China Drone Attack on Crop-Eating ‘Monster’ Shows 98% Kill Rate | Hacker News Reader

China Drone Attack on Crop-Eating ‘Monster’ Shows 98% Kill Rate

bloomberg.com

161 pointspseudolus105 comments

Why not mention the startup name instead of saying China, which just makes it sound like if the Chinese government is behind it ? Do Chineses newspapers say US phone instead of iPhone ?

This is a really common thing with articles about Chinese companies. People seem to collectively equate them to the government. Perhaps it’s a holdover from communism?

For example, people will say things like “Reddit is controlled by China” when in reality Reddit has an investment from Tencent, not China.

Some percentage are mixed in with the government pretty tightly, though, and the ones who aren't can effectively be assumed to pass any kind of data to them, or be forced to do their bidding if the occasion ever arises. That's true in the US, too, of course, but at least in the US the companies can (secretly) fight it out in court, and actually sometimes win.

> That's true in the US, too, of course,

Do people really believe still this, or is this something everyone says reflexively to avoid committing the faux pas of coming across as believing that the U.S. is better than a communist country? Trump should have exploded this idea. He can't even get his own executive bureaucracy, which he is theoretically in charge of, to do his bidding, much less random U.S. companies.

False equation. It is silly to compare the operation of the entire US government to a small special ops team from a 3-letter agency using a small special ops court to compel a small special ops team within a corporation to do something.

The teams that do that kind of thing are very intentionally separate from the bureaucracy.

Of course the situation is far, far worse in China than in the US, but look at some of the recent-ish litigation involving corporations and the NSA and FBI to see what I mean. Who the current president is has little to do with it.

If I hadn't added that, I would've received the opposite comment about American bias towards China.

It's not just online that this happens. I was listening to some people talk on DMR ham radio last night, on Talkgroup 91 Worldwide. (DMR is a digital voice mode used in commercial and amateur radio, and talkgroups let you talk with people who are on the same talkgroup, roughly akin to tuning into a common frequency.)

John Miklor jumped into the conversation; he has a website [1] where he reviews various handheld and mobile radios.

Someone else jumped in and started thanking John for the good work he does "reviewing ChiCom radios." He kept saying ChiCom over and over again and I started wondering what he was talking about. I thought he must mean radios made by Chinese Companies like Baofeng, AnyTone, or Wouxun.

It slowly dawned on me that this was not what he meant at all. He was talking about Chinese Communist radios!

I guess I'm writing this on my Chinese Communist ThinkPad!

[1] http://www.miklor.com

A big part of it is the fact that the Chinese government hold enormous sway over private companies. The US for example has a constitution which protects private ownership, and which the courts have upheld. China has no such protection for its private companies.

Take for example the recent law requiring companies in China to “support and cooperate in national intelligence work“. Private companies in China have no ability to fight against such a law.

So I wouldn’t say it’s a “holdover”... let’s not forget that even with China’s economic modernizations, it’s still a totalitarian regime.

See:

https://www.afr.com/policy/foreign-affairs/no-such-thing-as-...

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2019/jul/25/china-business...

In this specific case I think it is clickbait. "China Drone Attack" is a hook, and the drone seems to play almost no significant role in this story (it is essentially about spraying Bayer Chemical insect poison onto the crops).

Absolutely clickbait, but this is what I've come to expect from Bloomberg.

But as the article mentioned, the role of the drone(s) are to spray the insecticide after dark when the worms are most active.

Because any business in china is much more an extension of the Chinese government. There's a perception of Chinese people and companies doing things for the reward they'll get in treatment by the government.

“China drone attack” gets more attention than “random Company inc uses drones to spray pesticides”

Internet needs a dedicated button to report clickbaity titles to kill this awful trend.

This isn't that new, Yamaha has been selling a remotely controlled helicopter specifically made for applying insectcide on crops since 1991[0]. They were even used in aerial robotics research for a bit[1]. Helicopters are particularly nice for spraying crops because you have a nice turbulent downwash that pushes the pesticide onto the crops.

[0]https://www.yamahamotorsports.com/motorsports/pages/precisio... [1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yamaha_R-MAX#Research

Were they autonomous?

Unless I'm missing it, they're just unmanned, not autonomous. Wikipedia says "The Yamaha R-MAX ... is remote-controlled by a line-of-sight user".

They weren't. The crop dusting was done under manual control. Around 2005, you could semi-easily get a flight control unit to put on the research version.

Add a laser scanning system and direct the system to fly into a building... from flights back around 2006-ish: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Skdh4Nwm6r4

Ah yes, Bayer Crop Science. The science division of a company that likes Monsanto's business model so much, they bought Monsanto. Good to see they found a fresh market for releasing "low-toxicity insecticide" into the food chain.

Understand the sentiment. But applying it selectively seems to be desirable, no matter how euphemistic the low-toxicity part is.

The article said nothing about selective dispersal. For all we know these drones are just fancy crop dusters.

From what I can read of the press release, they are claiming a reduction of 30% in the amount of pesticide used. So, a significant incremental improvement, but certainly not something truly smart like using a camera to identify individual pests and targeting those pests with directed blasts of insecticide. Still a few years from that version of this tech.

In case you don't know, company executives make merger decisions and nobody else knows about it until it's done. So anyone at working level in Bayer Crop Science has pretty much nothing to do with the Monsanto deal.

> Bayer Crop Science. The science division

No, the agriculture division. The pharma parts of Bayer are as much science as the Crop Science part, they differ in product domain not “science”.

This is pretty interesting to read... I think our media normally ignores North American pests travelling to other parts of the world.

Around here we have a lot of talk about pests that have arrived from China that affect our local plants but not many that talk about our pests that have invaded China.

Locally I've had to deal with the Asian Winter Moth decimating trees in my yard and throughout the area I live in. That seems to have gotten under control the last few years though interestingly.

And of course everyone knows about the American Chestnut tree and the blight from China that wiped it out.

I guess most people just know best about what pests affect their area. Here in France, phylloxera is well known for having decimated our vines after having arrived from America (what saved the French wine industry was grafting our species on the roots of phylloxera-resistant but unpalatable American vines).

Same for the Argentinian ants that have founded the supercolony along the Mediterranean coast.

Also a disease of plane trees introduced in France/Europe from the US (WWII, I believe)

Here in the UK we also have a problem with american squirrels.

Whole Europe is invaded by grey squirrels. Also red-eared turtles and bullfrogs and probably many more species...

> phylloxera-resistant but unpalatable American vines

Hey now. You send me a palatable French wine and I'll send you a palatable American one =)

This is actually referring to different species of grapes, and has nothing to do with winemaking technique or prowess.

Virtually every type of "quality wine" that is consumed in the world comes from the old world species vitis vinifera. This includes basically every variety you've heard of: Chardonnay, Cabernet Sauvignon, Pinot Noir, Syrah, Merlot, just to name a few French varieties (but the same applies to Italian, Spanish, German, etc. wines). Any American winemakers making those kinds of wines (and I agree that many New World wines go toe-to-toe with the best France has to offer!) are using grape vines that were originally imported from Europe.

In addition, there are several species of grapes that are native to North America, the best known of which is probably the Concord grape. Unfortunately, due to their flavor profiles these species don't tend to be used for winemaking (one exception being Manischewitz and other sweet ritual wines). However, they have a natural resistance to phylloxera, which saved vitis vinifera from decimation and likely extinction through the grafting technique.

I did not know this.

However I would still like to exchange bottles with other fellow =)

American wines are made from European Vitis vinifera, grafted on the roots of American species just like in France.

One that concerns me in North America is the Pine Beetle (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mountain_pine_beetle) and its native, but affected by recent climate events.

The current infestation is actually causing the BC forests to be nearly a net carbon negative! (edit: to clarify I mean negative as in they're increasing the carbon output of the forests compared to the carbon sink. May be wording it wrong)

I think you got it right, forests are only carbon sinks as long as the trees are alive then they release their sequestered carbon as they rot. Typical tree dying is sporadic event and can be taken back up by other trees in a normal situation.

Here the tree death is not sporadic and there are not enough growing things to re-uptake the all the released carbon so it enters circulation.

Invasive species and their impact are relative to your area, of course.

Of equal interest is the use of non-native species to provide more genetic diversity. In Canada, we are using lots of 'Amur' trees and bushes from Russian and Northern China to increase diversity of our treestock after the huge diebacks caused by Dutch Elm, Emerald Ash Borer and other imported pests.

It wasn't that long ago when rich dudes used import species to North America to show off their love of Shakespeare.

See flock of starlings? Thank Eugene Schieffelin and his American Acclimatization Society.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Acclimatization_Socie...

Are you near Boston? I observed the same thing, winter moths destroying trees at an alarming rate until about 2 years ago. I wonder what changed.

Edit: Wow. https://www.masslive.com/news/2018/09/umass_amherst_scientis...

Don't get too excited. We don't know the full story on the 2% that lived. For all we know, they could become tomorrow's 20% that developed pesticide resistance and rampaged through China's countryside.

That was exactly my thought. It's like DDT on Mosquitoes. The ones that survived were resistant, so when they bred, all their offspring were resistant.

Could end up being the same issue here, so this could easily become a FAR FAR worse issue in the next generation or two of these worms.

Is it _far far_ worse though? It seems to me it should become just as worse as without any woking pesticide, only later.

My brother worked in a mosquito lab for a while and said that mosquitos lose these resistances pretty quickly (as a population) if they aren't regularly being dosed. In the absence of pesticide, the more efficient organism is generally the one without whatever metabolic fluke made it immune to the poison.

The lab helped inform the city's strategy for fighting mosquitos, which was to rotate pesticides. I believe they also bred and released neutered mosquitos.

I sure hope so, because the poison is spreading all over the planet, and if insects don't develop resistance fast, they'll die out, along with everything else up the food chain.

>The number of generations a moth will have in a year varies based on climate, but in her life span a female will typically lay about 1,500 eggs

From wikipedia.

That’s got to win the click bait title of the day award! Despite the alarming title, it’s refreshing to read a neutral article about China. Neither good nor bad, just interesting.

Chinese drone attack with 98% kill rate [screaming face emoji]

Drones have very short flight times and can't carry that much weight. Can this really be cheaper than driving a tractor around?

Perhaps most of the product is a refueling station.

The challenge is getting the tractors into the right locations and keeping their operators out of the spray. It would be harder to get precise application so they are more likely to use more and higher concentrations of pesticide.

The most cost-effective response using traditional application of pesticides is probably bigger drones (aka a flying tractor)

Remote-control tractor seems simple enough.

We pretty much already have remote control tractors via autosteer. The operator is a meat weight making sure nothing catches on fire.

Autosteer, of course, is only useful off of public roads, what with all the pesky pedestrians and other vehicles.

Look up Blue River Technology. Proof of concept for this tech already exists, John Deere will have this tech out in the coming years.

Looks like you got some downvotes for not showing a relentless enthusiasm for using the latest tech to solve every problem.

The article mentions controlled dosage and the fact the worms eat at night so perhaps having a human on a tractor chasing worms by night is not the best solution either.

They can still fly long enough on a set of batteries to spray a reasonably-sized field. They can be much more precise than spraying from a plane and are much cheaper.

They have a real use-case though of course they are not always the best option.

For commercial applications like this, I'd assume the eventual setup would be to have drones follow pre-programmed routes linked to specific day/time flight schedules, then have them automatically return to a re-charging/re-filling station as needed. The time & labor savings alone would be astronomical. Tie a system like this in with solar energy, could also dramatically reduce energy costs and carbon footprint.

You don't buy one big one and have it do your whole field. You buy lots of them and have them do the field as a swarm.

Consider that a row-crop tractor can cost $100-300,000 (see footnote). You can buy A LOT of little drones for that much money. Or a smaller number of drones and a number of swappable battery packs.

$300,000 worth of spraying drones could cover a huge amount of area in a lot less time, and with a lot more efficiency.

Footnote: Pricing based on 2014 article at https://www.businessinsider.com/farm-equipment-prices-2014-5

Probably more reliable to maintain, too. A single drone or even a substantial minority failing only lowers swarm throughput rather than completely taking the whole thing out of commission.

I honestly doubt it. Flight life expectancy for drones must not be great and fixing a drone can use quite a bit of time, depending on what is wrong with it.

I say that as someone who worked with drones. They are, honestly, a pain.

Have you worked with large numbers? I feel like industrial scale drone swarms would be much different than the consumer ones we're used to. Even military ones that are individually very valuable.

Possibly. You might be right. But the experiences I had with them are less then stellar. They are fickle, break easily, are more work than you'd think to maintain and have not so great flight time. I might have a tainted experience and maybe just one data point, maybe many thing changed in the last 3 years. But my experience with them is this.

I kept looking at the many consumer drone startups that kept popping up and promising various abilities, but they were, almost all of them, lacking. Videography and photogrammetry are the few fields where they took off, and that is because there you have a trained individual controlling the drone. I find it hard to find any startups or products where drones with high autonomy are being successful.

Am open to being proved wrong though, I'm always excited to see development in this field.

Do you think they'd send the inoperable drones to someone who thinks "they are a pain," or do you think they'd send the drones to a vendor who is experienced with their specific model and can quickly address any issues they find?

I'm a bit disappointed that there's no mention of mini laser cannons strapped to these drones. That would be way cooler, especially at night, and much more environmentally friendly compared to pesticides.

Would the equipment and batteries required work with drones?

Maybe a spike on one side of the drone, and it flies into the target. Or a spike shoots out one side, along with a counterweight motion, and then retracts.

Edit: on second thought, it’s likely less practical to impale the things than to inject a small dose of poison or electrocute them or something, and it’s probably easier to use a ground-based robot for such precision tasks, with less energy and mass constraints.

I was curious whether this was a thing and apparently it is: https://photonicsentry.com/

Seems like the laser technology is patented and they are aiming for fixed defenses though, so it won't be in drones anytime soon. Also lasers have more safety concerns than insecticide.

Targeted use of low toxicity pesticide with a 98% effective rate? More of this.

as with most claims outside verification would be nice and as with most promising outcomes what will be the effects ten to twenty years out. there is no text about what other insects may be affected by this insecticide

> the “ravenous, fast-moving fall armyworm” that can fly up to 100 kilometers in one night

Thats some distance. Assume thats only possible if greatly aided by the wind?

This is fascinating. I'm extremely curious about the technology. How big are the drones, and how can they carry enough insecticide to cover a large area? Drones make sense to replace laboour-intensive and potentially harmful traditional backpack sprayers. I am curious as to affordability of this type of technology, and use outside of Asia. Can anyone point me in the right direction to read up on North American use?

> ...The fall army worm, a crop-devouring pest, has spread from the Americas to Africa and Asia...

So, is this like a new version of the Stuxnet worm? But in this case, its delivery mechanism uses almost-nano-size robots, and its target is foreign crops and not centrifuges? </sarcasm>

Sad that the technical details are missing. How are the drones finding and targeting the worms?

It seems the drones are simply spraying insecticide, rather than anything more sophisticated such as plucking the caterpillars off the plants or shooting them with high pressure water jets. The advantage of drones over human pilots spraying insecticide appear to be that they are easier to get on site and can fly at night, allowing them to use lower strength insecticide.

Fascinating read.

I wonder if we could eliminate invasive species that way in a more general way.

They tend to wreck havoc on local ecosystems and are unmanageable.

I wonder if they would not just evolve to evade ML detection or if that's too high of a wall to jump.

There would still be a market for human-driven eradication though (ahem https://www.helibacon.com )

Hah, worms with CV Dazzle camouflage...

There are reasonable concerns about using genetic modifications to kill things like mosquitos, but why don’t we use this tech against invasive species which we want to be absolutely removed from an ecosystem?

It's due to the concerns that a genetically modified species may return to the native ecosystem and decimating their natural habitat.

It would be simple to solve that with a breeding population kept isolated. If the genetic modification wipes out the wild population, you reintroduce it.

For species that reproduce quickly, such as insects, this is reasonable.

That said the mosquito trick is that we can produce drones whose babies are also only drones with the same genetic malfunction. The number of drone-only mosquitoes expands exponentially until they are most of the males, then most of the population, and then in a couple of more generations, the population is wiped out for lack of females.

I'm not sure that this would work as well for a species that moves more slowly. Or whether we know how to do the trick for species other than mosquitoes.

Reintroduction takes time, time which those species that depend on it as prey (or are kept in check by it if it's a predator) will die out.

This is also balanced by the fact that as far as we know, most any mosquito can fill most of the same roles in the food chains. We're mostly concerned with wiping out the few species that feed on humans and our pets/livestock. We could eradicate two or three species which carry West Nile, Malaria, Zika, Chickungunya, and a few other really bad diseases of humans, dogs, cats, songbirds, horses, and cattle that are spread by mosquitoes. Other species would still lay eggs, hatch, and get eaten or reproduce normally without threat to us.

Also note that despite the technique being proven in the lab, and the fact that mosquitoes kill a half-million people per year, we have not yet pulled the trigger and done it. Exactly for fear of the potential ecological consequences.

That, too. Good point.

BTW, thanks for all your time on PerlMonks and here. I didn't even notice who I was replying to the first time.

So how this compares with having a very low tech solution instead, like the one using pipes in the field that can spray the insecticide in the same amount as a drone does?

I didn’t see much useful information to base this on, but drones could theoretically be much more accurately targeted and thus use less pesticide.

Plus, a far more portable solution when you’re dealing with something that’s moving quickly across a region.

Pipe in the field can be damaged during farm operations like field prep, planting and harvesting etc... they also get clogged by dirt and in many jurisdictions you can't send pesticide down a water irrigation pipe for example. For some farms that would also be a lot of pipe to lay. So overall just a really bad idea.

Think plastic pipes that can be laid out/taken out at beginning/end of season. Low tech/cheap being the key element here, same as targeted irrigation, where only a sliver of water goes directly to the roots, only in this case it will be pesticide targeting directly the crop. Drones sounds for me way too expensive.

You got to spray the whole plant amigo. you are talking tons of pipe. It’s acres and acres of row corn.

Yup, agree. You might not be used to hard work but I am and I know those acres and acres are a 2, maximum 3, days of laying the pipes. And you know what also they are good for? Targeted irrigation as well. Shoot 2 rabbits with one bullet amigo. I wanna see you do irrigation and spraying pesticides using your drones and lets talk the cost of water + drones at the end of the season vs. my approach.

Consider that for many fields hiring out powerful airplanes flown by actual humans to drop pesticide is economical, would inform me that using pipes in the field is not as low-tech or as economical as you might expect.

Next step: make it completely environmentally friendly by using lasers instead of chemicals, followed by a flock of geese to eat the roasted worms :D

Are they just aerial spraying, like crop-dusting, or are they identifying individual army worms and zapping them?

Aerial spraying at night which is when the worms feed. Normal insecticide application happens during the day and to be effective they spray a lot more.

That makes sense. Especially if you're not farming big flat fields, where a pickup truck and a spray rig can do the job at night. China has limited arable land, and farms terrain no one would bother with in the US.

An army of small toy drones or large army drones? (ie: localized poison spraying VS large area)

Hopefully this turns out better than when Mao killed all the sparrows

They claim 98% but that's only the ones they know about

In other news, insecticide resistant armyworms soon to be decimating crops across China as several thousand resistant individuals remain to breed with local populations after each application of pesticide.

So, the drones spray Monsanto/Bayer insecticides.

I have to remind myself whenever I see Bayer, that they bought Monsanto so deserve any bad karma they got in the deal. Hear Bayer, think Monsanto.

Hmm, can we make the title more a little more click baity?

This seems dangerous in the hands of a nationalistic government.

Everything is dangerous in the hands of someone you don't trust.

Only dangerous if you're a fall armyworm...

If this scares you then you probably shouldn't watch Slaughterbots: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9CO6M2HsoIA

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