FarmBot – Open-Source CNC Farming [video]
farmbot.io
farmbot.io
I have a garden. It uses a drip line that's buried in the ground. It's $10 worth of tubing from Lowes with a few holes where plants go. It's on a $15 timer that waters automatically once a day. I do, however, have to take a few minutes to put seeds in the ground.
That said, I would be throwing money at the monitor right now if this thing was smart enough to identify weeds and remove them. (Maybe that's in the plans? They have a part for weeding shown.)
But I love all these new ideas around farming. The most interesting is hydroponics considering how much more resourceful it is with water (sometimes using 90% less water per equal amount of harvest).
Edit: for those asking, all I used was half inch black tubing (the kind they use for automated sprinkler systems), drilled small holes every 12 inches, buried it, hooked it up to a spigot with a timer, and that's it.
Drip emitters are the kind of thing I should be 3-d printing but at $5 for 50 or whatever the going rate is...
https://www.amazon.com/gp/aw/d/B00E1HXYQA/ref=mp_s_a_1_1?qid...
https://www.amazon.com/gp/aw/d/B00K0TKJCU/ref=mp_s_a_1_2?qid...
https://www.amazon.com/gp/aw/d/B006LYHG42/ref=mp_s_a_1_1?qid...
Weeding is entirely unnecessary and often does more harm than good. Plant a cover crop and leave it be. Gardening can already be as simple as 3 tasks: plant, harvest, spread compost. It is just that people are very set in their ways and don't ever think to explore better ways of doing things.
Because I read about it (I asume you mean permaculture), tried it out - and dismissed most of it.
Permaculture is indeed great as a concept, but is in no way as easy as people tell you it is. Most of what people tell you about is close to scam (even if it is wishfull thinking)
And I do use permaculture principles in my garden, but if someone tells me, no weeding is ever needed - then they either do gardening on a different planet, or are just lying.
In a small backyard garden you might need to pull out a couple dozen weeds over the entire growing season.
You'll also be able to reduce your water use significantly because you've eliminated most of the open/broken soil that loses water to evaporation.
Thistles are a real pain here (South Australia), as are soursobs (oxalis). I have an entire catalogue of weeds.
I might try some black plastic on one bed.
My soil is very good quality, having been improved with chicken & horse manure and composted chicken litter. The problem is I live on a windy hilltop and seeds from all over land where I'm planting. I've even had a wheat stalk show up.
If you did that properly and still got thistles, then we're doomed!
One thing to try might be two layers of clear plastic with air trapped between - maybe 15-20cm gap. That further raises the temperature of the soil underneath. It's a method used in greenhouses too.
Are you telling me, that you don't have to do weeding, like OP said, at all?
So not in the protected greenhouse, but out in the open gardens, where there are seeds coming from everywhere?
But unfortunately ducks are not an option, even though I also would love their eggs.
They'll always eat part of your harvest.
Side-note, duck eggs are great for baked goods. Nice, fluffy cakes and brownies. But fried they're a little gross.
The dirt will get covered in plants, but you don't have to pull up everything you didn't plant yourself.
What about them? A weed is simply an unwanted plant. If they do no harm, why do you want to spend time removing them? Again, plant a good cover crop and don't weed. Your soil will be better, you will use less water, and there's no downside.
>(and snails)
Nothing about permaculture says you can't deal with snails. You can still deal with snails/slugs however you like. The obvious being simple copper wire or beer traps.
>Are you telling me, that you don't have to do weeding, like OP said, at all?
Correct. The only plants I pull out of the ground are root vegetables.
>So not in the protected greenhouse, but out in the open gardens, where there are seeds coming from everywhere?
Yes. Again, seeds coming from everywhere doesn't matter, because a dandelion in your potatoes doesn't hurt anything.
I agree wholeheartedly. If. Unfortunately, if I ignore the thistles and many of the other unwanted plants, they will outcompete the plants I do want and completely overwhelm them. I'm not a big fan of doing unnecessary work. I know from experience that if I don't weed, I get almost zero yield. Squashes and potatoes are the only plants I have that survived.
OTOH, a few minutes here and there spent weeding (get them while they're small) and I get more veggies than I can eat.
This year I'm experimenting with using discarded heavy plastic bags as mulch to suppress the weeds. I'll see how that goes.
Most timers are either battery-operated, or have to be wound once a day. To me, that sucks, and I don't want to have to route power to the garden system. With the slow drippers, I can leave this for weeks without issue.
If I don't dust tomatoes or cover broccoli/etc I will lose almost everything.
Something that skimmed/raked the surface lightly at regular intervals between rows to frustrate slugs and disrupt weeds would probably help me, but not sure how it could reliably account for varying plant types, sagging leaves, wayward tomato vines, etc.
The energy costs for indoor climate / light regulation can quickly become outrageous compared to super market veggie prices. Therefore, I think this type of tech is for rare exotic plant, maybe historical even.
Imagine buying a piece of tech for growing historical coffee plants in your basement where you set the climate control to Kenia or Hawaii (buy the soil addon?) and which guarantees (as in `likely it will yield') you 2kg of your own personal coffee harvest per plant. This stuff has urban hipster $$$ written all over it.
If you could control climate and soil to that degree, I can think of a certain plant that you could grow that will yield much more profit than a coffee plant: http://botanycentral.providence.wikispaces.net/file/view/coc...
Also, I seem to have a pest problem as well, I think rabbits, as all the leaves on my bean stalks have seemingly been chewed off.
Broccoli leaves get decimated by caterpillars if they aren't protected from moths laying eggs on them. Same happens to cabbages, bok choy, etc. A fine net with 10mm gaps works fairly well. I use petal poles and arches of pipe to make a removable frame.
Looks a bit like this: http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_OJlKX8cCges/SoKz6rQJ3bI/AAAAAAAABx...
For slugs/snails, I use pellets but apparently you can use copper tape if you have raised garden beds.
Plus its scalable - just extend the raised bed if you have space and it allows manual intervention because it can be moved out of the way easily.
For watering yes I agree its complete overkill.
The key thing here is the possibility to monitor each individual plant and react to changes in its development or environment (in contrast to modern industrial agriculture, were things are done with huge monster tractors).
I'm sure it can/will be improved to serve more functions - like removing weeds and collecting pests without the need for herbicides or pesticides and so on.
Eventually, these will all become software problems which the global programmer community will be more than glad to tackle.
The most important thing about FarmBot and similar tech, though, is the potential to de-centralize agriculture again and make small-scale, local agriculture possible, without needing to employ human labor. Not only would this create a new market for high-tech agricultural tools and software and make growing your own food easy (even in the city !), it is a very welcome solution to the many environmental problems that large-scale industrial agriculture generates today.
So I'm very optimistic and happy about this tech and I wish you guys all the luck.
http://www.amazon.com/Plastic-600ft-Embossed-Growerss-Soluti...
Course it would help if the garden was on a slight incline with holes punched in the frame boards on one end to deal with draining off the occasional two inch rain.
It's called precision farming, and it's done today, with "huge monster tractors".
Seriously folks, modern agriculture is an advanced multibillion dollar business which left the 19th century 200 years ago.
Can't see much precision there.
With precision you could do small fields with trees and bushes (with fruits) in between and need no pesticides ... all in all, a farm could then be also a nice place just to walk around and enjoy nature. Like some bio-farms are allready today, the problem is just, that the human labour needed to do it is huge - with robots it might be possible to go all bio - and still feed everyone!
No doubt about that. And I am not so naive to believe they will happen soon on a big scale ... but I hope to live long enough to see them come (while having my part in it)
Microfarms are unsustainable. They don't grow nearly enough food, nor the variety of foods needed (we can't live on just kale), nor do they do this economically. Basically they're cute ideas from suburbanites that have no experience beyond growing anything beyond a chia pet herb garden in a window sill. Large fields exist of a reason. And yes, GMOs and "Big Ag" is wildly successful and safe for the same reasons.
Robots don't need to solve the planting or watering problem. That's already a solved problem. The most labor intensive task is in vegetable and fruit harvesting. A two-axis vertical plotter doesn't even begin to solve that problem. It's a vision and dexterity problem. Once you solve that problem, there's no reason not to truck-mount the arms and simply scale up.
The fly-over states know a thing or two about this.
So I don't see much precision with the use of pesticides on large scale and never heard of a way to prevent them from going into the groundwater. (oh and I know a little bit about the ways how it gets decided, what chemicals get labeled as "harmless")
Oh and explain this:
> Microfarms are unsustainable. They don't grow nearly enough food
Why should lots of microfarms produce less food, than one "macrofarm" of the same size?
Doing those things on a big scale only reduces required labour -> that's why I want robots.
But it is true, that bio, if you meant that, can't produce as much per field, as a monoculture field, no matter the size - but with a monoculture, poisened field, you only get food and destroyed everything else - with a bio field, you get food and intact nature with diversity, clean water and soil ... all in all a place where you want to be. So all in all you get much more from the land if you grow Bio.
In this case, each microfarm will produce less vegetables than a macrofarm of the same size.
I wasn't trying to be a jerk by linking to the Wikipedia article. It seemed to me like you weren't familiar with the concept.
So, nevermind ;)
I think that's the point he was trying to make.
Most people in that village did the same. And they survived and the food was very good - it had flavor and taste, attributes which are not applicable to produce grown in the large scale farms of today.
The only problem is that they had to work every day all day on those farms..
Large scale industrial farming made it possible for people to move to cities and forget about the difficult task of working the land.
And it was good. For a while.. But now we are faced with different problems - over populated cities, pollution, excessive carbon in the atmosphere, water shortages, etc.
Robotic farmers allow us to dream of a world in which people can grow their food locally without having to do the manual labor or rely on large-scale farming. Many could move back to the countryside - closer to nature and type away on reddit just like before, while the robots take care of their food outside in the small field.
This will never happen in the form you describe. It would mean no bananas and coffee for most of the planet. It would mean no fresh vegetables in the winter. Most fruit would be highly seasonal.
There are only 2 ways of achieving this: global food sourcing, or complete climate control - which would need to be much more sophisticated than the "vertical farms" you see nowadays if you wanted to grow e.g. orange trees or banana palms.
I do that. To a much greater extreme than most people: all of our dairy, meat, eggs, vegetables and most fruit comes from our yard.
>The only problem is that they had to work every day all day on those farms.
I spend about two hours a week doing it. Clearly you do not have to work all day every day to grow your own food.
>Robotic farmers allow us to dream of a world in which people can grow their food locally without having to do the manual labor or rely on large-scale farming.
So did permaculture. This is already a solved problem. The reason it is not done is cultural, not technical.
'In contrast to modern agriculture, where things are done with huge monster tractors' - You might be interested in what http://www.bluerivert.com/ are doing. They are essentially attending to every plant individually in smaller cropping areas.
Once you actually get to a large area, I.e 1000ha fields, it doesn't make sense to attend to every plant individually throughout the season. We do however have technology to plant each seed down to mm precision, and apply nutrients based on zones created within fields.
Also, does it make sense to duplicate all the infrastructure required for one of these, over every single paddock on a farm, when we could have a single, essentially autonomous, machine crop and manage the entire area itself?
not really. You'd run at least one machine per planting line, so you'd be covering a lot of area at once. Plus, these could operate 24 hours a day, which is a real help along side the human workers.
This is how I see it. http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2014/07/140717-japan...
TBH if someone would just build me a robot that has 20 km range, can deal with crawling up hills and can identify coloured shapes and "pick" them (pneumatic suction would probably do it), We could put a few tens of thousand blueberry/coffee pickers out of business.
FarmBot will not put anyone out of business. The Japanese Aeroponic farms have a better chance of being the future of production.
PS I downvoted you for the negativity.
Trying not to be overly cynical here, but how is this worth the cost? It appears that it simply plants, waters, and detects/removes weeds. In a 1,250sq.ft. garden, we invest less than 2 hours per week on these tasks.
How would this be scalable? How do you spell scalable?
How would this justify its cost?
How does it withstand being outside all year, year round?
How does it not just destroy your crops when they grow tall?
How could this possibly improve on current farming methods (outside of removing chemical weed-killers maybe)?
I understand it's in its infancy, but I'm genuinely having a hard time with this.
You would spend more machine/human time scanning and driving, more money in fuel, and more energy in general than if you were to just plant, spray, and irrigate.
Extend the x and y axis?
> How would this justify its cost?
Presumably by saving costs elsewhere? Labor, chemical inputs. Not saying it's there yet though, but why should it be?
> How does it withstand being outside all year, year round?
A cursory glance at the specs indicates that they've considered waterproofing at least. I imagine "the elements" will prove even more challenging than expected, but it's not like this wasn't considered.
> How does it not just destroy your crops when they grow tall?
The y axis is up pretty tall, and the manipulator is pretty narrow to get down in between plants. Clearly it is not advisable to grow crops that are taller than will fit in the machine.
> How could this possibly improve on current farming methods
Automation? We don't expect Burger King robots to improve on culinary techniques. I feel this is mostly interesting for repeatable research uses, but as basic manual labor savings it's interesting as well.
(I am in no way affiliated with this project... just seems easy to see the potential, and odd to treat a prototype as if it needs to make a business case right out of the gate)
I'm a 4th generation farmer in my spare time. The variables required in agriculture are just too many for something like this, is my opinion. I get it, farming isn't immune from technology, but this just seems like over-engineering a problem.
I'm certain there is a lot of complex knowledge locked up in farmers' brains that most folks wouldn't even think of. The same is true for doctors though, and it doesn't seem foolish that folks are creating expert systems to help with complicated diagnostics and such. Surely the wisdom of farmers can be codified and emulated reasonably well by software.
Further, maybe this is only limited to a subset of agriculture. It doesn't need to apply to every crop type to be useful. It's probably dumb to grow 100 acres of wheat this way. Perhaps it's useful for highly-controlled small beds of high-value high-labor-input vegetables or such?
However, I suspect a device like this will scale well cost wise with longer rails, thus larger versions working in a elongated greenhouse would probably significant efficiency. Additionally, you will need a device like this if you want to do vertical hydroponic farming, as the efficiency of people drops precipitously as soon as they can no longer easily reach the plants they're working with.
Now, vertical hydroponics, that's one I hadn't considered. That may be a good point. I lack any experience with those systems, though, so I hesitate to comment.
Make no mistake, this is where agriculture is heading and the people behind this are obviously clever and innovative. I just don't think this is a very compelling product (outside of the "A robot planted my veges" kudos)......yet.
Making dinner in the kitchen? Hit "Salad" on the app and have your farmbot harvest the ingredients for a 300g garden salad....
Lots of cool applications and I got prepared for "buying mode" when I watched the video. But three deep breaths reminded me that this wasn't going to return the value to my life that it had initially cost...yet
But we are here on HN, right? ....
(And yes, that is our entry on Hackaday!)
I'm asking b/c I'm curious about business models that build heavily on open source.
But, and don't Vote me down, considering current events, how long until we see a "Weedbot"?
However, probably a better solution for something like weed would be this: http://openag.media.mit.edu/
I don't know that I've been this excited about a piece of machinery before. This product has the potential to completely change the way we obtain and consume food. I understand it's very niche at the moment. And the price tag will likely be huge for the first run. But this is a great first step and I'll try to pre-order a kit.
That's seems like an unbelievably large statement to make. Can you explain what you mean by all this excitement?
If the price point gets low enough, if construction is easy enough, and if enough people latch onto the movement this could be a game changer. Even if 10% of a family's food comes from Farmbot, that's 10% of food that doesn't need to be shipped across country for their consumption.
This is essentially a 3D printer for food.
No it does not. It allows people who want to garden to garden. But people who want to garden can already garden. Your packet of seeds tells you right on it how deep to plant and how far apart. That's all this is giving you.
There are plants you don't want close to each other. There are plants that require more irrigation than their neighbors. The soil pH matters, pests are varied between species, and temperature levels can be paramount. Planting time absolutely matters.
If you have ever tried to grow more than a few things in a garden, you realize exactly how complicated it can be. And while the product at hand does not address all of those things, it lays a foundation for a future where it could. The framework is built and it's open source.
That's great! And at the level you're at, the product probably doesn't make much sense. Everything is easy once you learn how to do it.
I'm curious which of the things I listed aren't significant issues? They're all things I've came across when trying to grow food.
I do agree that the current incarnation of this product fails to address those things, but the maker community will surely expand upon the platform. It appears to be extraordinarily modular.
Which you still have to do. Again, this literally does nothing but plant seeds for you, which is a pretty easy job.
>I'm curious which of the things I listed aren't significant issues?
All of them. The only harmful interaction between plants anyone is going to experience in their garden is beans and peas getting slowed by onions. And that doesn't even matter much, it just takes a little longer for your beans to be ready to harvest. Acidity is largely irrelevant, some plants tolerate or even prefer acidic soil, but almost all plants grown in a vegetable garden do just fine with neutral to slightly acidic soil. And watering is a non-issue, use hugels or at least ghetto it up with "lasagna" beds.
>but the maker community will surely expand upon the platform.
To do what? Solve problems that are already solved and do not require any sort of mechanical solution?
Not nearly enough. In Sili Valley, I live on a 8000 sq ft lot. In much of the USA, people live on 1/4 to 1/2 acre lots. A garden that will produce enough fresh produce during the growing season to feed a family of 4 during the season along with enough to preserve for the off season is bigger than that lot, even before you subtract space for the house. I invite you to do the math.
My mother's garden fed us the year around. That garden was bigger than my current city lot.
But it doesn't have to, right? If it can augment your grocery trips and prevent however much food you would've purchased from being shipped cross country, it's definitely left a mark.
I didn't mean to suggest it would supplant the supermarket, only allow people to more easily grow their own food.
It's capable of at best making the production of a few weeks worth of food somewhat easier. It's cool and all, but this particular 'bot is far from revolutionary.
I own a small farm myself. If the price point were low enough, I could easily set up acres of this technology and map out my crops using my computer. It could keep track of when crops needed to be harvested, when I needed to weed, how much I need to plant of one thing for a season. And then eventually could do those things for me.
via the magic of the internet, those acres need not be contiguous. Which is in itself rather fascinating.
Rather than signing up for the local CSA I'd sign up for someone to monitor and run my robo farm.
All of that is just garden planning software, which has existed for 20+ years.
How? It is completely useless for farming, which is where over 99% of our food comes from. So even if it completely changed gardening, it would have almost no impact at all on the way we obtain and consume food. And all it does is plant seeds, that doesn't change gardening at all.
Last time this was posted on Hacker News three years ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6451350