Robot treats 500k plants per hour with 95% less chemicals [video]
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> Imagine, a few years down the line, applying these principles to maintaining an edible polyculture ecosystem-farm. Not necessarily a big machine going through a flat field, but small drones tending to trees, vines, herbs, plants, pollinators and water features all in the location that is best for them based on local features. It could micromanage weeding and harvesting, but also composting, planting, grafting and nurturing keystone species and rare species while avoiding pesticide, nitrogen imbalance and soil compaction. A productive farm could look like the garden of Eden.
The project is pretty well thought out and extremely ambitious. I can only hope they continue to make good progress on it.
Yup, actually if you read between the edits toward the end of the video I think this is in the minds of those working on it, not sure why it wasn't focused on more, perhaps because it sounds less immediately practical... once the automation is somewhat intelligent, the need for a monoculture for viable large scale agriculture is diminished.
In fact at a certain point of sophistication, especially when harvesting a polyculture becomes viable, it will probably flip and become significantly more profitable long term to abandon monoculture... since the soil health will improve over time which also improves yields.
Also, the key difference between a 'hard' challenge like self-driving cars and something like self-sustaining agriculture is that the reliability doesn't need to be 100%. An achievable target could be something like 'one human to operate the location'. Things will break, software will glitch, maintenance will be required - but that will be OK, as long as the issues can be corrected in a reasonable length of time.
One big tractor isn't a full-time job's worth of maintenance.
Now, the video is shot in a shiny nice weather day. Now imagine how would it perform if it's raining since last Tuesday.
There's also energy costs to consider; does a drone swarm use more or less energy than a large tractor for the same result? I'm not sure what the answer is there, and I suppose it depends quite a bit on what kind of work is being done.
farms are pretty automated these days, maybe 100% when tractors can self-repair; which maybe is not _that_ far away… because some already give reports of what went wrong to the central
Yeah, nobody suggested that we have building size tractors so I don't know what you're arguing.
They were talking about "current farming machine sized ones" vs "a drone with some crap attached"
The only reason you think it's easy is because you ignore the number and just imagine doing it once anyway.
(40 hours / 10,000 batteries = 14.4 seconds per battery; USA minimum wage = $7.25/h = $290 per 40h week, about the same as the cheapest hydraulic lift I saw on machinemart.co.uk at current exchange rates, but I'm not a mechanic so I don't know if that would be the right tool for the job anyway).
And of course, the same applies if we really had drone swarms — anything like this would be automated, up to and including full disassembly of damaged units so their parts could be reused for new units, e.g. https://youtu.be/pDZdnbI0MAc
Big farm will also have more than one machine and the "downtime" will be mostly scheduled maintenance, very little chance of your equipment just deciding to not work today. In case of many smaller farms, well, you can ask the neighbour... from what I remember from living in small village with many farmers "harvest" was often few farms pooling their resources and doing all the fields together, instead of each doing their own.
'We' have already succeeded in autonomous driving in agricultural and mining domains - these are much simpler, more tightly controlled and less liability prone than open highways and suburban backstreets.
eg:
> We run more than 130 autonomous trucks, part of our Autonomous Haulage System, across our Iron Ore operations. The trucks are operated by a supervisory system and a central controller, rather than a driver. The system uses pre-defined GPS courses to automatically navigate haul roads and intersections and knows actual locations, speeds and directions of all vehicles at all times.
> In 2018, each truck was estimated to have operated on average 700 hours more than conventional haul trucks, with 15% lower costs – delivering clear productivity benefits. They also take truck operators out of harm’s way, reducing the risks associated with working around heavy machinery.
Current advancements already allow tractors to go autonomously go over the bulk of the same large areas of ground that they have for the past decade (already logged and recorded), graceful fallback alerts remote farmer to make a human decision re: tree falls, new rocks, unexpected gear state changes.
These are useful advancements in machine control.
These developments have locally run in parallel with the above linked Rio Tinto work here in W.Australia - it's a pity the largest mining operation on the globe has imagined its work to be productive and useful and allowed its cost analysis to sway its thinking lacking your insight to the contrary.
I work for John Deere, I can't speak for the company.
But we had made it so much more complicated because we couldn’t see the few simple rules that each of them were following.
Honestly, I think robot swarms will be simpler than large singles.
I hope you don't mean "Boids" and the three-four simple rules, because that's just an approximation of a swarm behavior made for artistic purposes - i.e. the result is supposed to pass as a flock of birds or a school of fish to casual onlookers (e.g. gamers, audience of a movie), and not to be accurate to the real thing.
I'd like to add, that while individual behavior is difficult to predict, a general motion prediction can be much easier. (Think shepherds, for example)
The "swarm" is meaningless there. Each node need to have minimum amount of sensing and computation to handle that job.
It's also at worst "a sloped square" so there is no "swarm mechanic" to move around, just zigzag around the field.
There's so much opportunity for improvement, but we need the R&D money and start-ups to be there too. Please, VCs, spend your money on these projects!
A key problem with small autonomous robots is their energy supply and mass. Batteries have low energy density. Actuators have bad power to weight ratios too. Living things are enormously more efficient. So much so that the intuition apparently offered by watching animals usually does not apply.
This is extremely true for swarm robotics, inspired by ants, termites, etc. Swarm critters rely on the emergent effects of lots of behavior to make up for their limited sensing and computation. By 'limited' I mean relative to a mammal or bird. Lots of behavior means lots of energy spent moving and doing: exactly what is prohibitively expensive for a robot.
Computation and sensing is getting better, smaller and cheaper much faster than batteries and actuators. This trend favors smarter robots that think carefully (cheap) and do the right thing (expensive per shot).
Ag is hard. It’s dusty. The weather can be brutal. Stuff gets left out year round. The turnover is high. Schedules are dynamic and unforgiving (when the weather turns, you have to adapt your whole operation). There’s not a lot of highly technical staff to maintain things; bailing wire and bandaids is a real thing. The tradition of “hacking things” to keep them working comes from farmers.
The more complicated your machinery, the more your MTBF product goes up. So complicated units don’t scale well.
If a single sprinkler on a pivot fails or misbehaves, there’s nearly 400 of them and there’s some overlap. If your “robot” stalls out with some grit or a power supply issue or a bricked update, or leaky hydraulics, you just lost 1/10 of your pivot. Pray it happens on an inner span, rather than an outer one.
It’s interesting to note how the size of Meganeura is credited to environmental factors (oxygen ration in the air). Context is everything, as usual.
Well, toxic chemical agents can also be used as weapon on human civil, and — sadly — it was actually used that way. Plus even when you use them for farming, you still have pollution that will erode biodiversity, human health, and other sustainable environment negative impacts.
Not to say that robot swarm is necessarily a perfect green solution. You still have to build them and feed them with energy, so even if the robot would be exempt of undesirable side effect on local operational site, the global impact would most likely include plants in their lifecycle.
In Europe, taking the train is often more expensive than flying.
Sadly it's not fashionable because it isn't cheaper and takes a lot longer.
In the US, most tracks prioritize freight traffic over passenger rail. And there is a tremendous amount of freight traffic. There may not often be traffic jams, but when you are diverted to side track to wait and allow a priority freight train through, it's not uncommon to wait a very long time (I've been delayed more than an hour on the 3 hour train ride from Portland to Seattle).
There are also huge bottlenecks in US track infrastructure that absolutely do lead to traffic jams - perhaps most infamously in New York City. Vetoing the addition of 6 additional tracks through NYC is one of the reason Chris Christie was so hated.
https://www.amtrak.com/privately-owned-rail-cars
There was even some hn post on it where someone detailed how much it costs and what you get
As your arm gets longer, it has to get stronger, thus heavier, thus requiring larger motors, and anchored to the ground better. After a handful of meters, robot arms can’t hold themselves up, let alone carry a useful tool.
There are multiple meter long robot arms for lifting big things in factories but they are enormous, enormously expensive, and consume enormous power.
But here’s a delightful concept that sidesteps this, by making the arm weigh nothing:
I work in this industry (contributing architect of https://nelsonirrigation.com/products/twig-wireless-controls...).
We dream of lots of fun things. And even try some of them. But not a few days go by that we don’t once again mutter “power is king” To each other. Everything we do revolves around the constraint of power budgets.
Make a square of tensioned cable (or rigid rail) boxing in some area of garden/food forest/farmland at a height above the plants. Have 4 modules which maintain position on opposite sides and holds a tensioned wire between them, making a tensioned wire along the x and a tensioned wire along the y. At the intersection of these wires there is a powered doohicky that can act like a spider and drop down onto the plants below and do its work. The power to the doohicky could be cable from either axis.
Following the other comment re: power being king, what if we used a hub-and-spoke model where small drones with cameras (for sensing) and simple arms w/ clampers (for manipulating) perform 'bursts' of energy intensive activity and aggregate their sensory inputs into one composite report on the health of the plants? They do their thing (maybe for 10 - 15 mins or however long their battery lasts) and then fly back to the hub to charge. The hub itself could rely on a hybrid combo of guaranteed external power and solar panels.
Ofc, it'd be cool to see a cost analysis of how expensive this solution is (from both technical and financial standpoints) versus simpler, more energy-efficient human inputs (aka walk around your garden and prune trees that need it and pick berries that are ripe).
This technology has existed for a long time now (see cable robots, or cable-suspended cameras)
My better half owns a small hotel with 19 rooms. Turns out running a simple 10 minutes task in each room takes... entire day (3 hours for the work + switch room overhead + breaks turns out to be full day often).
Of course, that movie does have certain other implications and side effects....
And very, very sad.
This sprayer is designed to promote the growth of {everything it doesn't kill}. Those 'weeds' will have as much benefit from the spot-spraying as the crop. Which is either significant, or it's negligible (and this sprayer is useless, so probably not that)
During those hot days having then written software for a hobby I thought there has to be a better way. Could a sprayer map weeds and apply chemicals in a single pass? I did an in depth investigation talking to tech people and university experts to see if what I imagined was possible. What I found out was that we were decades away from the tech making it possible.
A couple of years later Monsanto came out with Roundup resistant soybeans and my soybean field walking was greatly reduced overnight. Problem with this one solution fits all was that soybean yields dipped with the resistant beans for farmers that previously had good weed control and we began to develop more Roundup resistant weeds.
I did notice that this company is working with high value crops only. I believe the reason is the tech currently is quite expensive. Though in time the cost should come down as more farmers use it.
One problem for the Eastern states is the use of shields on the boom. The company that I worked for experimented with shields on our commercial sprayers. In fact we were the first people to do it East of the Rocky Mountains. We bought them because we wanted to be able to spray on windy days. The shields had problems and were parked in the weeds in a single crop season.
I did a lot of soil testing. Refused to go out on November 15th, the start of deer season, after the 4WD pickup I was using was shot up in a field. I hugged the floorboard as shots went through the truck and just over me. How a bright yellow pickup could be confused with a deer is beyond me.
Every single people working in their property should have one working non-stop in the deer season to signal that is not a deer. Some just are deertonic and unable to distinguish it from cars.
It wasn't. It was confused with a government vehicle. The one day a year that is synonymous with hunting accidents just provided plausible deniability for taking a few pot shots.
Basically, intensive agriculture is compensating for its destructive nature by just brutally suppressing any "undesirable" growth. In nature, pests target the weaker plants. Basically, you stress out plants by mismanaging them and they are fair game for a wide range of fungi, insects, etc. E.g. under or over watering them, depleting the soil, etc. all stress plants out. If you have unhealthy soil, it's hard to have healthy plants growing in it.
Intensive agriculture starts with disrupting the soil (by plowing it). This causes the soil to degrade over time and releases captured carbon into the atmosphere. The natural response is for aggressive weeds to start growing in disrupted soil. To "fix" this, farmers use a mix of pesticides and fertilizers. The pesticides kill a lot more than just the pests and weeds and then further degrades the soil and the bio diversity in and on it. And finally the fertilizer is just bleeding out of the land straight into the ground water and surrounding areas. It works but it is resource intensive. You need lots of water, chemicals, energy, etc to grow a single crop at the cost of literally anything else. Basically modern intensive farming grows mono cultures on top of artificially created deserts.
Organic farming avoids doing that. Try not to disrupt the soil. Kill off (and compost) weaker plants rather than trying to rescue them. Use nature to keep pests and weeds in check. Etc. It works but it is more labor intensive. You need people to look after things. You get healthier and tastier produce (cooks love organically grown stuff for this reason). However, automating that labor makes it more scalable. That's the opportunity here.
By what measure is vertical farming more efficient?. I've heard the contrary regarding green house gas emissions, it is still less efficient in most crops, it consumes too much power and that overcompensates any efficiency gained in other areas
It's interesting that this conclusion can change drastically if electricity becomes 10-100x more efficient
Vertical farms are essentially closed systems where nutrients, energy and some water goes in and produce comes out. There's a bit more to it of course but that's the general idea. They are climate controlled environments where light is provided via grow lights. In short, it uses energy which needs to come from somewhere.
You are confusing power requirements and greenhouse gases. Mostly these things use some form of sustainable power. Either sourced indirectly via some electricity provider; or directly with e.g. solar panels. If you think about it, the number one expensive consumable here is electricity and the cheapest way to produce it is via renewables. It's that simple. Why would you get more expensive energy if you can get it cheaper. Keeping all those ACs, lights, pumps, etc. going you are going to have to figure that one out or deal with competition that is smarter than you on that front.
There are probably a few farms that are forced to buy via the grid and are hopelessly dependent on their local coal burning monopolists. Not a great business plan but the good news is that coal is rapidly becoming a very unfashionable way to produce power due to the fact that it is expensive and dirty. It being expensive cuts down on energy margins and causes coal dependent producers to be dealing with awkward things like going bankrupt and being forced to pay more for their coal than they can charge for the resulting energy when wind is blowing and the sun is shining. Gas has similar issues, as people that pay gas bills these days can vouch for. Mine went up by 2x recently. Not great.
Solar's efficiency is below 50% [https://www.nrel.gov/pv/cell-efficiency.html]. Considering that, I'd guess for each m² of solar panel deployed, you'll get <50% of the yield that would be produced in that same land with horizontal farming (assuming fertile land).
You can argue that solar panels can be deployed in non-agricultural surfaces, and that's true, that allows to grow things where it was not possible before. But I'm not convinced that vertical farming is more efficient than horizontal on very important metrics like cost and GHG emissions
It doesn't even need to use herbicides because it removes weeds mechanically. We actually build it to also fit into Europe's small(er) scale farms as well.
Regarding the energy issues mentioned multiple times in various threads here: We managed to make it solar powered and battery buffered to work autonomously for more than a working day.
Disclosure: Co-funder of the company
But I'm dreaming, certainly if it would have existed humans would have tried to leverage them a long time ago.
It used to be our fav tools, now we just don't go in that direction much anymore.
We could study, teach, bread, terraform, integrate and so on at a much larger scale and with better tech. It's just... It doesn't look like a product.
You are missing something important: soil compaction is a sub linear function of weight. which means that larger tractors that cover more area with the same tire tracks are must friendly for the soil, compared to many small tractors. Because of this factor larger is better. Eventually we may get to the point where the tractor runs on tracks, to allow even bigger tractors that touch a smaller are of soil.
Sure flying drones will have less soil compaction, and they will have a place in the future, but keeping something in the air uses vastly more energy than wheels on the ground.
To cultivate the earth we're going to mine other parts of it? I'm not suggesting getting rid of the tools that improve quality of life but does automating one aspect not cause 100 other things down the line? There's mining, factories, repairing, replacing.
Maybe instead of robots we work on getting people to have gardens on their property, in cities use the rooftops, stop importing foods from across the globe, etc.
How hard is the jump into the realm of computer vision/AI/robotics for someone with strong skills and experience building web applications? Is the coding much different? Is a company like this employing math/theroy-heavy people to develop new types of AI or are they working higher up the stack and just need people who can pipe data around?
If you don't want to change what you're doing or using, most modern robotic platforms have a web interface somewhere in them for monitoring the fleet. Any web developer would find their skills perfectly compatible.
For example, at Foxglove[0] we are building open source web-based visualization and data management for robotics (shameless plug: currently hiring).
https://www.fossjobs.net/ https://github.com/fossjobs/fossjobs/wiki/resources
If you are willing to make the jump. It's possible. You have an advantage.
> Is the coding much different?
Not as much as they have marketed you to believe.
> Is a company like this employing math/theroy-heavy people to develop new types of AI or are they working higher up the stack and just need people who can pipe data around?
No. They are not making academic thesis. You'd be surprised how primitive and "basic" many of these companies are (comparing to their marketing videos, which are click/eye baits). You can definitively make a difference there.
Of course, as other comments have mentioned, these companies still need front-end, databases, backend, and you know, normal basic automation scripts like everyone else.
I have worked for one of these companies that produces fancy AI based hardware.
Turns out the hardware is made in China and the AI is handled by third parties (amazon, etc.)
Does that mean putting it all together is trivial? Of course not. But it's not as difficult as it might seem from the outside.
AI-wise, nowadays model training stacks are practically codeless. Training a state of the art model on custom data usually boils down to changing some parameters in a config file, plus some boilerplate code. Not always that easy of course, but training an image classifier today can be a single line of Python.
It's not so much piping data around but dealing with datasets in any kind of non-trivial problem is where the hard work is. Neural nets are just another tool for most data scientists. For example exploring Kaggle will get you familiar with weird datasets, but actually collecting, arranging for data to be labelled, and then cleaning it is a skill on its own.
That's usually where experience comes in. Hence there are a lot of startups charging frankly obscene amounts of money for data labelling and curation tools.
So you won't actually have to jump into a whole new career in order to contribute to these types of products. You just have to search for a company that works on a challenge you want to contribute to.
Then again: Speaking from experience, most uses cases for ML are not fancy, world-saving new approaches like the one in the video but revolve around quite mundane applications and tasks like "how to make users click on this add", "how much will we sell next month", "can we automate the creation of thix Excel-file" etc., so pick your company carefully
We have a mixed team, including mechanical engineers, web developers, electronics guys, embedded software guys.
We do have ML people for custom networks but most of it is object detection/ classification which is a solved path and just needs data management.
We’ve done lots of cool ML applications, but many of them need management systems too so that’s where web apps come in.
You could definitely fill a position in a small company like mine and upskill / sideskill in time.
We’re based in Scotland but do have remote workers in other countries.
edit: forgot to include link :)
Two other things I thought were interesting in the video. One, the idea of mapping the whole field is pretty cool. There must be useful things you could do with a millimeter-scale 3D map of an entire field. Two, this is happening in California, just a few hours' drive from Silicon Valley. I hope some of the engineers laid off recently find work in ag tech, because there will be huge opportunities coming with the rise of computer vision and (hopefully soon) robotics.
One group I'm familiar with are using 50kv (and "more than enough" amps) for the purpose.
If people have to stay around to care for it, then yes, it's scary.
This is just a misunderstanding of the risks involved in various things.
That said, comparing a 50Kv shock to a handheld taser (which typically run at 300-500v) makes me think I might not be the one who misunderstands the risks.
You're off by three orders of magnitude. You need about 32 million volts per meter to overcome the resistance of the air. For a gap of a centimeter, it's about a few hundred kilovolts.
And I grew up farming, I'm quite familiar with the dangers.
For example harvesting equipment... the big ones are sort of up to a 30 food wide chainsaw with conveyors and other grabby bits to suck you in. People need to be many meters away from those things while they're running for any sense of safety. A hot spark has nothing on many other dangers and if designed with any sense would only result in severe local burns. Plenty of farm equipment will effortlessly rip a limb off if it doesn't tear your entire body into bite sized chunks.
You know the machines that do that and you don't go near them. When you're the operator you must know where everyone is at all times and know what they mean to do... and be able to communicate with them with a series of gestures, eye contact, short yells, etc. If you don't it's trivially easy to kill your helpers.
in my experience, this is the best approach. I worked at a few biotechs that did a lot of lab automation.
the robots that could do everything were hardly ever used because they did everything poorly and seemed to be constantly in need of repair.
the robots that could do one simple job were always in use.
I guess in the near term dozens of specialized robots for each task will be necessary, but the idea I like is teams of general purpose robots using simple tools to perform almost any task "manually". It's too early to implement that now, but I think it will be feasible within my lifetime.
Generality is probably one reason why this robot sprays instead of hoeing. In addition to killing weeds, by changing chemicals this thing can fertilize, and they also mention pollinating and preventing pollination of flowers. (Preventing pollination avoids overburdening some kinds of trees. Currently instead people have to do "thinning" which is simply pulling half of the crop off the tree before it's ripe and throwing it on the ground).
Well targeted as they seem to do, I guess it is a good product to preserve the soil and wanted plants with no harmful residues.
The cynic in me wants to point out that this is basically a commerce, so of course they use the best sounding chemical possible. Will they still use that by the time it becomes a commercial product? I guess only time will tell.
I wonder about the effects of acidification after long term use. Perhaps some alkaline filler can be added to balance.
I put vinegar in my salad sauce, I would not dare with glyphosate.
[0]: https://www.csiro.au/en/work-with-us/industries/agriculture/...
The challenge with Agtech robots in general is that you need to be able to prove payback, including all operations costs, in ideally 12 months or less on equipment.
This is very hard for most crops because you have to be constantly moving from field to field. However, it is doable and I see it happening soon, starting in specific crops (My company L5 [1] is working this for strawberries).
However, as the price of raw tech inputs (robot arms, compute, cameras) continue to fall, I do see lots of “low hanging fruit” that can be won relatively soon, especially with smart software.
Automation of day-neutral strawberry picking sounded sensible on first glance to me because harvest occurs over many months of a year (extendable by transporting the robots to another region with different growing seasons) thus robots are not sitting around idle for 95% of the year. Additionally, harvesting strawberries is dangerous work for humans to perform due to repetitive twisting, bending and reaching.
However, looking deeper into the economics of strawberries (using Australia as an example), picking costs are stated to only be 20% of fixed growing costs[1] seemingly amounting to AUD$1.30/plant (USD$0.80-1.00/plant). With a typical density of 40000 plants/hectare, robots appear to only be cost neutral if they can be operated at AUD$52000/hectare (USD$30000-40000/hectare) for picking. This results in, for example, two AUD$26000/year (USD$15000-20000/year) robots assigned per hectare needing to pick at a rate of 2 seconds per plant[2] for 12 hours each every day. With 9 million tons of strawberries produced globally per year, the strawberry harvesting market would be AUD$11bn if Australian labour rates, likely amongst the highest, were the global norm.
Would it be fair to say that farm automation will only become viable if everyone accepts the true cost of growing produce is much higher than current prices. That, for example, wages for farm workers would need to be much higher (doubled or more) to be livable wages and also to compensate for injuries and health risks of farm work and an inability to work in manual labour jobs at older age. In Australia we're seeing many news articles on the topic of "lack of farm workers" so a significant upwards movement in farm worker wages seems possible. Or perhaps strict health and safety regulations introduced to protect farm workers from repetitive injuries would result in wide adoption of farm robotics? Or perhaps it will just be cheap robotics that results in mass uptake of farm robotics?.
[1] https://www.abc.net.au/news/rural/2022-06-25/breakdown-of-th...
[2] Per a 2019 example from one of your competitors (https://youtu.be/9cxHYEzMVKQ?t=106) it looks very difficult to pick at a rate of 2 seconds per plant without wastage (e.g. missing obscured berries) but my simple calculations are nonetheless optimistic.
Huh, I actually thought it was using a laser and the 95% chemicals meant through the entire farming process. In that case it's probably much less than 95% chemical use overall, there's still pesticides and fertilizer to consider, not to mention chemicals used in cleaning and packaging.
I wonder what kind of power you'd need to laser weeds at that speed? Now that I think about it, probably like, a lot. And maybe it'd heat up the surrounding plants too much.
Spraying with that much accuracy is still pretty cool though.
The attachment they built needed a custom cooling rig to deal with the dozens of lasers. Super interesting engineering going on with agtech.
Seems like a phased array microwave would be cheaper, require no moving parts, and be able to target the root system ... and be less of a safety risk.
* John Deere, has "See and spray".
* Robovator
* Carbon Robotics Laser Weeder
* Ecorobotics solar powered autonomous weeder.
Your choice of chemical, laser, or mechanical weed killing. The first two above are production products.
Ask me anything ;-)
How much will Avo cost?
I wonder which one would work best on farmers. The corporate one feels more polished, but the simpler one feels more honest.
But, am sure having multiple players in the market is a good idea. Yeah, John Deere is obviously a behemoth and may not be as light a nimble as a good startup in advancing this tech! (and hopefully, they wont try to squash out the competition).
> pesticide sprayer
Says all about the company.
Lasers are a MUCH better option. John Deere is not a reputable company when it comes to farming.
But, the thing I like is John Deere is the major player in farming equipment. They can have a huge, immediate impact on the amount of pesticide used today - this not a product that is being developed, it is available and already reducing the usage of pesticides.
It'd be better if it came from a better company, but it's a great transition product that will probably have a large impact on pesticide usage.
I guess, in addition to the typical engineering stuff (AI, robotics, etc.) to work with these companies on startup-level, a passion for agriculture, especially historical agriculture, might be what could set you apart from competition.
Eg: A chap I work with has tens of thousands of ANOVA grow plots for seed varieties spread across Western Australian Climatic conditions .. he and various assistants routinely fly multispectral camera drones above plot areas and calibration images.
That's an aquisition, store, normalise, process cycle for a fairly steady data stream.
Cars, phones, and many critical pieces of infrastructure are quickly becoming impossible to service or fix by anyone but their manufacturers. Even normal operation relies on services that can be shut down which the flip of a remote switch. Not a huge problem in the individual case, but when our farming relies on similar technology, threats like cyberattacks, bugs, datacenter outages, chip supply issues, political disagreements, etc all become major national threats really quickly. Granted, farming has had sophisticated technology for quite a few years now, but smarter AI systems will inevitably involve more interaction with cloud services, and at that point, we're setting ourselves up for some scary possibilities.
To get the spraying done by firing up a few drones would be excellent.
Particularly with weeds that are in hard to reach places on the farm.
And, you know, cheap. And usable in difficult terrain.
I can't imagine my father, or any farmer who does their job at small scales here in developing countries, being able to afford technology like that.
Yup. I've got four acres of grass that I'd love to farm... without having the farm be a full time job.
But at the home garden scale, I'd like to see a dog-sized spider-like robot that would roam the block doing this. It can be very hard to keep soil weed free, and then weed it once it isn't.
The future will be something like, or at least based on, vertical self-contained (almost completely closed systems) automated farms.
The best hope we have for solving food needs AND climate problems is to let as much earth as possible go wild, and reduce and optimize our footprint. Actually that's not correct - the best hope we have is to allow human population growth to go negative and also do smarter things.
I suppose if you wanted be really space efficient, you could use nuclear energy to cultivate yeast.
Fruits and vegetable taste is already steadily decreasing and I have more and more trouble sourcing something decent despite having way more budget.
I also assume that, like everything with complex systems, we are missing the forest for the tree and we will discover tons of health issues related to this in the future.
First, you're underselling it. 95% less pesticides is huge. If that's economically viable we're a LOT better off. I have my doubts since it's clearly a PR video, but still.
Secondly, the analogy falls short. The goal of horses and cars is transportation of goods and people, which is easy to measure and cost. Agriculture is about utilizing immensely complicated biological systems to deliver nutrition to people. We don't know everything about nutrition, let alone everything that contributes to making nutritious food. That's why we always look for minimal modifications to biological systems in order to tweak it to our liking. The same is true for say medicine; we don't design an artificial organ if we can avoid it, we usually aim for something like a simple chemical compound that triggers an existing response that helps the organ function normally, as defined by our existing biology. We may be quite advanced species, but biology is not exactly something we master.
> vertical self-contained (almost completely closed systems)
Well, sounds more convenient for humans, that's true. But if you take nutrition out of the system you have to replace it with something, which I don't think we've figured out.
Crop densities have been increasing dramatically over the last few decades, well beyond what natural soil systems can handle. Consequently, fertilizer use has increased dramatically. Our soils are just nearly dead as the factory monoculture farming has sucked everything out that it can (and killed a lot of important things it needed).
This current advancement (TFA) is just a bandaid, or paving a crack in the road. Perhaps a better analogy is that this is paving a crack in the road when we should be designing a whole new transportation system to meet our current and future needs.
Most of this agriculture is owned by a few huge companies. They are not interested in large systemic changes as those cost capital. They would much rather optimize what they have, even if the cliff is visible in the distance. Beyond one earnings quarter or perhaps a CEO's tenure, they don't care. As long as they are not standing on the cliff today, you cannot expect real (beneficial) changes.
As for replacing nutrition, this needs more research. But there are aquaponic systems which seem promising and enable a much more closed loop with vastly less waste.
Oh speaking of waste, I didn't even mention water yet. Current farming systems use water like it will never go away (and is free), but we know it's a problem now and presents its own absolute cliff in the near future.
The water shortages are going to be our first impasse, because there's no remedy. Current farming uses vast amounts of water, much of which leaves the area due to evaporation. This leads to rapid desertification of regions, and then traditional farming becomes absolutely impossible (without lengthy restoration beforehand).
Reducing meat consumption definitely makes the problems less immediate, but so far it doesn't seem like we will be able to reduce that consumption. So I wouldn't count this as any near term solution.
nope.
because vertical farms require a fucktonne of power and infrastructure. Moreover they are only really useful for certain types of crops (ie salad)
Your stables (rice, cereals and root crops) don't work well in vertical farms.
What you're actually trying to make is a greenhouse, and the dutch have solved that pretty much already (apart from the massive monoculture bit)
I suspect the future is actually in dense mixed crop fields. If tilling, cropping and tending can be automated then making sure a plant grows in it's allotted space become simple and cheap. It reduces the risk of total crop wipeout, can keep a field productive all year, and if done properly can improve soil quality.
Ideally we would work to develop food forests everywhere in and around our population centers. However, that's much harder for a multinational company to make money doing, so it's not going to happen. Likewise, with city land becoming increasingly expensive, reverting blocks or spaces to be used to develop food forests is not likely.
Maybe our best bet is to learn how to eat money.
So saving even 95% is maybe not a compelling economical argument to use this.
But no, not just to get some enviro-theatre stamp, they'll pay $0 for that.
And there's a lot of FUD about ag chemicals. Check rivers - the chemical problems are downstream from cities, where an urban dweller can dump as much whatever on their lawn as they like (and they do). While ag is restricted and regulated.
Ag is regulated, for sure (and for good reason!), but it's still a huge polluter. And yes, let's regulate domestic chemical use while we're at it!
You ever read that? Farmers do. But no, residential customers just pull the trigger until the weed starts to curl or whatever, and then the sprinkler runs and it all goes down to the creek.
resistance is a massive problem, so you need to spray more.
But that kills off the soil, so you need to put more fertiliser in.
But that means you get weeds, so you need to nuke the field, which means the soil blows away, which means you need more fertiliser....
Folks in the midwest largely use no-till single-application processes. Which prevents weeds from even starting.
In the vision augmented weed spray domain (the subject of this posted video) there has been reporting on both heavy tractor dragged units (for covering entire 1,000+ acre farms) and, perhaps more interestingly, lightweight solar powered spray bots that have minimal soil impact and intermittent deployment patterns.
Weeds patch up and spotting initial patches from air drones and then deploying a light spray bot to target individual weeeds is effective in many ways; kill time before spread, fuel usage (solar), minimal total deployment, soil impact, etc.
The tool used to be a pipe and wheels. Now the tool is a five figure contraption with millions of lines of code, hundreds of moving parts, and extremely specific high tech things that aren't easy to replace.
People are drunk on high tech, and have forgotten that simple is good.
The key to preventing this kind of adaptation is multiple modes of action. Robots do offer that ability because they can be used to both physically remove pests, and also chemically treat pests like in the video.
If you have two to three robust modes of action, you can basically prevent resistance from happening entirely.
>It is possible that rye traveled west from Asia Minor as a minor admixture in wheat (possibly as a result of Vavilovian mimicry), and was only later cultivated in its own right.[0]
Also found this about rye while looking that up:
>Recently, scholars have discovered that rye, more than other domesticated crops has followed a weedy species type of domestication process--from wild to weed to crop and then back to weed again.[1]
[0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rye
[1]https://www.thoughtco.com/rye-the-domestication-history-4092...
- going invisible?
Weeds adapting to look like non-weeds is highly plausible, IMO.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8903786/#:~:tex....
It's not highly plausible. It would take a lot of generations and a lot of mutations for this to happen.
But really, the whole idea of having perfectly manicured fields like that with no sign of any weeds around seems like the real problem to me.
Zero biodiversity…we wonder where the insects are going ?
So while we all need robots, there are probably a hell of a lot of people who would be able to produce even one crop a year in their backyard, who don't bother.
I still think there should be a lot more rotation between general crops, animal grazing and replenishment cycles. "Live" soil is becoming a problem and we keep extracting/killing it faster than it's getting replenished. Not to mention all the pesticide issues.
Could be a fantastic diversity-enabling tool.
1. If you allow weeds, you'll need to till the soil to maintain yields
2. If you till the soil you erode it, damaging the the long term health of your farm and water supplies.
3. If you drop yields globally, people starve (and farmers go out of business)
Since eroding the soil harms biodiversity in a different set of ways, killing weeds seems like the least bad option. Ideally we wouldn't require harsh chemicals to do that but no one has quite figured it out.
Yes.
>Zero biodiversity
Good.
The philosophy behind modern industrial farming is to basically create a chemical holocaust that extinguishes all plant, animal, and fungal life except the crop.
Classical India seems to have had better ways. In an introduction to Dharampal's works (who has written a lot of science in pre-Modern India), Claude Alvares notes how the Dutch, who had reduced the grass species to one or two in their land, had the temerity to advise India, where each backyard has(d) hundreds of species of plant.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B27IBNotwpE
Pity, everything in India too is rapidly devolving to Anglo-American monoculture now :( They (the elites, who are the ones that really count) barely even speak their own languages now.
Look up the SDS for various chemicals, it can be very eye opening. Some common household stuff is very dangerous.
The city gardening service in my neighbourhood is waging constant war on what appears to be a forest of bushes now, which they unwittingly sow and expand through cutting plants with ripe fruit.
Not only do the parent plants regrow, a new generation is formed each time they do it.
My relative is an agricultural engineer and her recommendation is a drop of Roundup on top of every unwanted specimen.
On the other hand, plants exchange nutrients and also harmful stuff via their root systems. That's why you plant "companion plants" for other plants to grow quicker.
Spraying unwanted plants with sub-centimeter accuracy seems pointless since these plants transfer those chemicals to unsprayed plants.
> You cut down the visible part and shortly after that it regrows like it's nothing.
If you cut the plant close to the ground, will it really regrow as a properly pruned plant? What if you cut it multiple times, just as it starts regrowing?
Now there is opportunity to only put the hoe in the ground, and some are working on that. It will still use more energy than chemicals, but it only uses the energy where needed, and avoids chemical resistance so I think there is a place for it. (but see the other replies - there are other limits)
Also, can less space be taken up by rows if the farm vehicle is legged? One would just need spots for the feet to land on.
But I’ve worked with tech in ag for 10+ years now. There are some motivated/excited early adopters. But there is still a lot of resistance. It generally feels 10-20 years behind. I’ve worked quite a bit with the very company mentioned in the video. Like any big company, it’s made up of all kinds. I’ll leave it at that.
Instead of some clever bit of selective plant killing molecular wizardry, just spray the weed with lye (NaOH). Dissolve the weed and any overspray or residual will lightly raise the pH of the soil. If you have alkaline soil problems, then maybe use sulphuric acid instead.
Another interesting Freethink video: "Generalist vs. specialist: Which Is Better?". https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ER2R-F68L0c
Because you can now identify the weed's location to within 15mm, (down from >5meters) you can use much smaller, moveable sprayers to apply the chemical, rather than just spraying the entire field.
This robot would not change that problem
What we'd need is sustainable farming with crop rotation and lots of diversity, but this is less efficient and farmers are already not making a ton of profit
True, but the issue though is the problem they solve: famine.