Article reality: CEO starts a drone company and tries to get farmers to want them.
> Convincing farmers to use drones instead of tractors was tough
> Today, selling farmers on the benefits of drones is a big part of Erickson’s job.
Seems like a simpler system than using drones, which can fly about 20 mins max on one charge.
Depending on the field that percentage can be as high as 10. Depending on the crop, the value you gain by aerial application can be in the 10s of thousands of dollars.
There's a lot of interesting stuff going on in agtech, most of it is practical, too. But yeah, guidance add-ons to a farmer's existing equipment has a pretty good return on investment for the farmer.
There is a soy bean pest that can invade crops on my family’s farm. If treatment is needed early, the cost effective solution is to drive a spray rig. Later in the season, that causes too much crop damage. So then it becomes a calculation of the loss due to pest versus cost of arial application.
In the end, it all comes down to cost per acre and the benefit needs to exceed that.
-posted from my self driving tractor.
> Driving a tractor through a field will crush a percentage of your crop
Even if there are "tracks" to account for the tractor's wheels? Nothing would have been planted there in the first place?
For this kind of application, I think drones have a snowball's chance in hell of getting any kind of traction with farmers in the area. Their capacity is too small, their runtime is too short, the area they can cover per unit time is too poor, etc.
At this point in the crops life, the canopy is quite filled out, and a large portion of it is already dry. By driving through the feild at this time you knock the seed from the pod onto the ground, where it is impossible to harvest. Thus it is better to do desiccation from the air.
Even at the standard 1C charge rate, you'd only need 4 batteries to effectively fly non-stop.
In the article they mention the system was meant for rough terrain where they were hand-spraying because the tractor couldn't get there, but I guess they're working on making it viable for large flat farms now.
Also, what next? Farming - but with AI
Not sure if you're joking, but this is a big area of research/innovation even prior to the latest LLM-fueled hype-cycle
From 2016: How a Japanese cucumber farmer is using deep learning and TensorFlow https://cloud.google.com/blog/products/ai-machine-learning/h...
keep in mind that robots are made by people, which strongly suggests using people directly is cheaper
the real social issue is you must meddle with the self-development of said people in order to keep it cheap, simply put you must make sure those people stay poor. in modernity this happens across countries (i.e. my theory that countries as a whole are kept poor). I call that practice neocolonialism
Possibly the biggest logical miss I've ever seen on this site. This would only be true if one person built one robot ever, and that robot was only as efficient as them.
Now would something like this https://carbonrobotics.com be cheaper than dumping chemicals on your field? I don't know. We could certainly do without the negative downstream effects of various pesticides and weed killers though.
And that is why my roof is held up by people I hire to hold it up. Bricks would complain less and would be more reliable, but they are more expensive than people because bricks are made by people.
Except that is not how the cost of things works, is it?
I should have downvoted you for this: I laughed so hard it woke my wife from a nap in the next room.
By that logic, no factories or anything would be automated, as it would be cheaper to use the people directly rather than having people build the automation.
Why do farmers even use tractors? Someone had to build that tractor. Wouldn't it be cheaper to hire the people to plant the crop directly?
whereas people only cost what people cost.
the real reason we do have technology is because keeping people poor is terribly evil, and doing that only to have cheap things is somehow even worse. which is the real point I'm making by the way
moreover, we're all missing another subtle point I omitted. herbicides are even cheaper than people, robots, or any combination of them. but as it turns out, killing the soil is also a pretty bad thing to do.
Is this because herbicides are not made by people?
It's much, much cheaper to pay someone to operate an excavator than to hire many people to dig the ditch by hand.
This is how modern economies improve everyones' lives: labor-saving devices.
Yes, and given that flying crop dusters is pretty dangerous (old, shoddily maintained aircraft and "runways", low altitudes over rough terrain) and exposes the fields to lead from the fuel, it's high time to get rid of that.
A drone with an automated recharger+resupply base can operate entirely on its own.
Better late than never, I guess, but the FAA has approved unleaded 100 octane. https://www.aopa.org/news-and-media/all-news/2022/september/...
That was a long time ago but I’m not sure the profession has gotten much safer
Tractors can carry many tons of liquid that needs to be sprayed on crops, as well as an implement that can spray a many yards wide swath of crops.
A tractor is also something that is needed for the rest of the farming and harvesting operation.
My grandfather's tractor has been running on machine oil, curses, and cheap diesel for 40+ years before he sold it off due to age.
Now if you combine this drone with a targeted spray depositing, you see where I'm getting?
P.S. I don't know why my comment was down voted, but ignorance knows no boundaries.
I don't know what that sentence means. Tractors, by definition, don't struggle to pull. Quite notoriously, they can pull hard enough to flip themselves over.
Now combine the tractor with targeted spray depositing. Any technology that can be strapped to a drone, can be made cheaper by removing the expensive, fragile drone bits, and then strapped to a tractor. Farmers aren't in the business of spraying expensive chemicals onto crops that don't need them. They are VERY conscious of the costs, and are always looking for a way to lower them.
The point is that a tractor is necessary equipment that farmer already owns, and can take a combination of implements that are tried and tested, and capable of being incrementally improved on. The only thing that a drone can do that a tractor can't is move quickly.
You are not trying to flood the field with pesticides
And weigh lt us a huge problem, when it’s wet you not allowed to drive in the fields because you will compact the soil, ruining it
It also has a pretty high capex bar to clear - it can’t replace a tractor, the farmer needs that still for implements, so it is purely additive in the capex area :/
Still, looks super duper cool and presumably has some tricks it can do a tractor can’t!