New autonomous farm wants to produce food without human workers
technologyreview.com
technologyreview.com
Right now, VC money should go to other things like AI, supply chain integrated into production, blockchain etc.
And they must have farmers as partners. Farmers completely distrust tech because we are not included. I gave up trying. It’s like we speak different languages but when tech is trying to create produce for MY domain,isn’t my participation and input necessary?
I am particularly bummed because I applied to YC twice and it always comes back to finding a tech partner. My tech is farming. I know stuff your roboticist or engineer can’t dream of because we live that nightmare of crop failure or machines failing all the time.
At this point, I think I am going to write stories like sci fi or fantasy and maybe someone will realize my vision(or not..who knows..maybe it’s not the right fit, but I will never know) after I am gone. I really enjoy coming up with theoretical solutions because at this point, that’s all I can do.
I would have discouraged Iron Ox from that idea. Who transplants one at a time when technology exists to do thousands at a time? Why? I can’t even wrap my mind around this.
That's unfortunate that you feel this way. Quite frequently the ones I see succeed aren't the best at their tech either (be it their focused field or general tech). Tech VCs gravitate towards tech people. Surely that is obvious and you shouldn't give up after only consulting them. Let them solve things the only way they know how, and maybe you can find someone else to take a different approach with your ideas. Or maybe not. You shouldn't feel so slighted/jaded by it though. We all feel our ideas, be they ones proven in other scenarios or not, are workable.
> But outside, we got sunshine. And it’s free. Nothing is cheaper than free!
Would simulated and/or pumped-in sunshine cost more than (or even a significan fraction of) the labor?
If not, that seems similar to the sunk-cost fallacy, substituting "free" for "already paid for".
If labor costs, for any comparably-sized farm, dwarf artificial light [1] costs, then it would be a form of "penny wise, pound foolish" to opt for free light if it means incurring the labor cost. This is true, even if each is the biggest single cost in each scenario.
[1] Even that needn't be 100% artificial, since windows and skylights exist, though, again, my ignorance as an outsider may preclude me from realizing something that might be obvious to an insider, like this option not moving the needle on cost.
On one hand, there is a regular farm with farm labour and natural sun light. A traditional calendar picture farm. A tractor, some workers, rows of crops, red barn etc.
On the other hand, there is an automated indoor farm with artificial lights.
Are these the two scenarios that are being compared?
I agree that indoor farming will likely seem more profitable even though lighting costs money.
But it doesn’t happen that way because of
1. economies of scale.
https://coststudyfiles.ucdavis.edu/uploads/cs_public/52/c9/5... : UC Davis cost studies for lettuce.
https://www.freightfarms.com/income-projection#proformabody-... : freight farms income projection. Look at comment sections to gauge reception
https://www.agrilyst.com/stateofindoorfarming2017/ : agrilyst compilation of indoor economics. No one is named.
https://www.scribd.com/document/318543132/10A-Dr-T-Kozai-Pla... : Japanese Prof.Kozai sharing their insights. Very helpful.
2. While indoor farming is being tinkered around with..someone still has to keep supplying lettuce to the Walmarts and Whole Foods and Safeway’s and Kroger’s and restaurants and consumers.
3. Right now, the advantage of outdoor lettuce farming is legacy. California lettuce companies have been doing it for so long that they have perfected it to an art form.
But regulations are strangling and water is disappearing. Soon labour too. And it’s getging expensive.
They do the best they can. They give medical, 15-27/hour including benefits, breaks, overtime and some even provide housing. But it’s not going to be sustainable because the public still wants cheap food.
Even if indoor systems are automated, the jury is still out there if it would be profitable. Also..indoor plant specialists would want 60-120k. The Joses and Eduardos and Marias employed in the field demand much less.
Make of this what you may...I am just throwing light on current ground reality. I have NO solutions or recommendations. These are bigger problems.
I do know that food security is important. Local food supply is crucial for this. Food should be reasonably priced for everyone. Farming should be financially viable and sustainable for young farmers to keep doing what they do best.
My solution is small farm robotics. Outdoors. Because I am not an indoor farmer. I only read about it. Perhaps there are other ways to deal with it but I am not equipped to comment more. I understand large scale production but I haven’t worked in it. Everyone is an employee in a corporate farm. I am a farm owner and a farm worker in my farm. So it’s worlds apart.
I wouldn't know, other than assuming that the subject of the article is the model for the indoor farm.
> I agree that indoor farming will likely seem more profitable even though lighting costs money.
That does answer my question, and it essentially answers (at least part of) why VCs would find it interesting.
> 1. economies of scale.
IIUC, the subject of the article is attempting to tackle a niche (of their own creation?) of urban farming, which is, presumably, at smaller scale.
But is it a business worth purusing for humanity. Have you ever tasted hydroponics lettuce ? It's so inferior in taste and the sensations it gives in your mouth. It may have all nutrients, but if nutrients is the point, then let's eat soylent green.
Here's a major "organic" tomato operation in California.[2] It's indoors. The growing medium is coconut husks with computer controlled drip irrigation. It's more similar to a hydroponic operation than to an outdoor farm.
[1] https://www.npr.org/sections/thesalt/2017/11/02/561462293/hy... [2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4ayKz9-FbhA
But yes, being able to produce fresh food better, faster and in more controlled way is definitely worth pursuing for humanity.
there's earth, rain and sun and millions of years or R&D already done and proven successful. I really wonder what kind of research youo want...
What you may want is : tasty food for everyone on earth. But that's not science, that's much more politics.
A lot of food that we eat today evolved really fast after we started to care about their taste and only select the ones with the properties we want. We're talking about maximum 10k years of fast evolution for human taste, not millions of years.
But it isn't better. And why is making worse food faster worth pursuing for humanity? All the available evidence seems to suggest that a rural agrarian lifestyle provides more happiness and fulfillment. It would seem that we should be pursuing how to move people into the country to grow their own food, not how to support the highest possible population of humans at the expense of those humans and everything else on the planet.
Given the history of agriculture and the tendency to select for large watery produce, it seems like what you've experienced is the result of a profit optimization rather than an anecdotal example of hydroponics limitation in regards to producing quality vegetables.
Similarly, there's a bunch of robot startups that aren't really _about_ the thing they're trying to do right now, so much as they want to make general purpose robots that can handle all sorts of tasks.
In this case they landed on farming, but there have been other seemingly dumb robot applications. For example: check out this massively expensive robot arm (that could easily kill a worker) that has been used instead of just putting the conveyor belt directly into the conveyor belt oven.
That company isn't interested in Pizzas or restaurants per se (if they were they'd make something more like a frozen pizza factory) they're just using it as a proving ground.
There is real innovation happening in the farming space but it looks like the video you posted or these automatic milking robots or something else that really helps out.
https://www.nytimes.com/2014/04/23/nyregion/with-farm-roboti...
What’s to stop someone else from getting an industrial robot arm and making it do the same thing?
(Side note: building a pizza-making robot is one small dream of mine.)
Your website offers food from a "little farm". Wouldn't tech companies prefer to partner with experienced large scale commercial growers? In addition, you seem to take things (that aren't even criticisms) overly emotionally/personally, which would probably not be ideal in a cofounder.
My website is a placeholder. I don’t have time to update things on social media amidst farmwork. I might during winter when cover crops are in.
Large scale commercial growers can be partners, but are you saying small scale farmers don’t deserve the benefits of robotic technology and stuff that would help us make more profit without repetitive manual labour? This is exactly the sentiment that I sensed with tech people in Silicon Valley. That there is no value to saving heirloom varieties or using conservation techniques to protect soil and environment. Our small scale gives us room to grow varieties and food of the different people from all over. Fertilizers leach. Tillage destroys soil structure. Massive soil disruption gets rid of soil microbiome. Large scale commercial producers are important but local food is important too. That’s my opinion anyways.
You are way off Mark when you say I take things overly emotional /personal. But I am not going to challenge you. It’s your opinion and you are entitled to it. Have a nice day.
P.S: they are not ‘cabbages’
Could you link your website?
Sometimes all you need is a blind garden gnome as a helper. If I can tell the gnome to walk 3 steps, stop, use a two inch circle hoe once up and once down, it doesn’t matter if he is blind IF I set up planting and spacing before hand that is suitable for the blind garden gnome. Yes, it’s awesome to have a rover with lidar and sensors and vision system and AI for phenotyping and uploading the ID of every weed in the field to the cloud. But do we need it?
And I thought about it long and hard as to why all this is even there in the design. It became apparent very quickly. Data. They are collecting data with all the IoT devices piggy backing on the machine.
They tell us that we need this data. They tell us that this data will bring us more profits. They tell us that we have to pay for this data collection.
But my field data that is 2-3 times more valuable than the kale I sell(and that I pay for because most of these are subscription services) belongs to me. But the IoT devices and the farm bots that collect it are not even ours. The farmers don’t own it, they don’t have right to repair and they can’t extarct data. And trust me, there is A LOT of data that can be collected from our fields that we don’t even need. But we own it. And I want to commoditise it for the farmer. Why should we buy retail and sell wholesale and take all the risk, but not reap the benefits?
That’s why John Deere wants to deny farmers right to repair citing DMCA. That’s why hardware tech is going to commodity crops that are traded in the exchange. That’s where the real ROI is for VCs. I am not an idiot. I get it, but why should part of profits from my activity not come back to me?
With produce and non commodity crops, the value is trying to capture the ROI through blockchain and data from that. But again farmers are at the bottom of the supply chain and value is spread to all the people in between and we get none of it because we are the first ring in the supply chain. It never flows back. If I sell Romain wholesale, I can get 39cents from buyer. It sells for 1.59-2.50 a head as it adds up on the supply chain, but that 0.5-one cent I pay per romaine for technology to extract data is included as costs for the 39c I receive, but it becomes 5-10 cents up the value chain and it plumps up everytime it goes up.
But people who work in supply chain tech and robotics and drones have access to SV and VCs. Farmers don’t. Large commercial farms that operate with offices and lobbying muscle and are members of organizations that represent them have access to SV and VCs, but small farmers who work the farms they own can..in no way..access these people who are investors.
The small acreage farmer is basically nuts. They farm because they have a passion for it. Soil health is more important than pesticides and fertilizer to boost productivity. Many aren’t buoyed by higher profits but its their very nature that gets them out of the game after 4-5 years average because you can’t suppirt yourself with this kind of variable, broke today-chicken dinner tomorrow income. But we have value and we can create value. We need to make money to continue doing what we do...when they say that the average farmer is 58 and young people don’t want to farm..well..why would they if they are not seen and valued?
I didn’t know how this became such a long reply. Thanks for reading.
My website is a placeholder for my farm. Its not a place for tech or farm bot topics there as it’s a place for my customers and farm friends. It’s my username dot com.
Also. I doubt if there is any infrastructure or support in central California. UC Davis might have some ways to collaborate with small farms but in my limited and personal experience, I find that they prefer to work with their own..alumni and school network. I am an immigrant and didn’t obtain my education here. I get it, but I don’t have to like how the system works.
That’s why YC selection process bummed me big time. I have a reasonable network that I built since I started farming four years ago. But it WAS hard and it’s never enough because I don’t ‘belong’ here or the networked university system.
Lest it seems like I am whining, I want to say that I am just being realistic. I also know when to cut loose from a sinking dream. I guess I will keep trying but I am not emotionally or passionately invested anymore. My time is precious and I can’t waste it trying to impress people who see things differently.
I am still a good writer. I will write instead. I am hoping that it will fulfill me. But sometimes..from time to time, I got to roll my eyes when I see wheels that will never roll being reinvented with so much $$$!
With the OP, I don’t have a dog in this fight as it’s Indoor Ag, but I have learned a lot about automation and data collection by understanding indoor systems and philosophy. Iron Ox is like Amazon’s Kiva or Fetch Bots. I don’t get it.
So far, they're not as flexible about weed/plant detection as they could be. But there will probably be a training system where you go out with a cell phone pointed down at the field, swiping left for weeds and right for plants, until the machine learning system is trained.
There's a lot that can be done, and is being done, by hooking up inexpensive vision systems to actuators on agricultural implements. Here's a nice example - a cultivator which is stirring the soil around each plant while not touching the plants.[2]
The main problem with automated vegetable harvesting is not that it can't be done, but that for some crops the infrequently used machinery isn't cost effective compared to hiring large numbers of people for short periods.
[1] https://www.growingproduce.com/vegetables/automated-weeders-... [2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DhqNmRuBPsw
Manipulation of plants in a clean room is easy, it is also remote from any real world application (outside space or maybe arctic farming). You should at least aim at greenhouses tech.
Also, the market concepts of innovator, early adopter, early majority, late majority, laggard came from potato farmers, showing that some of them are innovators, just like every other group. Target them.
There has to be a ‘farm stack’...because it’s a lot of things. When I see a weed thinning machine start up bought for 300 something million, I am awed that just one simple function that isn’t even that essential with proper management is so expensive. This was Blue River Tech bought by John Deere. And what did John Deere do? They shut down lettuce thinning and took it to cotton which is a commodity crop and is one of the crops that uses pesticide sprays a lot. A good notion but it’s not food.
Which brings everyone back to square one and more $$$ going into something that has already been invented but retired.
And even if companies like John Deere own these tech, they control it tightly. I wonder how many lawyers are in their payroll. Farmers in California just lost the right to repair tractors with software in them. DMCA (https://www.forbes.com/sites/jasonbloomberg/2017/04/30/john-... )
Can you imagine if one of those giant autonomous machines breaks down? Having smaller bots that swarm and take care of small acreages is less risky. Mitigated crop loss. It serves both small farmers and large farmers. Most ‘large farms’ are really corporate farms that outsource growing instructions and protocols to smaller farms and buys their produce. They contract farmers to grow what goes under their label after packing. Packers are not often growers. Distributors are not always packers. And then there are brokers, wholesalers and retailers. The supply chain is long!! The lettuce is at least a week old before you can buy it! Small local farm operators can get food via a smaller supply chain. I also want farming to be climate change proof and ‘future proof’. It’s easier to pivot smaller systems than larger massive ones.
I am making quick points but there is a lot of nuance depending on location, geography and kind of crops grown. This is why Agtech needs farmers and growers as partners. We know all the gory details and gnarly bits about our specialities.
Take pests like bugs. It differs not just from crop to crop but also differs with soil type, geography, season and sometimes we don’t even know why or how. It’s not possible to standardize this intelligence. So a weeding machine meant for the lettuce fields of Salinas, CA may not work elsewhere. It will become unbearably expensive to work out a system for a common farm marketplace. But it’s easy when we have a general purpose platform and process with minor changes depending on circumstance that can be cloud based and open source based on local farmers input. For this it has to be small and cheap.
And most importantly farmers need to trust tech. VCs have chosen to create for a few massive consolidated large scale farms(not selling to them,btw but leasing) instead of making it possible for everyone to farm.
It’s like the smart phone. If Apple made a $30000 gold plated phone, few might buy it but when they make cheaper ones with plastic cases, everyone can have one. And Apple makes $ from services and apps and what not. Plus they will be repeat buyers.
I struggle to explain this to finance folk and tech folk who now think they are bosom buddies with the VC folk now that they got a couple rounds of funding. There are real pain points that are not being addressed. In the field, I can already see future pain points. 30 years from now..if there is no fossil fuel..if climate change occurs..if soil changes..if water disappears..whatever. But no one who can make it happen is listening.
The word Technology means 'the skill of crafting', but its become hijacked to mean anything with a microchip
That so few people can feed so many using such a small amount of land is a massive tech innovation
2. There is already a lot of technology in what you eat. Mechanization in factory style farms, cold supply chain, blockchain for lettuce at Walmart..the stock system..the inventory..everything. Not to mention that your food chain is owned by agri fertilizers and pesticide companies..and gmo seed. Bayer owns Monsanto now. The company that used slave labor in nazi concentration camps bought out the company that made agent orange. And that’s who is making your food and medicine.
3. I am also frustrated that farming methods aka hard work meant to feed a lot less people is now expected to feed close to 10 billion by 2050. On less land.
Who would have thought, it's actually real: https://www.ibm.com/blockchain/solutions/food-trust. It seems to be based on Hyperledger Fabric, which apparently does not require proof-of-work. That's amazing, and thanks for mentioning it. This is the first non-disastrous blockchain project in active use that I've ever heard of.
It’s overkill for lettuce sold to Walmart, but I can see why Walmart wants to try it. I am curious to see how we can implement and use blockchain appropriately in the supply and value chain of food. Walmart mandating lettuce blockchain and patterning with IBM is a good start, but honestly at this level, it can also be done with just well managed database systems. But I am all for it! I am excited to see where this will lead.
I also can...intuitively only because I can’t articulate it or prove it.. see this as ‘laying down of the road’ before the town is built. Exciting.
I'd much rather we eliminate the need for jobs so people don't need to work anymore. Working sucks. I think I work at a great place. I still wouldn't do it if I didn't get paid.
Piano, music composition, hanging out with friends/family, and social work.
Basically the things in my life that I think actually matter to me.
There’s not enough political will though.
How "representative" of our country (assuming you're in the U.S. apologies if you're not) are our politicians?
How many are "wealthy" vs. the general population etc.?
It's a huge cost center, and the amount of labor required to operate a farm is considerably less than what it has been in the past. It seems like the major bottleneck is harvesting, packaging and shipping the majority of your product to market, it's a natural place to look for gains.
The moneymakers are the landholders anyways.
> Then you don't know how to solve the shortcut in jobs.
Most harvesting work is done on a "piece work" system. These aren't jobs that have any future in them because there are absolutely no skills required and no reason for an employer to develop them and they're highly seasonal.
> Couldn't we just slow down tech a little bit and let people do some good old hard work to keep getting their cut?
There may be cases where this is true, but when the labor is literally "just pulling food out of the ground and putting it in a box" I don't think the use of technology is an inherent problem.
Having said that, my position has always been that lettuce(and strawberries) should be moved indoors because they are ground huggers. Lettuce has been easy to automate indoors but strawberries have continuous fruit production and a canopy and keeps on going for a longer season. So it has proved to be meow difficult. Also needs a lot of targeted lighting because it has to fruit and flower.
Automation is a beautiful thing. It comes from a keen study of the repetitive movements that goes into the task at hand. But machines can never replace humans everywhere and for every crop, but it can certainly make farming better.
When I attended TechCrunch this year, in one of the panels, (robotics investment by VC) the moderator asked if replacing strawberry pickers with ‘roombas’ is unethical because the strawberry pickers won’t have jobs.
I was very upset and am pretty sure she hasn’t picked strawberries bent over or even seen the workers do this for hours and being paid by the clamshells and not by the hour. It is also this kind of thinking that is holding back technology and innovation.
Let’s find them other jobs. Better jobs. Make education accessible. Who knows..the strawberry picker could be a genius or a musician or just someone who wants a simpler less back breaking job. Who are these tech people and moderators and VCs go try and ‘save’ farmers and farm workers who desperately need tech to help them.
Instead these are the kind of concerns I heard at TechCrunch. It was very disheartening. I am not very hopeful. They are all throwing $$ down the drain and america’s crutch is cheap labour. Europe is far ahead because they don’t have cheap labour. Japan, Middle East and even down under, they are innovating because their pain points are ageing population, water availability in deserts and in Oz.nz, labour. China is making great strides and surpassing EU with their farm tech innovation and especially with robotics.
We are being left behind because we are allowing something so essential as food production, distribution to become fodder for politically correct faff talk.
I was thinking to myself..that it makes no sense. If you break down some of the concerns ‘tech folk’ who want to ‘help’ farming into words and meanings, it was just dead words...killed by the sword of ignorance and hubris. Unethical to replace strawberry pickers with robots? It was very painful to hear that kind of talk.
With everything else I definitely agree. I think picking ripe fruits by hand is what needs to be automated the most, everything else is already 95% automated with basic farm equipment. Automating growing cabbages is about as impressive as making a car drive in a straight line without a driver. Seasonally handpicking fruits for pennies out in the sun, bent over 12+ hours a day, is the real grueling work. I would rather be roofing houses than handpicking strawberries or other handpicked soft fruits.
Fruit picking is very tough. I feel that canopy management and spacing and everything else has to be standardized for the machines. Apple picking has a number of autonomous options now. They even have been able to figure out sorting and packing. The problem though is soft fruits. Like strawberries and raspberries and blackberries. Really difficult. Growing them indoors makes it really easier, but it’s the grip and their bruising tendency that is the problem.
Cabbage has been mechanized. It’s a beautiful thing to watch. There is no need to make it autonomous because the labour needed isn’t picking and bending and working in the sun..they can be in the shade in the deck as the machine brings the cabbage to them and they can inspect and pack them. It’s easier but still repetitive manual labour. But not brutal like those working in the field to harvest. Cabbage, lettuce, asparagus, sugar cane, sugar beets, corn and soy, of course..grains like Millets and barley etc are all easy. If there is one thing to crack it’s plants that have continuous and multiple harvests. Like eggplants or peppers or tomatoes(heirlooms and cherries. Sauce tomatoes and those for processing are already automated).
Urban farming, the type proposed by most US based startups are already at a massive disadvantage. Not only is the price of land much higher, but the running and capital costs are far far greater, totally obliterating any hope of profitability.
Take this current startup, they use a generalised robot arm, which would have cost >$100k plus the software to do the visual registration. Event then its moving one plant at a time...
Why are they not spending the time working on low tech plan holders, that could be plucked and moved using cheap conveyor belt systems? even better a tray, with known locations, that can be moved to a specialised plucking machine, which can pluck an entire tray in one go.
There is no mention about pest management, its a massive monoculture, and one or two fungal spore could wipe out that entire warehouse in a matter of weeks.
But you are also right. The equipment needs to operate in freezing cold or dusty environments or humidity. Indoor growing inside hoophouses or greenhouses and glasshouses are a lot more effective.
I agree. Pest issue is the Achilles Heel and weapon of wholesale complete destruction of harvest. They are trying to combat it with more technology. I want to say that I am really impressed by how Indoor Ag has evolved over the years. It’s not perfect but way better than how it was ten years ago.
Hydroponics in the middle of a drought is a disaster, it sucks huge amount of clean water. Yes, if you are careful you can use it to clean water, but again, its at the risk of importing fungus/pests.
Most agriculture doesn't need high tech solutions, it needs simple ones. The biggest threat facing most farmers in the developing world are drought and pests. Drought can be managed by creating small simple dams that slow the passage of water to the sea. (lots of india for example used to do this.)
The future of agritech is small, simple and cheap. The Netherlands has this other type of stuff nailed.
In the developing world, land and labour are cheap, asking a farmer to buy into this style tech is like asking us to buy a small Caribbean island, impossible. The only people that can do this are the rich, who are normally the ones causing the droughts and destruction in the first place.
Eh, that's a tad bit generalized. German farmers still employ a lot of cheap eastern European seasonal workers, around 160.000 per year [0], especially for asparagus harvest.
Tho, due to the economic progress in Eastern Europe it's been more difficult for German farmers to find enough cheap hands.
[0] https://www.sueddeutsche.de/news/wirtschaft/agrar---bruchsal...
Edited to add: https://youtu.be/j8-X9Lk508I : how a labour crew harvests asparagus
This has been going on since 2010, back then it was still around 330.000 seasonal workers [0].
Automation has been one factor, but a lot of farmers would rather keep employing cheap seasonal labor, as they used to, instead of buying and maintaining expensive machinery all year around.
[0] https://www.zeit.de/wirtschaft/2018-05/erntehelfer-mangel-er...
Potato should be easily mechanized like any root crop. Sugar beets are mechanized. Why not potatoes?
There's also the fact that mechanization is expensive, while the eastern European labor used to be extremely cheap and Germany doesn't have growing season all year around.
So, many German farmers temporarily hire cheap labor, instead of investing in expensive machinery that just costs money outside of the growing season.
The Dutch have been working on saline water crops and so far they have done a great job with potatoes. Also working on carrots, beets, cauliflower,kale etc all grown in salt water. Non GMO. They are testing in Kenya, bangaladesh, Vietnam and places where salt in soil makes it impossible to farm. I want to say I am really impressed with Dutch Ag.
I also understand EU got a lot of produce from Africa but placed restrictions about it being non GMO. Now that China has taken over management of Africa and spending on infrastructure (their belt and road initiative) so they can outsource farming to feed their billion plus population. In the US, they bought Smithfield foods to start exporting pork to China and they also own a lot of farmland in the USA, the pork operation because regulations are lax in North Carolina rather than in China. (Open air lagoons with pig poop...disastrous with ). But I digress. Different topic. I am trying to get back to my initial thought which is that..local food is food security. We live in a globalized world where we can and do ship food all around the world, but a fundamental self sufficiency to feed the local population is a food security issue and I would say..even national security. But this has also gone horribly wrong with stockpiling(corn and grain subsidies in the states leading to surplus leading to HCFS, ethanol and then animal feed..) and to entirely handicapping certain industries(like our dairy sector that is highly subsidied ..bottled water is cheaper than milk. Dairy farms can’t make it anymore). It’s a balance.
I am afraid I might have digressed..thanks for reading!
> Open air lagoons with pig poop...disastrous with
Wasn't there recently some tornado/flood going through a US farm area spreading the literal "shit", out of these lagoons, everywhere?
> I am afraid I might have digressed..thanks for reading!
Heh, I think not digressing is sometimes impossible, especially on such topics like farming and food production, which are often rather wide-ranging if not all-encompassing.
Agriculture is the basis of our modern human civilization, at some point or another, it's all leading back there.
But if I am going to assume it’s one of the links I posted:
Italy and Netherlands makes some really great automation for tractors re harvesting produce. They still have to be driven by humans but it’s only a matter of time before it’s fully automated. If you name the crop, I might be able to get the name of the company.
Root crops is likely Netherlands. If it’s greens, brassicas/cold crops, Italy has some great brands. On a slightly different note, I like German company Kult Kress too for precision weeding.
"At this point in time, hydroponic farming of lettuce cannot be deemed a more sustainable alternative to conventional lettuce farming techniques, but it provides promising concepts that could lead to more sustainable food production."[1]
And yes conventional agriculture has other negative impacts (water, transport, land), but I'm not hearing much about energy use from these startups.
Hydroponics also create a lot of wastewater, its a fact rarely mentioned but when the goal is sustainability then created waste should also be accounted for.
Aquaponic systems don't have that issue because they copy a natural ecosystem on a small scale. Imho that's where the future of human food production needs to go.
There is a company that is trying to use organic/natural hydroponic nutrient inputs than just what’s been used all along. It will take some time(and testing) to adapt.
Edit: apparently not. The Engadget article is a bit better. "What we found is that the two biggest costs in the indoor farm are labor and electricity"
https://www.engadget.com/2018/10/03/future-indoor-agricultur...
That tray-lifting machine looks expensive.
Are plants other than lettuces suitable for hydroponic farming?
I am the founder of a startup [2] based in the Netherlands and backed by Founder's Fund focussed on scaling high-tech greenhouse growing as a method of crop production. I have both a technical background in Reinforcement Learning and have spent time training as a tomato grower. Happy to answer any questions anyone may have at dave@optimal.ag.
[1] https://www.nationalgeographic.com/magazine/2017/09/holland-...
>> "What we found is that the two biggest costs in the indoor farm are labor and electricity"
this may be true but it doesn't mean the costs of outdoor farming are lower, plus the added cost of land (good farm land is expensive to own or rent)
Urban land is much more expensive per unit. not only that, but you have the Capital expense of the machinery and buildings, plus the operational expense of heating, lighting, ventilation, and fungus control.
http://blog.zipgrow.com/indoor-hydroponic-farming-costs-prof... has a good overview of the costs. $110k for 500 square feet. excluding building. Then you have the opex for lighting which is $1100 a month. You'll need heating in winter, which will similar cost.
To put that in perspective, https://www.uklandandfarms.co.uk/rural-property-for-sale/eas... grade II soil. $80k, buys you 211266 square feet, with change left over for tractor, plough, seed and tillage hire/buy.
Moreover, its not an asset that will depreciate, unless one lets the soil blow away/don't improve it.
For those interested here is a video of our lab. Our structures are vertical for our research. However, our commercial (big) deployments will be flat or an "A" system. Right now, we are leveraging the abundance of sunlight in the tropics (India). We can produce 10x the traditional farming without any stacking but at a fraction of the cost of other hydroponics/Aeroponics setup.
Photos https://photos.app.goo.gl/XytrQYsQ0UaSKozV2 Locavore Demo Tour https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U2CRI61_DlQ
One question - do you have any kind of automatic way to clear clogs in the sprayer heads?
We will still be using mist spray method with other crops that has less dense rooting, etc.
set pressure 0
open a solenoid connected to h2o2 with enough elevation to reach the clog
detect flow increase ->assume unclogged
close solenoid, set pressure 50 psi (or whatever)
This might best be done with a hydraulic circuit rather than electronic sensors, by the way. Ie. to detect pressure build up have a secondary line with slight resistance before the nozzle that when pressurized triggers other hydraulic elements which cut pressure, etc.
1) grow the majority of their food in their back yard (asymptotically converging to 100%), and
2) spend a minimum of time and effort in order to do so (asymptotically converging to zero time and effort).
AutoMicroFarm will provide products and services to that effect.
I started out with aquaponics, thinking the end product would need to be high-tech. But it turns out that good design (which the aquaponics industry has not completely agreed upon yet) can obviate the need for high tech.
Aside from aquaponics, permaculture goes a long way towards maximizing yield while minimizing time and effort needed on an ongoing basis. However, the time and effort is often front-loaded when the design is installed.
Robotics, when ubiquitous and affordable, will transform agriculture, whether on a commercial or a residential level. In the meantime, there are lots of opportunities that I hope to capitalize on.
Not everyone who is willing to garden, does so. I've worked with a couple local clients who love the idea of gardening, but weren't sure how to start.
Permaculture design (on a back-yard level) is one of the services I offer, although I don't call it that.
In the meantime, I am in the process of updating my website. It's taking longer than I would like (day jobs: can't live with them, can't live without them yet...).
You can read more on the current state of my own yard, and the types of services and products I am offering, here: https://blog.automicrofarm.com/state-of-my-suburban-homestea...
It seems to me that we would see more adoption of farm positions if we provided smaller, integrated farm plots where folks that had their fill of urban living, wanted to raise a family and be closer to nature could be apart of a community. Sort of a replacement for the sterile suburbs where people go to raise families, only with flexible family focused farm jobs.
I realize there are intentional communities that provide this, but I wonder if the ag industry is missing out on an opportunity also.
Edit: it was super cool to meet his cows but the market for 12$ yogurt is so small that it would he hard to break into that market. He only got there because his family has run a very natural dairy farm for decades (or at least that's what he told me).
So the real question isn't can someone produce yoghurt cheaper than this person (they can) but is the product they produce worth the $12 for enough people to make a go of it.
The real question is if you love doing it, can you support yourself...
Sure it was boring as a kid, but I got a lot of hands on training fixing machines and working with plants and animals. It was also much safer than the last 25 years that I've lived in Oakland.
I can see that I'm touching on a heated topic (Rural vs. Urban living) that people feel strongly about.
My original point is that there appears to be people willing to work on farms, but not the types of farms that build culture and invite communities to be a part of. So we are left with migrant workers which in this day in age are probably largely illegal.
I would assume that this is an untouched labor force and economic niche that is being underutilized.
If you can do all that, it is a good sustainable life, but if the most you can do is grow some garden crops and shit, you will not be able to afford the service costs of everything else you need to survive. You won't be able to sell some tomatoes and afford all the same services as before, especially out int he country where land is cheap. It takes a lot of fuel to get in and out of the areas where land is cheap enough to do any of that also.
The main issue isn't can you do it, but can you make anything like a living wage doing it. Lots of variables in that equation.
I'm certainly not suggesting it's impossible, but it clearly isn't easy.
Notice the task-specific machines and the high plant volumes, such as transplanting machines capable of handling 35,000 plants per hour.
IINM, to make a dent in the larger agricultural system, these facilities will have to produce high calorie and protein bearing crops, like grains, beans, etc.
It doesn't seem to have much to do with lowering the natural resources (water, fossil fuels) spent per calorie of food produced at a large scale, though.
Leafy greens along with soft fruit need quite a bit of labour which is in short supply in higher income countries. It makes some sense to target them.
I never understood why APIs like this would ever be disabled. Why not just have it return "blank" responses?! Same goes for e.g. iPhone "access to contacts/location/etc"...
Here's a jsfiddle to demonstrate: http://jsfiddle.net/w49x9f1a/
TL;DR: the disabling of the filesystem API gives it away.
An end effector pose has 6 DOF (3 translation, 3 rotation). A robot with fewer than 6 DOF can't physically reach all poses in its task space, so if sensing says go here, the kinematics will often say it can get close, but not exactly.
A robot with exactly 6 DOF can usually reach all poses in its task space, with a catch. Typically there are only a discrete number of joint configurations for a given pose (like 4 or 8). Thus, if you want to reach a certain pose but all joint configurations are in collision then you are in trouble. Adding just 1 more DOF, making it a 7 DOF arm, ensures that the arm can generally reach any pose with an infinite number of configurations, the last dimension used to plan avoiding collision.
If you use motion planning and sensing for all of this, instead of something like a teach pendant where you carefully set all of the desired poses manually, then higher DOF is easier.
But farms generally have lots of land / space availability. The pipeline for growing, farming, and transporting crops is fairly predictable, minus unexpected events like hurricanes/tornados/rainfall, diseases, pests, spoilage, etc
With farming, everything to my understanding is mostly predictable for crop size. Farms generally specialize in one type of crop if I'm not mistaken, especially if its hydrophonics /inhouse like in the dutch farm video mentioned in this thread.
SCARA makes more sense for farming
Which one looks 'better' or 'more sophisticated'? SCARA or a robotic arm? Which one is going to attract more investors?
Cool concept nonetheless!
It's also something that is done from orbit. E.g.: https://www.esa.int/Our_Activities/Observing_the_Earth/Coper...
Error 1005
Access denied What happened? The owner of this website (www.richardmudhar.com) has banned the autonomous system number (ASN) your IP address is in (7922) from accessing this website.
That isn't food, it's a condiment.
Also pretty sure its a ton more efficient to grow these in a field, under the sun. Want to make a cool robot? Make a field scale planting/harvesting robot for this and that might have some application. This is just a gimmick.
But they probably already have it.
Check it out.
... fuel for the robots.
I call BS. There is almost always enough labor at the correct price. That means the juice wasn't worth the squeeze (or the employers are making bad choices...) . If farm hands were making $100 an hour I'm sure you'd see a lot more farm hands. Of course they'd also probably be losing money, so that's why we dont see that.
[1]: https://www.engadget.com/2018/10/03/future-indoor-agricultur...
Edit: this quote was actually from an engadget article linked elsewhere in this post's comments
Both CEOs and journalists, as well as most readers of MIT's Technology Review, understand that you can get more labor by raising the price. The implicit understanding is that a) most Americans don't want to do back-breaking manual labor for a living, and b) most Americans also want food to be cheap. This is an ongoing problem in agriculture and has been for decades.
Nobody from any country wants to do back-breaking manual labor for a living.
But the whole "jobs Americans won't do" is nothing more than a political slogan/talking point.
The reality is that Americans will do any job, provided they are fairly compensated.
More than once, it's been in the news that a factory/food processing plant/etc... has been busted for having illegal workers, paying its workers below minimum wage, or both. A week later, the factory has to hire legal workers and Americans for the previously under-paid jobs, and there's a line around the block of people willing to now work for a fair rate of pay.
I've never heard that, could you provide a couple of concrete examples?
https://www.denverpost.com/2013/01/14/fear-from-swift-plant-...
I remember there was a meat packing plant in Colorado a few years ago. I tried Google News, but it's apparently incapable of showing anything but the most recent stories.
To the extent this is true, I think it's tautological.
At some point, much of American labor was manual. People's notion of a fair wage for that was not high, and the work was accepted as normal. But now there are a lot of people who work in offices, and much manual labor is now way easier than agricultural work. There's also a broad (but not universal) societal expectation that people shouldn't have to destroy their bodies at work. So I think the perceived "fair" compensation for this has risen dramatically. And I think the number of people willing to spend 14 hours a day, 6 days a week [1] doing that work at any price is much smaller than before.
And honestly, I think that's great. We should find ways to turn every job that people don't want to do over to robots.
[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2014/08/08/nyregion/in-harvest-seaso...
Even if you had policies that firehose-flooded the labor market, that still only saves you a trivial amount on the price of farm output. (I'm guessing most of the cost of apples comes from the price of the land and capital.)
It just doesn't look like there's this huge tradeoff we're facing that could justify massively increasing the labor supply.
A better explanation would be that, if everyone else uses unauthorized[2] labor, then you have to do it yourself to keep up.
[1] https://www.thepennyhoarder.com/make-money/side-gigs/like-wo...
[2] "illegal" is apparently taboo now, but "undocumented" is Orwellian.
This makes me wonder...
Autonomy is the biggest hurdle for these technologies and manual labor is the reason they are needed. Why aren't we meeting halfway and using remote controlled robots instead of autonomous ones?
That way workers could do the job from anywhere in the world without having to break a sweat and you'd only need a fraction of the investment to get it running.
Telesurgery is a bit of a myth. It's been done a few dozen times.
It doesn't make that much sense economically. It's actually cheaper to fly a surgeon or a patient around for the few occasions when it really needs to be done.
Most surgery still isn't done with Da Vinci robots or whatever. Surgeons with their hands can do many more things. That's not to say those robots are not amazing, it's just that they don't do everything.
The military is the one area where it might make sense, but have a close look. They don't do it either. Instead the US military has an amazing extraction system where someone injured in battle in the middle east can be at Rammstein within hours.
I assume it's not very hard (for experts) to build an AI that would push the right buttons at the right times.
It is extremely material to the narrow profit margins of farms, so you see a race to the bottom with importing slave labor, terrible practices, etc.
But enforcing labor standards and minimum wages wouldn't add much to the average American's food bill, even assuming farms couldn't avoid some of the hit by using less or more productive labor.
It is BS.
> a) most Americans don't want to do back-breaking manual labor for a living
No. Most american don't want to do back-breaking manual labor for peanuts. As maerF0x0 said, raise the wages and watch how many americans love back-breaking manual labor. It's strange how the tar oil fields in south dakota are able to attract workers from all over the country.
> and b) most Americans also want food to be cheap.
Don't all humans?
>there's not enough people to actually do ...
IMO there are plenty to do the work. There are not enough people who are sufficiently incentivized to do the work at the wages that farming pays. This is in comparison to other choices people have be it easier work or higher paying.
Unless you have a greater point or suggestion to make, why waste time on pedantry?
Combine these and you're right. Most Americans don't want to do back-breaking labor for a pittance. Grocery checkers (union) make $18.50/hour. Bus drivers (union) make $29/hour. Journeyman (union) electricians make $50/hour.
Try paying more than $15/hour for farm labor and you'll have more applicants than you know what to do with.
If it was just some cultural thing, then we'd have more than enough immigrants to correct for most Americans not wanting to do it. The problem is that there exists no cultural group that wants these jobs, native born or otherwise, at the pay and benefits offered. People switch to better jobs as soon as they find one.
> Americans also want food to be cheap
I assume everyone would prefer if everything is cheap? This is a problem that effects any business.
What robots do is reduce all that ripple effect of societal load on all the other aspects of sustaining the labor force and their human needs.
Focusing on simply labor and it's price for the task at hand is stupidly myopic.
And reveals the greater impact autonomous robotic labor will really have.
Let's assume California's Central valley in 50 years time is vast swaths of robotic farms.
All other human infrastructure in these places die. Restaurants, stores, schools, housing, police fire etc fall back to early 1900s levels (or some smaller density level of the past)
Are the margins that slim that the owners can't afford to pay their workers more?
Saying there is $3B of produce that could have been produced, ignores the fact that it would have been produced at a loss (after labor costs sufficient to incentivize workers) and there may not of even been a market for the over supply.
If there is an actual unmet market need the price curve will move upward meaning employers can pay workers more to fulfill the unmet need. To me this looks like a lack of a market for $3B of produce...
The average age of the oldest member of farming families is 58.
>When you are too old or infirm to farm at all you sell it to your kid or they get power of attorney and take it.
When my grandfather retired from farming, he simply leased the land to the guy who owned the adjacent farm. After my grandfather passed away ownership transferred to my grandmother until her death at 101. The same lease arrangement continued for a nearly thirty years. What was the age of the farmers of those farms?
See https://www.ers.usda.gov/topics/farm-economy/beginning-disad...
For better or worse "Principal Farm Operator" is defined term (please see https://www.ers.usda.gov/topics/farm-economy/farm-household-...) and just to make things more confusing the moniker is self-applied. In a perfect world the principal would be the most important or the most active Operator in a multiple Operator farm but perfection is going to elude us w/r/t the USDA.
Edited to note the upvote for your reasonable demeanor while disagreeing. An example I strive to follow.
Unless there is some sort of blowup, or an ER visit, you're not going to be in any kind of hurry to see the look on your mom/dad's face when they realize you're right. Or how angry they get if they refuse to see reason.
If you keep making teen-aged labor more and more impractical, then you're going to have problems. A lot of the really labor intensive work in farming requires almost no skill, just a whole bunch of hands and bodies. The cycles of farming naturally have highs and lows; when it's time to plant or time to reap, it's all hands on deck to get it done before time and weather runs out, and the rest of the season you need considerably less labor.
I think they still take two weeks off school in the middle of the fall in Aroostook County, Maine, so the potato farmers can get their harvest in.
Farm workers at harvest time are almost Olympic-level endurance athletes.
Most Americans who show up don't last a day in the fields.
So no, $100/hour won't inspire more than a few workers who have alternatives.
Good. I hate it when my food has human workers in it.
Tbh, I have my doubts it would play out like that, but it does seem they're conscious of it, at the very least.
Your fast food burger would replace iceberg with leaf lettuce, then the pale flavorless commodity tomatoes with deep red juicy ones. Then maybe the bun will be made with some cauliflower meal in it. The price you pay for the burger will mainly be for the labor, facilities, and transportation, and the mean quality of ingredients will rise, rather than the price going down.
If you make meals at home, you will likely have more options for pre-cut foods, and more distributor-packaged, fixed-weight bags with recognizable brand names on them. Rather than one whole head of cauliflower at a time from who-knows-where, you will get a 2# bag of pre-cut fork-sized cauliflower florets in a microwave-ready steamer bag from Edible Head Farms, with full nutrition panel, a recipe, and a heartwarming story about their plucky farming robots on the back. The market already knows you are willing to spend $X on cauliflower, and captures that same amount with lower production costs and a heap of value-adds like pre-processing, brand, convenience, and maybe flavor, if there's still room. The grocery store is already operating on 1% margins, and can't afford to take a hit on giving the same amount of shelf space to cheaper cauliflower. Your lettuce will come in stacked, equal-sized leaves for sandwiches, and in bagged, fork-sized bites for salads.