.

Has the author been to a farm in the past 20 years? Most crops today are not planted by hand, or watered by hand, or harvested by hand. (Harvesting is still the most labor intensive part of farming for a few fruits, but automation isn't far off.)

I think the most interesting part of this farm is not the automation, but the water saving, the reduction in pesticides, and the decision to use grow lights indoors instead of sunlight.

>and the decision to use grow lights indoors instead of sunlight

This is the part of indoor automated farming I don't get. You have this free, abundant source of energy needed to grow plants, and you don't use it... why? Seems like a massive inefficiency. Indoors is fine to protect the crops and control the environment, but why not above ground with a clear roof to let sunlight in?

Physical space is often a constraint. Green houses which cover large areas which are needed in areas where it gets cold in winter and you want certain types of food. The other is that the quantity of sunlight varies throughout the year in everywhere that isn't on the equator. Grow lights allow you to go from seed to harvest faster. Consider that the earth is not infinitely large and there is already a substantial portion of arable land covered in crops and there are few ways to increase productivity while still planting in the ground. Also consider costs of managing land with a limited staff and transportation.

>The other is that the quantity of sunlight varies throughout the year in everywhere that isn't on the equator. Grow lights allow you to go from seed to harvest faster

Why not have both? Grow lights when the sun isn't optimal, and the sun when it is. Wouldn't it be a huge cost saving measure to use free light instead of burning energy on grow lights when you don't need it?

If you want to use the sun, you'd farm outdoors traditionally. You're right at the core of it, that's why most farming still happens outside.

Building a specialized building is a compromise putting you into an uneconomical position, you'd only provide additional light to the top-most layer of plants (small operating savings) at the cost of building specialized architecture (large capital expense).

From what I understand, the vertical indoor farms are mostly low-calorie high-moisture crops so far like lettuces. Compared to many crops, energy is not the primary input, it's water, space and time. These vertical indoor farms economize by controlling the environment they grow in to avoid wasting water, accelerating growth cycle with grow lighting to avoid wasting time, and stack plants vertically to avoid wasting space. Supposedly it makes sense to pay the premium for electrical energy to be able to save on the other inputs. For higher-calorie crops I imagine the math works out to be quite far from break-even.

This is also why these vertical farms aren't about to solve social issues that people attach hope to them for, low calorie vertical farm produce isn't going to provide for the dietary needs of enough people to impact the the problem of transporting foods from agricultural areas to metropolitan areas basically at all.

> Building a specialized building is a compromise putting you into an uneconomical position, you'd only provide additional light to the top-most layer of plants (small operating savings) at the cost of building specialized architecture (large capital expense).

Couldn't you improve upon things by redirecting the light with fiber optics? Of course, I suspect there's a surface area problem with scaling something like that, so perhaps not.

I'm sure they ran the calculations and decided that electricity is cheaper than sunlight.

An immediate guess would be that with artificial lighting you can stack fields one on top of another. Something you cannot do with sunlight.

If you want to grow vertically, you need to be able to control light as your own farm will be blocking the sun from half or more of the crops

Oddly enough, and this is completely anecdotal, I've had much better luck growing outdoor plants than indoor plants. If an indoor plant gets some kind of pest (spider mites, aphids, etc) then you pretty much have to sit around spraying it and its peers with oils or alcohol day after day until you're confident the infestation is gone.

With outdoor plants, there are so many natural predators to pests that things tend to form a balance. In addition to that, yes, there is the world's most abundant (and inexhaustible) energy source just sitting there waiting to be used.

So I'd be really interested to know the benefits of indoor growing as well (besides the obvious reasons with regards to not wanting DEA aircraft spotting your crops).

Fujitsu runs a similar farm. For them, one of the advantages was that because they were growing in a disused clean room, formerly a fab, they could control air quality such that bacteria were negligible. This led to produce which could sit on shelves much longer without spoiling. Fujitsu charged a premium since retailers typically lose a portion of their lettuce value to spoilage or discounting.

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2014/05/22/fujitsu_grows_lettuc...

Predators are used in large greenhouses: http://www.thanetearth.com/faqs-pesticides.html

> With outdoor plants, there are so many natural predators to pests that things tend to form a balance.

Although you're not looking for balance, you're looking for a huge abundance of a single crop.

> In addition to that, yes, there is the world's most abundant (and inexhaustible) energy source just sitting there waiting to be used.

That energy source doesn't work quite so well if you start stacking things vertically and isn't necessarily reliable. Reducing inefficiencies in growth may be more beneficial than saving some power.

Pro tip: forget the sprays to deal with pests. Buy ladybugs and let them loose. They will do a far more effective job in a much more efficient manner.

Some vegetables can be overclocked, with a faster day/night cycle than 24 hours. Lettuce can be forced to grow about twice normal speed.

You don't need the night cycle at all for the vegetation stage, just flowering, so run these suckers 24/7 and you get more crops, more often.

See this article... the artificial light helps them grow the food faster and the lights are very efficient.

http://www.treehugger.com/clean-technology/former-semiconduc...

Do you really think they would invest this much R&D, yet somehow never thought to consider the cost or efficiency advantages of piping natural light?

I'm no expert but lighting has gotten a lot more efficient recently:

http://www.designrecycleinc.com/led%20comp%20chart.html

LEDs are also well suited to farming because you can tune their output spectrum:

http://www.lighting.philips.com/main/products/horticulture/c...

Light-emitting plasma (LEP) and white lasers are also making waves. LEDs suffer from narrow beam and canopy penetration, which can be compensated using a rail system.

See: http://plantozoid.com/plasma-grow-light-revolution/

You can stack fields so you grow 20X the amount per square meter/foot/whatever than you would with sunlight. True there are vertical solutions that use mirrors but these become unwieldy to design and maintain (cleaning the dust off the mirrors etc) so it's simpler to just go with the led shelf solution.

Adding to that, this allows you to grow vast amounts of food in urban environments meaning that it is a cheaper/shorter journey from field to table. Logistics is a major expense in farming and a huge harm factor in relation to our environment.

I could see a more distributed food production, avoiding the production madness on natural soil. So country side could be countryside again, farmers could get a healthier life style while cities get cost less food with less pesticides too. I also wonder if this would be interesting on a per-house basis.

At least partially because you don't have to reproduce the whole spectrum of sunlight, but just those portions that are used by the plants for photosynthesis. Even after solar cell efficiency and other losses, you might still be able to deliver more of the light you want to the plants, in addition to being able to control the day/night cycle.

Most plants photosynthesise on a very narrow band of light. It's actually more efficient to generate electricity using solar panels and reemit using specific wavelength leds. Plants are around 2% efficient while solar panels are around 20%.

Also as has been said below it allows you to stack plants in a way that would be impossible if you were using sunlight.

Additional thoughts are that greenhouses are terrible at retaining heat (interestingly the origin of greenhouses used to have a thick southern facing brick wall to act as a heat soak to maintain an even heat throughout the night) and so if you're trying to keep a certain heat level having glass might end up costing you way more in energy because of the need to heat than you gain from the sun.

People still do good things with greenhouses. I recently watched a video from a guy growing veggies through the winter in his greenhouse. He did have a non-glass southern wall but it wasn't the type for storing heat. Instead, he was using drums of water inside the greenhouse as thermal mass, which kept the temperature up during the night.

And people still grow plants by hand. The future is still going to be automated farms just as the present day is mechanised farms.

The advantages that automated warehouse farms give will be too great to not do. Faster grow cycles, no need for fertiliser, pesticides, or herbicides, closer to consumers, space efficiencies and so on.

First, sugar cane converts 8% of the light absorbed by the plant is preserved as chemical energy.

Second, photosynthesis is actually fairly efficient, the issue is plants are living organisms and we only care about energy stored not energy used. Net result, plants still need about 45% of sunlight even if you stick with the 'perfect' bands.

Sugar cane is very much the exception. Most crop plants (which have over the years been selected for efficiency indirectly) manage 1-2%. No one is suggesting growing sugar cane indoors yet, just purely on the basis of it's height you won't gain much by stacking it.

Also you haven't addressed stacking, heat retention or for that matter nighttime light.

The important point was Sugar cane is not better at photosynthesis than other plants. It simply 'wastes' less energy on growth and 'life'.

Break even would take 50% efficient solar collectors and 90% efficient lights including transmission and conversion losses. Clearly, we are nowhere near that point.

PS: The only reasonable option would be solar collectors that focus on different parts of the spectrum and let light through to the plants under them.

You don't need 50% efficient solar collectors. That'd be the case if 1 meter squared of plants had 1 meter squared of leaves. Even at full growth there are large gaps and for most of the growing time there are even larger gaps. 1 meter squared of solar panels is always going to be 1 meter squared. Also plants can't use light above 10,000 lux while solar panels will just generate more power.

And again how do you stack plants? How do you keep them warm enough? How do you grow them during the night?

Your solar collectors are not operating at night either. Break even means having 10 square miles of solar farm and 1 square mile of dense indoor farming needs to be more efficient than 11 square miles of farming and that extra needs to cover infrastructure costs.

You can play with the arrangements of plants in a greenhouse just as easily as a factory. EX: Stacking plants using clear trays and nutrient bath allows for using more light in the same space.

Anyway, the reason why this 'works' is crazy subsidies in Japan which actually has quite a bit of farm land, plus a market for ultra premium lettuce for decorative reasons.

Where are you getting 10 square miles of solar farm to support 1 square mile of dense indoor farming? Energy can be stored or brought in from other areas during the night.

And no you can't stack in a greenhouse for the same reason that there are hardly any plants growing on the jungle floor.

This sort of thing is already being done in London and Sweden. It's the level of automation that is making this news. Of course it starts at the high end but eventually all food will be grown like this just because it'll be the most efficient overall.

You focus entirely on the efficiency of photosynthesis in plants when there are so many other variables as for why this is a good idea.

Running these for decorative lettuce in a big city is one thing, when farmers use this for corn in Iowa you might have a point.

Shipping bulk rice from US to China is cheaper in terms of energy than shipping electricity required to grow that same Rice.

PS: Another sanity check. The US has 922 Million Acres of farmland. At 1kw/m * 8h / day that's vastly more than the world total energy usage. You can't even replace that with fusion power as the waste energy would directly produce significant global worming. (4046 sq M / Acre * 8kwh/day = 32 Megawatt hours per Acre * .92 billion = 30,000 Twh per day, world electricity is under 30,000Twh per year. ) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_energy_consumption#/medi...

Grains will be the last thing to change and that won't be for a very long time.

Also you have to take into account increased yields, faster grow times, lower fertiliser, pesticide, herbicide and tractor fuel costs.

Your sanity check is way off. Solar panels only get about 22W/m^2 though out the year on average and they're more efficient than plants. Second the maximum plants can use is about 100W/m^2 and that is at maximum midday strength. Now lets take into account varying intensity of sunlight, growing seasons, leaf orientation, gaps between plants and other factors and your energy requirements are much lower.

Research is still being done but most plants grow very well with the full red spectrum and 10-20% of the blue spectrum. This vastly reduces the energy required.

22W/m^2 is either really out of date or your thinking far north.

If you really want more farmland and have a lot of energy there are simply much better options, desalination and irrigation of west Texas for example.

PS: You can bump plant efficiency from 10 to 20% from using a narrow frequency of light, but that's a fairly low cap. And 10%(plant) > {20%(panel) * 20%(plant) =} 4%, which is why I said you need to have 50% panels to 'break even'.

Indoor offices also use artificial lights despite the workers usually only being there during the day. It's probably because the sun is unreliable and expensive to direct into all the spaces that aren't on the roof directly exposed to the sky.

Thinking of vertical farms as offices for plants makes a lot of sense.

Not a farmer, but the risk of natural disasters or a crazy early freeze would make sense to completely control it in the long run.

Japanese farming is notoriously manual, inefficient, and protected by heavy tariffs.

It shows - in a good way - in the quality of the produce, though.

There is a surprising phenomenon in microeconomics called the Alchian–Allen effect[1]. Quoting from Wikipedia, "[W]hen the prices of two substitute goods, such as high and low grades of the same product, are both increased by a fixed per-unit amount such as a transportation cost or a lump-sum tax, consumption will shift toward the higher-grade product. This is true because the added per-unit amount decreases the relative price of the higher-grade product." The quality of Japanese produce could be due to the effect of the higher prices on consumer decision-making rather than any advantages of small-scale farming.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alchian%E2%80%93Allen_effect

>There is a surprising phenomenon in microeconomics

I was waiting for some counter-intuitive twist, but that seems like common sense and basic math.

Not really sure how the concept earned a name.

Paying $1 extra for a better apple is worth it if you value the better flavor by at least that much. It shouldn't matter whether the choice is between $4 and $5 or between $10 and $11 - how did that dollar become less valuable, or the apple tastier?

"Humans act like money is proportionate when it's actually linear," is the crux of a wide variety of "surprising" microeconomic facts. People are more likely to drive across town to save money on a fancy pen that could cost $4 or $8 than they are to drive across town to save money on a suit that could cost $320 or $324.

(Yes, there are cases where there are good arguments that the utility of money isn't linear, but these are not those cases.)

Seems this would be counter-intuitive only in a vacuum; that is to say, were there no such thing as opportunity cost. Perhaps that's what you meant by "utility of money" not being linear. And, I agree with that point.

Where we differ is that I don't see how you are acknowledging that in only some cases. The degree may change, but not the underlying concept.

It is not like that. Because there is also quantity. Lets assume that good apples are $5, great $10 - for $10 I get one kg of great and 2 of $5. The great apple have to provide twice bang for the buck to be competitive.

If we slap 20$ tariff - for $30 bucks i get 1kg of great apples or 1.2 kg of good apples.

(That is assuming I want to eat roughly a kg of apples)

I think the whole progression of economics has been to start out by building models on wrong assumptions about how humans make decisions, and how the world should work, then refining them as actual data is gathered and science is done.

Agreed. The price is high but the quality is unparalleled in terms of taste, texture and appearance.

Humans can be excellent quality assurance machines, they're just very high maintenance.

You must be kidding me. Fruits for example may look perfect in Japan but I will take any ugly looking fruit from France over them anytime. Most of the time they cant compete thats why they have heavy tariffs on imports.

I can only go by what you can buy in Paris vs Tokyo and Osaka, but I disagree. Perhaps you frequent more regional areas with a better selection of produce.

Anyone who visits Japan in late summer should try Okayama white peaches. Warning: may ruin you for all other fruit.

Pretty skeptical about that. Rice is rice.

>Rice is rice.

Coming from a long line of rice farmers...I can assure you that this is really not the case. Rice has HUGE variations between various rice cultivars, and HUGE variations in the end result depending on how the grains are polished. Environmental factors and cultivation/growing methods also influence the taste and nutritional profile of the grain.

A lot of people, particularly in the West, just simply aren't aware of these differences because they've historically never had access to much other than regular milled white rice.

You're also overlooking the fact that Japan's farmers grow nearly every sort of vegetable and fruit produce imaginable.

Ha ha ha! As an American living in Japan, who doesn't even particularly like rice, I would have once thought so too, but have learned that's not true in the slightest. That would probably be like saying to somebody in my native Northern California, "Hey, grapes are grapes."

I have also learned rice is not the only foodstuff Japan makes that kicks ass. Peaches, garlic, strawberries, and melons are among several plant-based foods I have had here, with a quality that I never experienced back home in US and A (or anywhere else). (Of course, one perfect, individually-wrapped peach night cost $8, but that's another story.)

Then of course there's the beef...

NorCal is also a major producer of rice...just not in the hill country but in and about Sacramento all along the river.

I'm a bit puzzled that the reaction on the Guardian to this development is primarily one of fear that robots are taking our jobs. Isn't anyone excited about how all this production and efficiency is going to make food extremely cheap?

Food is already extremly cheap to the point where producers throw it away to artificially raise prises.

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2015-07-01/milk-spill...

I don't see anything in that article that supports your position. The article says that farmers are dumping milk because the supply has been outstripping demand and inventory costs aren't cheap. That's completely different from "throwing it away to artificially raise prices."

Everyone thinks about food in terms of economic costs. Few people consider the time that's involved. Yes, yes, yes, food is already cheap, but it isn't free because of the time humans spend involved in its production.

Imagine removing humans from the food equation. Production (vertical farms), harvesting (automation), distribution (electric vehicles), clean energy inputs (geothermal, solar, fusion), and maintenance (growing crops that can be used to manufacture replacement parts [e.g., organic polymers and carbon-based electronics] combined with modular robotics) needs to be addressed. Difficult, but not insurmountable.

Once food is actually free (not merely inexpensive), how will it affect the economy? A large part of our economy is based on trading work (indentured servitude!) for food. Such trades probably predate agriculture.

Hunger, humanity’s everlasting, unrelenting stressor is timeless and impelling. Hunger calls us all to consume, to feed corporate machines. Machines that were forged in the flames of the Industrial Revolution, when rich men hammered out schemes for our future. Their plans, perhaps unwittingly, followed the template of slave-driven civilisations wrought throughout the ages. Caste societies wherewithin the wealthy commanded the masses through control of food and knowledge.

The printing press and, on a larger scale, the Internet liberated our minds. Wholly automated, indoor farming has the potential to liberate how we spend our time.

In 1974, Henry Kissinger (a national security operative of the U.S. government) once proposed rationing food in developing nations to restrict population growth. Starve people today to prevent people from starving tomorrow. How brilliant. Decades later, researchers learned that empowering women to make educated decisions about their own wombs reduces birth rates. Imagine that. Kissinger was shown to be wrong, but it took time to discover the flaws in his logic, the errors in his proposal.

With the pressures of work, family life, and other societal impacts, time is the most precious of commodities. What if the majority of the world didn't have to work for food, but, instead, could invest their time dedicated to something they love? (Yes, there are people who have the opportunity to love their work, but I assure you, when compared with the global population, they are an insignificant minority.)

Robots/Automation has already made food cheap. Modern farmers are literally 1,000x as effective as their medieval equivalents. At this point the human factor is generally fairly negligible compared to other inputs (seed, land, machinery, etc.).

Remember when more than half of Americans worked on farms? It's why farm labor laws are special. Automation has allowed many of us to live a relatively labor-free life compared to our grandparents.

Who has that reaction??

I'm amazed that the drive to Japan's robotic future is human population centric driven:

The average age of their farmers is 65.9, young people don't want to be farmers, their population is in decline for many reasons...

Robot farming is critical to their bio and economic survival.

That fact alone is mind blowing to me. And awesome.

Some young people do want to become farmers, just not enough to replace the ones aging out.

Some of the things they have brought about is the acceptance of "ugly" fruit and vegetables. It's not a big market but it's one that exists because young farmers ate pushing the market in this direction despite a fetish for perfect looking fruit and vegetables.

There is even a small movement to get young women into farming: http://modernfarmer.com/2014/03/yamagata-girls-farm/

I keep hearing young people don't want to farm but I think there are plenty that do. The problem is, they don't have the experience, nor the millions of dollars in credit required to buy a farm.

I wouldn't call it "critical" like that. If robot farming became impossible for some reason, and old farmers started dying of old age in large numbers, and if there really were a shortage of farmers or farm laborers, then those who really needed their services would offer a higher wage, raising the price until some young people took it. Assuming Japan has a functioning market economy.

I wonder where this claim came from? (not sure how serious the concern you're talking about is, but let's run with it) Who benefits from persuading concerned authorities to push more young people towards farming? How about farm owners, who would have to offer higher wages to a less-competitive job pool? I wonder if they found it cheaper to just tell interviewers that the sky was falling?

Whenever you hear someone claiming an urgent economic "crisis", be suspicious. Very suspicious. With a moderately healthy market, often this just means someone will have to pay higher prices--which, as far as they're concerned, is an outrage, a scandal, and an emergency.

Edit: Googled around to figure out what stories you might have read. And, let's see:

"... Japan Agriculture (JA). With its tight links to the Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) and the agriculture ministry, and employing an astonishing 240,000 staff in Tokyo and around the country, the JA is probably Japan’s most powerful lobby. It campaigns to keep high import tariffs on farm goods: the tariff on rice is 777.7%, that on butter is 360%, while sugar attracts a 328% levy." http://www.economist.com/news/asia/21576154-fewer-bigger-plo...

"Shinzo Abe, Japan’s prime minister, has promised to protect “sacred cows” — including rice, beef and dairy — from the deal. Rice carries an almost spiritual significance here, not to mention a 778 percent tariff." https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/japans-farmers-face-an-...

Hahahaha, welp. Right, then, maybe you don't have a functioning market economy. That sounds to me like the real problem. I know my recommended solution. Hmm, I find it cool that I "called" that one. It's also kind of interesting to see what these Western publications are doing, and how far it leans towards uncritically swallowing the crisis story.

The Economist one is focusing on the TPP, and it is mostly critical of the JA. The Washington Post one--I give them credit for mentioning the important facts, but they exhibit no sense of their proper weight or their meaning. The article is titled "Japan’s farmers face an existential crisis", the first time they mention the agricultural lobby is in the 7th paragraph, and generally it seems like "Oh, gee, things just are that way" amid a sea of distracting details: portraits of individual farmers, their history and aging concerns, oh and by the way it takes a combined effort from the local and federal governments to "experiment" with "reform" of a few farms because they're so heavily intertwined that the government insulates them from market competition with a 4x-8x trade barrier and who knows what else, and also here's what this proud farmer has to say about his profession. Eeh. Just strikes me as bizarre.

I can relate to the sentiment - what's going to happen to countries in the short term when entire industries like transport and farming are automated at nearly the same time?

In the US, farming represents something like 2% of the workforce. If we lost every farming job (and we won't - robotic operations will have to be managed and maintained), it would still have less impact than the loss of manufacturing jobs in the '80s and '90s.

Transport, I think, would hurt more, but I don't know enough about it to say for sure.

Yes the transport issue is a big one for the US, however I'm talking globally. It's myopic to simply look at the US when talking about things that affect the US. The US doesn't grow its own food, and we should keep that in mind when reading stuff like this.

Rather, I'm trying to take a look at these percentages of farming workforces by country: http://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SL.AGR.EMPL.ZS and trying to see what is this new monster of globalization + automation going to do to countries like Egypt, Pakistan, and basically any country that registers anything over 20% on that website.

It's my opinion that the next 20 to 40 years are going to be formative when it comes to introducing technology that could radically change a country's class system - Automated transportation in the US being that technology case study. Others will look to the US to see how and if a technology that is developed in large parts in the US is allowed to take over US jobs. At what rate does the it take place? Will there be limitations? Will it be mandated by your Congress? What will happen to your economy?

There was a really good AMA on reddit recently about the economics and ethics of automation and when it came to transportation, the writing was one the wall: it's going to get worse before it gets better. https://www.reddit.com/r/science/comments/45k2pv/science_ama...

>The US doesn't grow its own food, and we should keep that in mind when reading stuff like this.

Not sure what you mean by that. The US is a net food exporter by more than 70 million metric tons.

Yes, other countries have more people in farming by percentage. But those people will be pushed out of farming by automation whether or not there are robotic farms.

> Not sure what you mean by that. The US is a net food exporter by more than 70 million metric tons.

you're right, http://www.fdaimports.com/blog/how-much-of-u-s-food-is-impor... but it doesn't change the matter of concern: what happens to those other countries' economic development when a large percentage of their workforce is rapidly made non-existent.

I'm also excited that we are reducing jobs. Jobs for jobs sake is a fools errand.

What is always left unsaid in the article: they're farming lettuce, a food that has 59 calories per head and is 95% water.

One can hardly call that farming in the sense of the word people expect when hearing about robot-run farms. This thing doesn't really produce meaningful food, it produces fluff in a salad, i.e. when you eat half a lettuce on any given day, you'd get about 1% of your calories that day from lettuce.

Further, the robotisation isn't really meaningfully new, either. Controlling lighting conditions for food? Old news. Moving around plants with machinery? Old news. It doesn't get much fancier than that. For example this factory-farm still requires you to plant the seeds yourself, no giant innovations here.

Is it cool? Absolutely, and it's fun to explore. But I'm not seeing the thesis on a new way of farming that I'm hoping to see. The economics and sustainability of traditional farming, when done well, seems overwhelmingly better, and the practicalities of producing real food in meaningful quantities, economically and sustainably, in an automised facility, is far away and quite different from this project.

Lastly, as most Guardian articles on tech, completely devoid of technical/economic details. What's the lettuce going to cost? Who knows.

> What is always left unsaid in the article: they're farming lettuce, a food that has 59 calories per head and is 95% water.

Which crop would you be more interested in seeing farmed robotically? Pick one and I'll go get you a link to the machinery that does so.

Don't feel any obligation, but as long as you are offering, I would be interested in rice farmed with artificial light.

Bookmarked to come back to when I'm done working for the day.

Having a tiny rasp pi controlled greenhouse in my backyard is something that really interests me. Can put little chain-driven slides above grow areas to shuffle around 'arms' that can plant/pick/prune/water; garden through code.

Have you seen farmbot? It is almost exactly as you describe.

Artificially-lit indoor farming is neato and will be a great technology to bring into space, but makes almost no sense on earth. Basically, it requires expensive infrastructure and way too much electricity (https://gigaom.com/2015/12/29/indoor-farming-good-for-cannab...). Maybe robotically-farmed greenhouses won't have this problem.

If the electricity for the grow lights is produced locally via solar power, it is actually more efficient than using sunlight directly (provided LED grow lights are used). This is because the grow lights provide only the narrow bands of wavelengths that plants absorb most efficiently. Only about 45% of visible sunlight is usable by plants, compared to around 95% for photovoltaics, which more than makes up for conversion losses. You also get the ability to stack the plants vertically, and the lack of windows makes for lower heat loss in the winter.

I don't know if that actually works in practice. Aren't photovoltaics (commercially feasible ones) like 20% efficient? Sure, its 20% of a bigger spectrum, and plants aren't perfectly efficient either, but I don't know if the math quite works as well as you make it sound.

The other benefits are awesome though. And our fusion future will make the photovoltaics issue moot anyway :)

Plants are around 2% efficient.

Ok, so they're going to be 2% efficient at using that 20% that was gathered by PV cells. So it still seems like using 2% of all the light would be more efficient than using 2% of a fifth of the light.

I suspect that by 2% efficient, that means they use 2% of the energy of all light. Since they don't use green at all, going through the PV and then generating artificial light of the frequencies they need does seem to improve things. But probably not by so much as to make up for the 20% efficiency of PV.

Every plant has a slightly different need but generally speaking you can grow plants very efficiently if you use the entire red spectrum and 10-20% of the blue spectrum. That allows for significant energy savings.

Nobody seems to be pointing out that it is unlikely to be cost efficient as well (sun is free), which is what matters.

Sun is not free. Sun requires land. If (and I don't think we're there yet) you can get to where the sun gathered by PV can be used to grow more plants than direct sunlight, and you're in a space constrained place like Japan, it starts to make sense.

I mean, you can stack farms vertically if artificial light is economical. You can't stack sun-lit farms vertically.

Solar panels are only about 20% efficient though, you're still losing out.

There was a halfway decent (if simplified) segment on Countryfile [0] about the use of PhytoLux LEDs in the UK.

They've been working with Bristol Uni to investigate the effect of various colours and wavelengths on plant growth (Something Gigaom, linked, is only just experimenting with); they claim energy efficiency [1] as just one advantage when using vertical farming methods.

0: http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/b06z9ph6/countryfile-no...

1: http://resources.phytolux.com/images/phytolux/newsletters/Pr...

But you can't grow multiple levels of crops using sunlight. it might make sense if land is at a premium. A few months back there was an article proposing large farms in downtown Tokyo because you could produce fresh food right where the people are.

Also, I'm wondering if they intend to produce crops more quickly by shortening the day to 23 hours or something like that.

I'm just going to file this one away for 20 years from now when electricity is 10-100x cheaper than today and indoor/underground farming is the most economical due to pest, density, and environmental concerns. Could you also say this technology will never make sense? That would be very helpful.

Currently ~50% of the cost of residential electricity is due to the grid, not generation - and it probably affects commercial electricity.

I would expect this to be economically viable in Iceland, with their short growing season and cheap geothermal power.

Also rich desert nations that normally depend on food imports, like Saudi Arabia. Solar PV + being able to grow food with minimal water waste is sure to make sense.

The company behind this farm have a nice website with a lot of specification / technical detail for their farm [1].

They claim that this farm will produce 10M lettuces per year on 3500m2. They are also looking for partmers to franchise their technology, inside and outside of japan.

[1] http://spread.co.jp/en/technology/

I read this "robot-fun farm" and was very intrigued, haha.

I'm probably talking out of my hat here, but it feels like Japan opening up to immigration more would probably be a more efficient help to this particular problem

They prefer to build robots and retain their homogenous culture than import and nurture a slave class.

This is awesome!

We were just talking about this on HN the other day. I want to build a fully robotic (automated) talapia fish farm on alameda island if anyone wants to join me?

Have you heard of aquaponics? You can raise both fish and grow plants in an ecosystem.

Yes - this is precisely what I want to do

Now this is innovation.

Neat, particularly for urban applications, but it'll never be as cost effective as actual field planted crops.

The future of robotic farms is in the fields, not in the factory.

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