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Comment by jatsign | Hacker News Reader

Next Ycombinator class: A company using drones to dry cherries with machine learning.

I know you're being facetious but these are the types of industries and activities that don't get the SV disruption treatment, partly because nobody there knows about them. It's partly why I love when these "off-topic" posts get made here. There's now a lot more people read this post and who are now aware of this strange thing that keeps our world working in the way we expect it to- and might have ideas on how to make it better.

I was being facetious, but I also love these kind of stories. Like the one last week about the guy sells onions on the internet. We live in a weird world.

Yeah I totally agree. I love these kind, and the onions story too. Wonder where I can get more.

What is SV?

Silly Valley. Some people insist it stands for 'Silicon Valley'.

Per the article, you need a drone the size of a Robinson R44 to be effective. A R22 is too small.

I'm really more surprised that a truck with a boom-mounted rotor that simulates helicopter downwash wouldn't do a good enough job. Clearly someone has to have thought of that (note that they already tried fans), so I wonder what the difference is. The operational costs have to be a small fraction of a helicopter's.

Or even fixed-on-a-pole rotors.

The fans they were likely talking about are probably the horizontal-style fans you see in orchards for (mainly) frost prevention (they look like small windmills).

But why not very large rotor fans - maybe mounted HVLS fans, perhaps a bit larger, and maybe spinning a bit faster. Surely something like those would be cheaper to install and run 24/7 - assuming they worked as well?

Then you would need access roads throughout the orchards so your land use would be less efficient. Same as with tree farms and why they transport them with helicopters, too:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cK3fV6EbTOo

I'm thinking: a fan the size of the ones they have on air boats - the flat-bottom boats with the giant powerful fan on the back? That kind.

...in Rust!

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