Agricultural drones are transforming rice farming in the Mekong River delta | Hacker News Reader

Agricultural drones are transforming rice farming in the Mekong River delta

hakaimagazine.com

379 pointssohkamyung274 comments

This is so great. My long term dream is that robotics take over farming, individually plucking each weed or weevil, and metering just the right amount of water for each individual plant, so that all the crops are organic.

Most of the chemicals (yes, including nitrogen fertilizers) offset labor, so when the labor is free we shouldn’t need them. And people won’t have to spend their lives in stoop-back work or exposed to toxic chemicals.

Out of curiosity how does nitrogen fertilizer offset labor?

Directly, as a substitute for more labour intensive sources like manure, compost or crop rotation.

Indirectly by increasing yield per acre per day.

But in the end you have to replace at least some of the nitrogen (and other nutrients) you are taking from the field in some way. And without a major shift in consumption patterns (less meat) this will mean fertilizer, as the alternatives usually lead to a much lower yield.

Meat farming replaces artificial fertilizer, by providing a source of manure, so doesn't that relationship run the other way?

But having 1/4 of the land under soy beans or other locally appropriate nitrogen-fixing plants doesn't seem like it would hurt yields too much.

I was very disappointed on my last trip to Iowa to see that most farmers weren't even bothering with cover crops.

I wonder whether genetic engineering can give nitrogen fixing abilities to plants that currently lack this ability?

It's not the plants themselves that fix nitrogen but endosymbiotic microorganisms in the soil.

I know. For simplicity, I was talking about the plants in the same generic sense that your gut microbiome is a part of you, and the dead tissues that form your hair and skin are also a part of you.

You still need to hack up the eg cereal plants so they can actually engage in that symbiotic relationship (or perhaps actually directly fix nitrogen all by themselves, without any outside help at all).

N-fixation does happen in the soil, but legumes have root nodules that host rhizobium bacteria and can assimilate the N much more easily

You could do that, the problem is the same as in making nitrogen fertilizer in a chemical plant: energy cost. It just takes so much energy to break the nitrogen tripple bond.

Even if you made a plant that fixes nitrogen extremely efficiently, every joule of sunlight it pumps into the ground is not available as calories you harvest. And fixing nitrogen will take an amount of energy per acre on the order of what you harvested from that acre in a year.

Well, only being as efficient as existing nitrogen fixing plants (or rather their microbes) would already be quite interesting.

Btw, I don't think plants are close to optimal efficiency in terms of using sunlight. See eg C3 vs C4 plants.

> Well, only being as efficient as existing nitrogen fixing plants (or rather their microbes) would already be quite interesting.

My point is that you can't have corn that is as nitrogen-fixing as a legume and still produce nearly as much corn - the plant (or its microbes) will need the majority of the available photosynthesis products to fix nitrogen. This directly makes the cobs smaller.

> Btw, I don't think plants are close to optimal efficiency in terms of using sunlight. See eg C3 vs C4 plants.

That's true, even photovoltaic panels (which are still far away from their theoretical maximal efficiency) are an order of magnitude more efficient at pulling energy from the sun than plants are. But significantly improving photosynthesis in crop plants is far beyond our current genetic engineering ability.

And I'm not aware of any way to organically fix nitrogen that uses energy outside what is provided by photosynthesis - or gets its energy from digesting dead organic matter, which also doesn't beat the limits of photosynthetic efficiency on a per-acre basis.

> My point is that you can't have corn that is as nitrogen-fixing as a legume and still produce nearly as much corn - the plant (or its microbes) will need the majority of the available photosynthesis products to fix nitrogen. This directly makes the cobs smaller.

I can believe that. However for people who don't want to use nitrogen fertiliser, this might still be useful.

You can see it as an alternative to clover (or manure), that happens to produce eg a bit of grain.

Nitrogen can also be replenished by crop rotation. Legumes will naturally add nitrogen back.

At the same rate as artificial nitrogen fertilizers? I doubt it. And, is the profit per hectare the same when planting legumes? Again, I doubt it.

By growing nitrogen fixers such as peas and beans on the same fields.

And more, smaller, robots vs large tractors could put an end to monocultures. Monoculture is the result of optimizing for minimal human labour, not an optimization for yields. So when labour is free, mixed fields are the way to maximize profits

How about harvest? Machines are quite specialized, how do you see that working out?

Bigger farms overall, which is anyway the trend so they utilize economies of scale. Or machine rentals if there is plenty of need from smaller farmers.

Unfortunately machine rental math does not work out for most of the specialised farming equipment in areas with changing seasons — when combine harvesters are needed (at the harvest time), they are needed for everyone within the same time window.

You might run into time of use contention unless you have a ver diversified crop neighborhood or adaptable robot. Don’t harvests usually happens at the same time for all the same species of crop in an area?

That’s a failure of imagination. Hordes of people used to do all the work, and Industrial Age engineering (thinking) replaced them with a combination of large, specialized devices and large, specialized farm layouts. It was more efficient for the technology of the time.

But we don’t build computing like that any more. Instead of large centralized single devices we use a large amount of protean hardware with various adapts (software).

Hordes of small devices can flood through the fields, using sensors to decide at any point what to do, and can use different effectors for different tasks at different times of the year, like the humans used to do.

You mean picking each ear/grain by a single device? rofl

I didn’t mean that — I agree that would be absurd!

I mean an autonomous device that picks a row, then does the same on the next row on the way back, then maybe unloads into a hopper and continues with the next couple of rows. And you don’t one, you have 50 or a couple of hundred of them rather than one huge combine harvester.

And if you have 50 of these platforms designed to go up and down the rows they could have been doing the planting at the beginning of the season (or desuckering your vines in spring or whatever) using a different tool, so your capex isn’t tied up in a few huge single-application devices, but amortized over a whole season. And when you have a fleet, if one fails and needs maintenance it’s no more of a big deal than when one server in a datacenter fails.

I was reading that and thinking family sized farm scale. If the machines are cheaper farms can be smaller and still justify buying a machine. Asian markets have quite a few small machines for managing rice crops.

Like these: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rice_transplanter https://sda-industries.com/equipment-parts/rice-harvester/

Compare that to "small" machines sold in the US. https://www.deere.com/en/harvesting/

wouldn't a monoculture help the robots, too?

But it doesn’t help us, and the robots are for our benefit. Make the robots go the the extra effort.

Contrary to bizzarre claims made earlier, robots don't actually work for free. In fact, they are more staunch about getting paid than humans are. They will stop working as soon as you stop paying them. Humans, on the other hand, will usually keep working for a while until they finally give in to the realization that you aren't going to pay up.

As a result, we're still going to optimize for the most productive use of robots, just as we do for humans.

That's false. Homogeneity makes it easier to harvest, process, and store crops. It also drives perfect competition which brings cost down on the commodity market.

Harvesting, processing, and storing, are human labor.

They involve human labor, just like every industrial process in existence. What's your point?

Yes, the GP’s reasoning is faulty (actually, “imperfect” would be a better term), but things aren’t as clear as you put it either.

Homogeneity helps with trading commodities, no question. And commodities reduce risk by allowing a very wide fan out on both sides of a two sided market…which has advantages and disadvantages for all participants.

More along your argument, it also lets the farmer use capital better in the short term (you buy the equipment you need for your monocrop).

But if you have multimodal devices you have the opportunity to take advantage of more flexibility. You can do crop rotation to use less chemicals or to take advantage of trends in the commodity market. You can have a different mix of crops for the same reason (half corn, half row crops, though they re typically worth less). You have more flexibility to adapt to climate change. The commodity markets can handle all this, in fact they help enable it.

This isn’t magic wand — crop rotation doesn’t make sense if, say, you have an orchard. But mechanization also caused us to abandon growing multiple crops in the same field, which can have benefits and improve yield. It was just way too labor intensive. If we go back to individual “labor” (automated in this case) it could be worthwhile.

But there are also costs considered: no flexibility, thus no way to hedge risk. Think weather, plagues and diseases, funghi whatever: If you single crop is vulnerable, now all of it is affected. The use of pesticides and fertiliser is also not free, and monocultures need a lot more of that. Furthermore the giant tractors needed for monoculture tend to damage the soil they drive on, and require the ground water table to be fairly low.

Certainly the logistical challenge of multiple small harvests of varying products is there, but this is definitely more manageable with robots and computers than without.

And for a small close to population centers, if they can supply multiple kinds of produce reliably, they might be able to make orders of magnitude more money on the local market than on the commodities market.

In a recent episode of Countryfile [1](popular UK BBC1 program on the country and farming) the resident farmer was mentioning both crop rotation and the issue of black grass invading his wheat fields.

The black grass was slowly out competing his cash crop and would difficult to remove (perhaps taking the entire field out of any production for a year or the use of chemicals).

Having a horde of little robots might greatly assist in manually keeping other plants at bay without indiscriminately affecting the field with chemicals (extra one-use expense, robots would last many years).

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Countryfile

I am searching for solutions in this field. Do you have any links to any consumer hardware for this. like drones which can cut down small invasive plants which were selected by AI?

Have you looked at laser weeding? A camera looks at the plants, an ML model identifies which plants are crop and which are weeds, and then a laser burns the weeds just enough so they die from water loss.

Research: https://ethz.ch/en/industry/industry/news/data/2022/03/laser...

Commercial product (first one I found, there are countless others): https://carbonrobotics.com/

Tertill cuts weeds but the ai is “if object is tall and firm enough to trip my bumper, turn”

I do work in this field. The AI and the sensors are much better than that. It can recognize each plant, builds a 3D model, a growth model and does disease detection. It controls robots, lighting (in vertical farming) and water.

Colleagues from the university did the drone things, and Lora sensors, but they are still way too expensive for the average farmers here in Germany. We should concentrate on the SW, and the Chinese on the HW.

Robot labor isn’t free. You pay in capital costs, energy costs to run them, and ongoing maintenance costs if you use them a lot. Environmentally, these costs might be more or less than the chemicals they replace, but it isn’t am obvious comparison.

Changing farming methods along with automation might work better, like vertical farming techniques.

Sorry, but in every example of vertical farming I've seen, there's nothing that actually works. Nearly all of the farms and companies I've visited and been exposed to use a lot more water and energy (in all forms) compared to a conventional farm. The only appeal I see are for places with limited agricultural land space such as Singapore or the Netherlands, or arid regions such as the Middle East or Central Asia. Even then, it's much cheaper for most of these places to simply import from abroad.

Vertical farming is complete bullshit for most plants. I don't know why people keep talking about it.

Plant growth is (for most plants) limited by available energy, which comes in the form of sunlight. Sunlight is extremely bright compared to artificial light sources and extremely cheap, i.e. free. Replacing it makes no economic sense in most situations.

If we talk about producing a lot of calories to feed the starving, even most reservations go out of the window, because staple crops are staples because they are very efficient at turning sunlight into chemical energy and they need all the sunlight they can get.

It's weird, vertical farming has gotten so much hype but really only makes sense for luxury products like microgreens, and still only makes sense if you specifically want to grow them in an expensive, dense city. Even things like mature lettuces, tomatoes, and strawberries have been tried extensively and simply don't make economic sense to grow indoors in stacks the vast majority of cases.

I assumed vertical farming was exciting for space reasons, and maybe very little else other than someone wanting (for whatever reason) to grow things in the middle of a dense urban center.

Non-subsistence farming is basically all cap ex at this point. Farmers have Ag Ec degrees and think about cap ex first. With the price of energy on a secular decline, imagine a world with ubiquitous renewables. The robots can go to a charge point and recharge themselves.

I disagree. I think we should have more human labor take over farming but on an individual level that's working much much closer to the consumption source. Think having your own farmer and food-producer in your own house or property, or perhaps shared with your small flock of neighbors.

Way too-many of the problems plaguing society atm can be solved by reducing transport and eliminating all the huge intermediate steps between our food (other other food-related products) and ourselves. Just think about how much effort is put into something simple like flour or butter or cheese (nevermind all the crazy processed stuff). The food will be more natural, it'll be healthier and with less additives, we'll be be contributing less to AGI/automation and creating actual valuable jobs, we'll be reducing the amount of plastic, fuel and electricity used for transport, storage, processing, packaging, labelling, accounting, lawyering. Every one of the major food production + distribution industries has huge support networks.

Local, small-scale food production used to be the only way food was produced - people didn't eat better then, and there were many, many fewer people to feed.

There's huge variability in what can be grown where, especially if you want to reduce the amount and number of inputs that are imported from further afield. There are places that can support all the crops and livestock that provide a healthy, balanced, and sustainable human diet, but not everywhere can. What if you want to eat flour in a place where grain crops aren't tenable, or butter where cows, sheep and goats don't do well?

Producing food this way also means that we need to build houses on fertile land that's good for growing things. That happens a _lot_ where I live, and I hate the site of previously productive soil disappearing under concrete house-slabs.

You can have both large scale production and small scale production at the same time. It is actually required for survival on a large scale long term. Technologies enabling small scale farms to be more efficient are as great an enabler as the advent of industrial farming.

If you want to see less fertile land covered up make it easier for people to make money growing on their own land.

Oh yes, taking agriculture back to where it was 2 centuries ago, when there definitely weren't any famines at all.

counterpoint: like the great chinese famine, when the government forced the country from an agrarian economy to an industrialized economy, and they fucked up the local food systems.

The same thing happened when the Soviet government forced the country from an agrarian economy to an industrialized one.

A lot of people have drawn inferences that it may have been the government, their leadership and application of ideology rather then the shift from agrarian economy.

seems to me that taking farmers away from their land will make people starve.

similar to how in the american south in the 20th century, sharecroppers were forced to work on commodity farms and didn't grow food. instead, they imported processed corn from the midwest that gave them pellagra. thanks in part to market forces of the midwest corn trade.

In Soviet case, the primary reason why people starved is because they have deliberately took away most of the food from the peasants to feed the cities. The cities didn't starve; the countryside did, which in turn prompted millions of peasants to move to the cities (and become industrial workers, which was the whole point).

taking control away from their land is very similar to "taking farmers away from their land". parallels with sharecropping in the US

> Think having your own farmer and food-producer in your own house or property

Impossible. The world is too urbanized, there simply is no space to do this for more than a few % of the population.

> Way too-many of the problems plaguing society atm can be solved by reducing transport and eliminating all the huge intermediate steps [...]

Maybe some problems can be solved, many more will be unsolved. Reducing our transport capacity of food increases the vulnerability to crop failures. De-centralizing processing will make it harder (read: more expensive) to test for pathogens, nutrients and ensure hygiene.

> we'll be be contributing less to AGI/automation and creating actual valuable jobs

No, we would be shrinking the GDP by moving labour from highly productive sectors into agriculture. At the same time food will become much more expensive, even more so if those new employees are paid minimum wage.

> and eliminating all the huge intermediate steps between our food (other other food-related products) and ourselves

How? You're simply replacing one set of steps for another, more labor-intensive one. I encourage you to visit one of those museums where people demonstrate how people in the 18th century lived for some perspective.

> we'll be reducing the amount of plastic, fuel and electricity used for transport, storage, processing, packaging,

You didn't quite state the full conditions to achieve this reduction, so I'll do it for you. Basically we have to completely change our diets. Fresh food can only be eaten in season, and only what is locally available. We can only store food that does not need climate control to keep, so in winter there are only conserved vegetables and fruits. Not using any modern packaging and storage methods means that even in season things have to be eaten really quickly.

On the whole, your insinuation that our food distribution is some kind of unnecessary luxury that we can do away with just rubs me the wrong way. It is the reason the amount of people in famine has been dropping every decade despite a population explosion. It ensures that there are no mass-scale outbreaks of botulism, moulds and other pathogens that used to kill lots of people and waste huge quantities of food. Its efficiency (along with high productivity) guarantees that almost everyone can afford to eat sufficient nutrients even through winter.

Sure we could get some of those benefits in your agrarian fantasy, but the cost would be enormous.

If we accept subpar nutrition we could propably plant GMO potatoes and things like that all over the place

Gmo can also increase nutrition. anti gmo and anti vaccine come from theisame anti scienece background, don't fall for either. Yes deand safety studies but then use what is good.

Just because it's not 100% possible right now, doesn't mean we shouldn't work towards it.

Your first criticism as an example. "World too urbanized". Again, the solution solves a big chunk of other problems we have. One need only read HN a bit to see a bunch of them. E.g. 1. Food islands. 2. Focus on transport to get food because mom and pop stores closed and we only have Walmart. 3. Car culture.

My point is don't shoot the idea down, we have to consider how working towards this arguable ideal moves the needle in a better direction. And yes, maybe the end-goal I presented isn't 100% possible or the right direction for society. But working towards it means we solve a host of intermediate problems, with each one making things a bit better.

Sorry I'm not answering all your points, which some are 100% valid and I agree, but others are just us talking past eachother. E.g. I'm not entirely advocating for us to go to the middle-ages and churn butter for 2 hours a day. But there has to be an in-between that opens up additional options and ideas that I can't possibly envision, or articulate well-enough, or consider every angle and potential criticism.

This would be utterly horrible. AGI/automation is a valuable thing while being forced to toil working the land sucks hard.

Small-scale agriculture like that is _vastly_ less efficient than industrialised agriculture. It won't create valuable jobs, it'll take labor away from valuable jobs.

This is the typical utopian dream that is complete horse manure. We like to look back and think how quaint and healthy things were but they were not. While there are a lot of improvements to be had in our current supply chain, going back to smaller farms is not the way to get there.

What you described would be more costly and I don't think there is really any relationship to health. Your food would end up being more expensive as most of the things you listed cost very little in the grand scheme, labor is the most expensive part.

I haven't crunched the math or anything, but you don't feed 8 billion people with small farms unless every 10th person is willing to go farm. Currently it's more like every 150th.

Sounds like solid napkin math. It true though, you don't have that happen unless a lot more people are farming and honestly, farming is valuable but the labor is not. Its better spent else where. I absolutely believe there are massive improvements to be made but I think they will happen with technology and more automation.

You are getting downvoted, but presumably, in Russia a significant amount of food is being produced in small family farms/gardens called Dacha [1], with a typical size of only 600 m^2 [4].

Since, original sources are all Russian, it's hard to fully verify via secondary sources, but there are claims that (1) as much as 77% of all vegetables and 59% of all meat [2] or (2) as much as 50% of all food [3] produced in Russia is on these farms.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dacha

[2] https://thebovine.wordpress.com/2009/08/09/in-1999-35-millio...

[3] https://mospace.umsystem.edu/xmlui/handle/10355/84725

[4] https://www.notechmagazine.com/2020/03/a-dacha-for-everyone-...

This already exists! There's a company called Carbon Robotics that has a prototype of a robot that eliminates individual weeds with a lazer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_2s-0wgQWXM

I'm also looking forward to this technology being widely available and helping solve the issue of herbicide run-off, and later additionally the same for pesticides and fertilization.

None of the inputs to farming will ever be free. Whomever owns the robots will be charging for their labour you are only substituting one form for another. Potentially it might workout better for production numbers still tbd. Farmers these days are beholden to the agri tech companies for costs and maintenance.

That is a great dream to have. In the energy world it was supposed that prices would go to close to zero with fully adopted solar but thats an equivalent far fetched dream.

In case anyone’s reading this who is interested in working on it:

I’m building a company/platform that does a lot of this, particularly the “metering just the right amount of water for each individual plant” part.

The thing I have in mind is very low cost devices (sub-$20) with mesh radio comms, inputs to read from sensors and outputs to control irrigation, and TinyML running the devices to optimize everything in real time.

I have about 10 years experience working in the field (mostly with high-value crops like wine grapes, nuts, avocados) and several iterations of prototype devices and web software, but am keen to attract people who are excited at the idea of working on this kind of thing.

Anyone - particularly low-level programmers or hardware engineers - interested in working on it can contact me (email in bio).

The Open Source Ecology folks have been working on this sort of thing for a while --- check in with them?

https://www.opensourceecology.org/

that website/project looks pretty dead

I’ve always been supportive of open-source and plan to make much of our tech open source [1], but I’m not seeing anything on their site that’s anything like what we’re doing (it alls seems to be large machinery, no microelectronics).

The thing about this field that I’ve learned over the decade I’ve been involved is that creating the tech is less than half the challenge; the distribution - building awareness, selling it, installing it, maintaining it - is a huge undertaking, and a lot of money needs to come from somewhere to make that viable.

[1] I’d like to have a RTOS to run on these devices that is as approachable and familiar as common Linux distros like Ubuntu, for people to install and customise themselves, with a full open source license.

In another comment I wrote that you probably need a BOM less than $0.50. At that price you don’t have a massive OS like Linux, you need something embedded that can run in a few KB.

But a bunch of small devices can be managed by a huge device running Linux — maybe even something as expensive as a Raspberry Pi.

(Apart from some time trying to sell in the Ag sector I spent a lot of time on embedded devices)

Well I already have a firmware version that can run in a few KB, which my father developed in Motorola assembly and that ran most of the soil moisture monitoring devices sold to the big-volume wine grape producers in Australia (mostly in Riverland SA supplying Treasury etc) from the late 90s till about 2010, after which newer products using Zigbee and cellular IoT took over (though we worked together on our own newer versions supporting Bluetooth LE and Cat-M1 up until his retirement a couple of years ago).

I hear you that $20 is high - but the status quo in this business now is monitoring devices that sell for AUD $600+, and with LTE-M or LoRa comms modules that cost over AUD $60 alone.

I'm forever thinking about ways you could drive the cost down further. I'd love it if there were a way to get the on-plant modules under $1. Feel free to get in touch if you want to discuss further.

BLE mesh and solar power should get your BoM cost below $20, but I don't see any way that you're going to hit a sub $1 price point. Assuming your mesh can cover the entire field (reasonable if you have one monitoring point every few plants), you can have one or a small handful of LTE-M basestation points to handle the data uplinks.

It's an interesting problem and I am sure reference designs already exist. Maybe talk to someone at Nordic.

Yeah I think that's right. It's a matter of trading off the water cost savings (and produce quality/yield gains) per plant vs unit cost per device, to determine the optimal density of devices.

As I said in the previous comment, right now, high-value crop growers like wine grape growers pay $700-$1000 or more per site (including reader/comms module and sensors), and generally only install one monitoring point per block (I have a system running at one of Australia's top boutique/biodynamic wine makers and at current prices he can only cost-justify having one 10 monitoring sites over his 70 acres of vines).

So, whatever we can do to drive down the cost to $20 or less should deliver big wins.

> Maybe talk to someone at Nordic

Yep, we're working with hardware engineers who are well connected to people at Nordic.

There's (relatively) lots of water in the Barossa Valley and it's worth growing a thirsty high value crop like grapes there. And even there the cost structure you say is unsupportable.

But the economics of farming in the Eyre Peninsula is quite different and they really have a water problem. From a food PoV these are the people we really need to help.

(I have family in both, not to mention in laws in Germany who also have a water problem...getting rid of it!)

Can you use mesh networking? A solar panel and an Esp32, with mesh networking might be cheaper than an LTE module on each device, at the cost of needing more devices.

Yep, mesh networking is the plan:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40740278

Why must the device be so cheap? Is the intent to have one serve each plant? Why can’t one serve many plants?

Yes, that’s how it’s done now, but it’s a matter of the precision vs cost tradeoff.

Right now it costs about $750-$3000 to set up each monitoring site, so growers can only afford to install a low number of devices per acre [1], thus a high number of plants per device. In that case you’re not optimizing to anywhere the specific requirements of each plant, you’re assuming (often falsely) that all the plants in that area have the same needs as the one you’re monitoring.

The lower the cost per device, the higher your resolution and precision of monitoring can be, and the more you can accurately provide for the specific needs of each plant.

[1] Very often that number is zero.

It seems very wasteful to me to have a lot of small devices sitting out in the elements, how resilient are they going to be?

Wouldn't a device that travels like a snail along a cable or something, while less glamorous than a self propelled (and navigating) device, deliver a reading for a whole line of plants every day without all of the eroding parts per plant?

It’s pretty normal to have devices out in the elements now, it’s just a matter of how many. Yes having a device on literally every plant will probably always be overkill, unless they are so cheap and easy to replace that it doesn’t matter when one gets damaged. More likely it’d be optimal to have a device every x-number of plants - which is what’s done now but the number of devices per number of plants needs to be higher than is currently conventional to increase precision.

Having machines moving around taking readings “each day” is insufficient, as during hot conditions the soil/plant moisture changes too rapidly. You need to take readings at least once every hour or even every 30 or 15 minutes in order to be able to start irrigating immediately when the moisture level starts dropping rapidly.

For farming on a forest floor, I would expect overly complex variance.. For farming in a field, why isn't the deviance you calculate between the needs of plant location 1 & 2 on a frequent basis not a reasonable estimate to update the predicted needs of one plant every time you pass over the other?

I can imagine that a lot of small devices becomes economically viable.. I find that unfortunate since I think it will be a lot of permanent ewaste lost in fields relative to very temporary water optimization benefits.

If you use an Olla, the plants self regulate their water intake.

See the book gardening with less water by David A. Bainbridge

Great for backyard tomato plants, not a commercial farming option for tens of thousands of acres.

Not the way farms are run today, sure. But if it’s worth it, farms will adapt.

It seems much more labour intensive compared to drip irrigation that essentially run long hoses in each row. Can you command on this comparison?

This sounds like the optimum use case for LoRa, doesn't it?

LoRa gets talked about plenty for ag monitoring, and sure it can be great for certain use cases. Optional support for LoRa is certainly something we want to support (via device variants or plug-on comms modules).

For the use case invoked in this subthread (an individual monitoring device on each plant), I don’t think it’s the best.

We’re currently working with Nordic nRF52xx/53xx/54xx modules, which have dual ARM cores and built-in 2.4GHz radio, so, support for protocols like Bluetooth Mesh, Zibgee, Thread.

That means you can have a single module that can handle mesh comms with neighboring devices, as well as sensor reading, machine learning and output control. You wouldn’t need a separate comms module to communicate back to a base station or a high post and antenna for long-range comms. So it offers big savings on the device production side and the installation time/cost side.

Ha. Didn't see this post before I responded to your other one :-)

Are you not concerned about the battery life running edge ML on these chips? I imagine battery replacement will be a large part of the TCO for farmers.

When I've done similar projects in the past, we did the edge compute on a more expensive box that could be more conveniently accessed by users. It was also the system collected and summarized data into reports, so having the data locally helped.

Yeah absolutely. You’d certainly need solar power on your devices, and the more data processing they’re doing the more battery and solar power you’ll need.

So you’d centralize the more intensive processing on a unit with more power, and have smaller node devices on the plants doing simpler tasks - just reading from sensors and uploading data, and/or receiving commands to switch things on/off. They’d be solar powered too but the batteries and solar panels can be smaller.

These are all the trade offs you’re constantly working with in this game.

Have you thought about sub Ghz mesh networking like 6lowpan with TI CC1310? If you don't need that much computing power then it's a good option, with way longer battery life.

Looks cool but I'm not sure how current those TI CC1310 devices are. I can see product release pages going back to 2015. Do you know anything about future support/availability for this model, or any newer models?

I wonder if in a large farm it will be worth running hoses and deploying a frob next to each device vs having an electric robot with a refillable tank walking the rows.

Such a robot is still SF today, so deploying a frob with each seedling would be the only choice at the moment (or continue current irrigation practices). The frobs have to be cheap enough to be consumables.

My gut tells me that the robot will cost less in the long run. It also doesn't seem like a hard problem (yeah, easy to say) since row crops are planted at fixed spacings and detecting that the thing next you is a plant and not a rabbit should not be a difficult task. The combination of GPS mapping (planter knows where it was during planting), known plant & row spacing, and basic visual imaging should simplify the problem.

So why isn't it done today? Probably still cheaper to rely on the weather or center pivot irrigation.

Scale, I imagine. Orchards are big. How many robot waterers would you need when you have to spend time at each individual tree (or groups of trees) to water it/them? How far is it to the nearest refill?

Put another way, drip is massively parallel. Robot waterers, not so much.

Oh, I wasn't thinking orchards. I thought OP was talking about row crops which can't feasibly be irrigated with hoses.

> I thought OP was talking about row crops which can't feasibly be irrigated with hoses.

Are we talking about irrigation pivots[1] here? Because those are a known technology.

If we are thinking about robots driving up and down the rows and watering plants from a tank, and then returning to some central location to re-fill their tank that feels like a "carrying water for elephants" situation. I suspect the logistics won't work out. Could try to run some numbers on it of course. Is that how you are thinking about it?

1: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7j1lMs7fcIQ

Yeah, and I think you're right. I hadn't even given any thought to the massive weight of the water tank you'd need to do this. I was thinking of it more like a sprayer, which requires a much smaller volume to be useful.

The other issue is the ability to respond to extreme heat quickly enough.

We work with fruit growers in South Eastern Australia where temperatures routinely hit high 30s and even low-mid 40s (°C) a few days each year.

Those growers want to see our soil moisture data readings updated every 15 minutes so they can turn the drippers on very quickly as soon as the soil starts drying out rapidly.

It would just be too slow to rely on robots driving up and down the rows in those conditions.

Row crops can be (and already are) irrigated with hoses. In dry areas of the world, drip tape is buried throughout the entire field because it allows farmers to make more efficient use of the water available to them. It does require the machinery has auto-steer (which is standard practice now anyway), because tearing up the drip tape with a planter is an expensive mistake.

https://whyfarmit.com/drip-tape-irrigation/

Really? I didn't know that. Just didn't seem feasible to have irrigation lines running for that distance.

Let's say the RoboWater(tm) rolls down a row of trees in the orchard, water hose unreeling behind it. At each tree, it dumps the calculated dose of water into a clay pot that is sunken into the ground near the trunk (from which the water slowly soaks into the soil). When the row is done - it reverses direction, reeling the hose back up in the process. Then some side-shuffling, and it's soon rolling down the next row of trees in the orchard, again dumping the calculated dose of water...

> The combination of GPS mapping (planter knows where it was during planting), known plant & row spacing...

This is not robust. Humans don't use GPS for this purpose (and anyway, the plants are closer than GPS resolution.

Looking and using the local data is the more robust approach. Trying to assume the real world is the same as your model has been the source of countless visual gags since the advent of movies.

$20 is a lot (I assume that’s the customer price buying them in volume). You have to save a lot of water / increase yield enough to justify that. That suggests a BOM well under a buck, probably less than $0.50.

I spent some time in this sector (at one company irrigation of almonds and stone fruit, another in wine) and the margins are very tight. Fortunately the farmers have sharp pencils.

When you think about it, farming is the perfect physical application of scaling.

We're not moving away from nitrogen fertilizers. Ever. Why?

Look at the following three graphs: global population, staple crop yield, and nitrogen fertilizer application.

Now overlay them. That's why.

Also, there are myriad chemical inputs that cannot be removed simply due to free labor. Sure, a robot can pluck weeds, but what about fungal and bacterial diseases?

There are absolutely automated systems out there to handle recognition and application of whatever fertiliser/fungicide is needed. Not cheap of course, but prices will come down.

>> individually plucking each weed or weevil, and metering just the right amount of water for each individual plant, so that all the crops are organic.

Not even close. The sorts of critters and diseases that pesticides combat cannot be mitigated by plucking things off plants, nor can nitrogen fertilizer be replaced with elbow grease. Identifying and removing (burning) infected plants would help, but only if each plants was isolated from its neighbors, otherwise you are just back to burning fields once infection is detected. Growing each potato inside its own little box cannot scale.

For many farmers the "right amount of water" ends up being however much is available. Crop fields are not home gardens. The amounts of water needed are measured in acre-feet. Metering it out to each corn stalk individually would certainly help, but likely fails the cost/benefit analyses at scale. A corn field has roughly 50,000 plants per acre, and commercial farm several hundred acres. That will be a heck of a lot of plastic tubing to install/maintain.

> so when the labor is free we shouldn’t need them.

Short of the singularity happening - "labor" (even Robotic) - at this scale - is not going to be anywhere near free.

I mean, in some ways, "labor" is already "free" in agriculture if you compare current cost of labor per yield vs what you would get before the industrial revolution.

The average labor cost to farm an acre of wheat pre-industrial revolution was 50-100 hours. Today, it's <1.

Short of the singularity, we are not getting a 100x improvement from here in our lifetime.

There's not only so many 100x improvements you can make until you need a perpetual motion machine traveling faster than light...

This sounds beautiful. Also sounds like you have never worked a farm nor know anything practical about working fields and crops.

And please enlighten me what will happen to countries where people are dependent on farming? Rather creating new varities of crops that are more chemical resistant?

Lmao, I'd love for this utopia, which has been completely achievable for decades now but you know...prevented by endlessly chasing profit and making the rich richer.

So many people are guilty of it on HN as well; as rich tech workers your hackles raise when I suggest things like making owning second homes illegal. We're all part of the problem.

Slightly related, but off-topic.

It's astonishing how high-tech agriculture has become without the general public noticing much of it.

I recently had a longer talk with my uncle, who is a farmer in South Germany, where he told me about the newish technology he is using:

- Milking robots: the process is entirely automated, the cows basically go inside the milking stations by themselves.

- His newer tractors are all driving GPS based, which allows him to keep the track with a precision of about 20cm. He is now able to exactly apply the amount of fertilizer, pesticides or seeds he wants to apply and plan the amounts in advance.

- A lot of data is collected for each cow and processed by an external company. This goes down to temperature measurements at each teat in the milking robot. The external company monitors each cow and plans individual treatment to prevent diseases and to optimize milk production.

- He currently plans to build a manure biogas plant, which will produce enough electricity for him and then some. I really like the approach to mainly use manure instead of harvested biomass (the economics of the two are vastly different, an interesting discussion in itself).

And that's just one farm. There are a lot of innovative things happening in agriculture.

Oh, I forgot a neat one: Drones with thermal imaging to prevent fawns to be killed by tractors.

Fawns, as in female deer? Is hitting them with tractors really a problem?

Fawns as in "deer children". When young, they lie down in fields a lot, and don't have the flight instict developed yet, so if they're in the field with the "parent" deer out getting food and the tractors / harvesters come by, it can be legitimately dangerous.

Their instinct is to stay put, which means they don't run when the tractor comes.

A drone flies over the field, maps where the fawns are staying put, sends a message to automated tractors to reroute.

This is probably the most "feel good" application of drones. That and detecting landmines.

That’s exactly the opposite of what thermal drones are use most of the other time

those fawns could be lying on a lot of oil

Is it? I believe the commercial application for drones with thermal cameras is fairly well establish at this point. You can spot a lot of things in buildings, transmission lines, etc.

The ops point is that after you spot them you call in old fashioned artillery.

Besides deer protection and wildlife management in general, they're used in SAR and police - especially in mountainous or forest areas, it's just soooo much faster to send a quick-response team with thermal drones than to travel by foot or wait for a chopper to show up. Obviously in rough weather you still need a legit chopper, but for stuff like "find someone who didn't return from a hike/called for an emergency without knowing where he precisely is" they're just fine.

On the infrastructure side, you can use thermal drones in construction planning to detect if/where a building is losing heat, spot (beginning) defects in industrial installations and inspect if a power line is still working acceptably. DJI also pairs the thermal camera with a decent photo camera so you don't need to send up two drones for the job.

> don't have the flight instict developed yet

They specifically have the opposite instinct, because fawns usually lack coordination to flee like an adult. So they have the instinct to still.

They hide in the field and are too afraid of running from a track or and farmers can’t see them.

A you imagine the aftermath of a deer getting ‘harvested’ by the combine?

Can you imagine being I the cabin and witnessing that, how it probably sounds in the process?

Then cleaning up the mess and repairing the damage?

I grew up on a farm in the nineties, and in my teens, I saw a roe deer fawn that went through a forage harvester.

Surprisingly enough, there was almost no blood, but every bone in the animal was broken. The load of silage that it ended up in had to be thrown out, the forage harvester itself, needed some light repairs, the harvest got delayed a few hours, and the whole thing was really depressing.

Luckily as far as I can remember it happened only once, and it was definitely something that we tried hard to avoid.

A female deer is called a doe.

> doe

A deer? A female deer?

> Ray

A drop of golden sun?

> Me

A name I call myself?

> Fa

A long long way to run?

> Sew

A needle pulling thread?

> La A note to follow sol

I assume they don't want wild animals that are ridden with diseases to end in something like cattle feed more than unavoidable.

Also, running over a fawn really bums out the person driving the tractor!

Anecdote on this: I've been flying R/C planes and drones in some publicly accessible fields with friends for years. Some farmers were a bit confrontational when they saw us (sometimes understandably so, we were always careful but the occasional crash and aircraft retrieval in the middle of a field _did_ happen...). But a few of them were interested, and asked if we could arrange to take some pictures and videos of the fields at specific times, to search for fawns before harvest or similar things. We were happy to oblige, and in return got access to even nicer, non-public areas to gather and fly from regularly. Win-win for all involved.

There's business in routine agricultural overflights for year to year comparison and records, with multispectral cameras (expensive) for ANOVA plots when cross breeding for new crops with resistance, for rock outcrop plotting | individual large rock recording for { later pickup | hazard enty into tractor maps } etc.

A lot of that is done locally here ( large grain fields in Australia ).

I am putting together a computer vision dataset for detection, identification, classification and counting for cattle herds of Indian breeds, which are the strength of Brazilian livestock farming [where there are still a lot of cattle in free-range pastures]. The dataset will also be useful for monitoring illegal livestock farming in protected areas, such as the Amazon. The scarcity of images of these types of cattle on the Internet, where European varieties are prevalent, forces me to negotiate with local farmers to fly my drones in order to obtain the images. It's not an easy job. Most are confrontational and hostile. I move forward with great difficulty but I will not give up. Soon at cownt.com.br.

Edited for clarity.

> - A lot of data is collected for each cow and processed by an external company. This goes down to temperature measurements at each teat in the milking robot. The external company monitors each cow and plans individual treatment to prevent diseases and to optimize milk production.

Very unfortunate for cows that they're able to produce milk for human consumption.

Evolutionary speaking, being tasty and able to produce milk for human consumption has been an extremely successful strategy for cows.

Of course, the individual cow might (or might not!) disagree.

Now imagine how unfortunate it is to be a big, challenging game for human hunt...

Compared to aurochs, the cows are thriving.

(On a side note, I just saw a mounted skeleton of an aurochs yesterday, in the Danish National Museum in Copenhagen. That beast was huge, and it would look even more overwhelming to medieval or Iron Age people, who were on average shorter than us; I am 6 ft and that animal was as tall as me. That is probably why it was so prestigious to hunt one, I can't even imagine a close combat with that. But it was hunted to extinction.)

> Compared to aurochs, the cows are thriving

This depends on the level of empathy you have for cows.

If you empathise with them as you would with humans, imagine making the same argument to justify slavery

One could argue industrial farms are fate worse than death

This is what I wanted to convey with my original comment. It seems people think having millions of enslaved cows living in horrible conditions is an advantage for cows compared with "less successful species". I imagine the cows see it very differently.

If cows would be useless to humans, their population would be probably in hundreds/thousands globally, or we would let their whole sub-species just die.

Milking is the least bad thing we do to them, I would recommend focusing more on other parts of farming/ranching if you care.

> If cows would be useless to humans, their population would be probably in hundreds/thousands globally, or we would let their whole sub-species just die.

I think the cows would prefer that.

Farming has always been innovative, except where an extreme abundance exists, like flood farming.

Thanks to modern capitalism, there's no such thing as a (localised) extreme abundance. Extremely fertile land will be bid up, until it's productivity per-dollar-value will be equivalent to other land.

So we will always have incentives for innovation.

(I specifically say 'localised', because on a global level we are living in extreme abundance by historic standards.)

This doesn’t really make sense, Local resources exist in abundance because transportation cost is not zero.

Iceland has more geothermal power than it knows what to do with, north of Canada has abundance of fresh water but it’s uneconomical to move it to California, etc.

I suppose it depends on how you define 'extreme' as a matter of boring tautological semantics. If extreme is defined as 'enough that it is worth extracting to anybody who discovers it'. Sort of like how ore is defined.

Basically there being a limit to abundance before it is too extreme to exist sustainably (without being extracted). You can have Cerro de Potosi, a very silver rich mountain sustainably exist. But a mountain made of solid gold? That would be extracted from until gold devalued itself.

A good way to think about this is to compare the cost of a commodity to shipping costs. Sure, pricey bottled spring water gets shipped all over the world, but bulk agricultural water (measured in acre feet) doesn't. It's heavy for what it's worth, so it's mostly transported downhill in rivers, canals, and so on, with occasional pumps.

There's no global market for water, like there is for oil and liquified natural gas, because the price of water is much lower. Instead there are regional water projects.

Even for natural gas, there aren't pipelines everywhere, and shipping natural gas (by ship) is more expensive than transporting it through pipelines.

Yes, that's true. There can be localised relative abundances of some inputs. Eg almost all of the world has an abundance of air. But submarines and space stations do not.

I guess I can rescue my statement that we don't have localised abundances of (easily) tradeable goods. And that leads to no localised abundances of all the inputs required to make a tradeable good.

To come back to the original example: flood farming would produce an abundance of agricultural outputs, and those are fairly easy to trade. Both across space and these days also across time, thanks to preservation techniques.

(Not all agricultural outputs are easy to transport or preserve, but there's probably something you can grow that is.)

I hope that in the future almost everywhere in the world will still have way too much air so that it's too cheap to measure; but thanks to global trade food prices will always be relatively flat across the globe.

So even people farming insanely productive regions will have plenty of incentives to innovate to further improve productivity.

Yes, we can see that in the American West where most water is used by agriculture. Exporting food can be seen as a more practical alternative to exporting water. When there's a drought, maybe don't export quite so much?

Water rights are complicated, so water is far from freely-traded commodity, but over time, cities do pay more, and that means they tend to get their way. There's a saying that water flows uphill towards money.

Local abundance is traditional: fruit and vegetables in season. It's still true for people with big gardens, when it's not worth their while to sell it.

> Local abundance is traditional: fruit and vegetables in season. It's still true for people with big gardens, when it's not worth their while to sell it.

Yes, that was basically my point: participating in modern economies tends to smooth out local abundance. [0]

That's good overall! Less waste, more innovation. But, of course, there are certain specific things lost to be nostalgic about.

You are also right that water as an input is subject to lots and lots of distortions. And that leads to wasting of water, especially expensive in places where water is actually scarce.

> Yes, we can see that in the American West where most water is used by agriculture. Exporting food can be seen as a more practical alternative to exporting water. When there's a drought, maybe don't export quite so much?

When water has a proper market clearing price, that's exactly what happens.

[0] Home production in a garden is a good example here, because it's usually not for participating in the wider market economy.

Yes, agreed. To continue, though, I think it's not just nostalgia; people who benefit from local abundance can lose something from more efficiency.

AirBnB is another example. There are benefits to living in a desirable location and they're often free for the residents. If the neighbors are, effectively, selling off those amenities, it benefits them and their customers, but not you. And that's why some communities place restrictions.

I believe the Coase theorem suggests that paying off the neighbors would be somehow efficient, if a deal can be reached. It can be difficult to agree on a price, though.

> AirBnB is another example. There are benefits to living in a desirable location and they're often free for the residents.

To be more precise, they are baked into land values / rent.

> I believe the Coase theorem suggests that paying off the neighbors would be somehow efficient, if a deal can be reached. It can be difficult to agree on a price, though.

Yes, transaction costs always kill you.

    > Iceland has more geothermal power than it knows what to do with

Build more aluminum smelters and data centers!

Yes. (And they are already doing that.) You can also build a high voltage direct current undersea cable to some other bigger grid.

> Farming has always been innovative

Shout out to Tractor Wars, which I never expected to enjoy as much as I did.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UgtHQUi8AvQ

There are also collars that monitor temperature and gait analysis to identify infection and hoof problems. Cows get automatically segregated at milking time for inspection. A monitor is also available that goes over the tail and monitors when a cow begins calving and alerts the farmer, traditionally farmers would wake up every hour or two to check on cows that were close. Successful farmers have always always on the cutting edge of anything that can increase margins or efficiency, they have to be it's a tough business.

I know quite a few people in the industry, and some near the top of big players and the common thing I've heard said is "We have so much data on such a granular level, we don't even know how to exploit most of it".

Is there anything happening with self-driving tractors? I'd expect that in the absence of speed and most of the typical hazards cars on the roads face, when doing pretty rote stuff like spraying, harvesting row crops, or tilling a field we'd be able to automate it pretty easily.

A lot is going on. 15 years ago farmers were putting the dog in the tractor - it worked so long as there were no deer or other things in the field. Safety is just as hard as for cars though and so progress is just as slow.

I work for john deere. But I don't have non public information and I don't speak for the company.

Biogas plants still need quite a bit of harvested biomass added tp the manure. Manure by itself has too low a Carbon/Nitrogen ratio, and without supplementation, it will over-produce Ammonia, inihibiting the anaerobic bacteria that digest the feedstock. So you have to add sileage or switchgrass.

Ultimately drones may enable purely-mechanical pesticide-free removal of each individual insect/weed.

Reminds me of the mosquito laser. It would target only female mosquitos of the specific breed (they are the malaria carriers). It was only prototyped and never commercially produced.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mosquito_laser

> It was only prototyped and never commercially produced.

aka Vaporware

Indeed. These are often predictable outcomes when there is lack in economy of scale or scope.

I saw a video where this company is doing exactly that for weeds:

https://youtube.com/watch?v=V3A6L2Dao6s

Great idea, I hope it works.

For weeds, this is already a thing. There are weed bots that kill with fire and others that kill with lasers.

The Royal Society had a two day conference on farming technology.

https://royalsociety.org/science-events-and-lectures/2024/06...

There’s almost a 7 hour video posted on Vimeo on the page.

I'm back in Vietnam (Saigon) for the first time in 4 years and it has been like a time machine. Covid definitely left its mark on this country due to the severe lockdowns they went through. The most interesting change I've noticed is that nearly everyone speaks at least a little English now. Attributed to being locked inside and a lot of YouTube.

It used to be difficult/expensive to get drones here, but I see DJI stores all over town now. Seeing this is super cool and speaks towards how innovative and creative Vietnamese get with whatever they can get their hands on.

> I'm back in Vietnam (Saigon) for the first time in 4 years and it has been like a time machine. Covid definitely left its mark on this country due to the severe lockdowns they went through. The most interesting change I've noticed is that nearly everyone speaks at least a little English now.

Interesting - here in Japan the consensus is that the level of English went down, as we had a few years of no tourists and no language assistants.

Vietnamese are extremely capitalistic as part of the culture. Everything is for sale here.

They realized that they make more money when they speak English to foreigners, so they studied up. I'm not even making this up, one of the kids I was talking to said that.

Today, as a tourist in Japan many restaurants and bars outside of Kyoto, Tokyo, and Osaka and some in those places will not serve me food or a whiskey highball because I am not Japanese. They say "No English" as the reason. Four African students who recently graduated from the University of Kyoto were refused entry into a bar in Kyoto as I walked by. They all speak English and Japanese fluently unlike many of their Japanese classmates. This is high contrast to Vietnam where people would stop me as I walked down the street offering me a beer poured from a pitcher, a seat at their table on the sidewalk, or food and they would try to speak English with me. I also noticed that there is a lot of cooperation between people of different countries in Asia done with English. I would not be surprised if the common language of the Chinese and Vietnamese people mentioned in the article is English.

Vietnam is my favorite place in Asia. It felt like the country is trying very hard to address many of the environmental problems like moving from gas powered to electric vehicles.

I've traveled all over Asia and lived in many countries for extended periods. It's also been my experience that the Vietnamese are the most welcoming and genuinely interested in talking to foreigners.

> It felt like the country is trying very hard to address many of the environmental problems like moving from gas powered to electric vehicles.

This is my favorite IG: https://www.instagram.com/sai_gonxanh/

But also SOOO depressing at the same time. The country is actually really really bad with trash and waste. The culture is literally to just toss trash into gutters. I can't tell you how many times on this trip alone that I've seen people just toss trash out car windows. Sigh...

Here is what is happening now, due to over farming, building dams everywhere and generally poor management...

https://www.instagram.com/p/C8Bk7jgvF65/

> everyone speaks at least a little English now. Attributed to being locked inside and a lot of YouTube

There was a push for English fluency in K-12 around 10 years ago. Most people you are bumping into are products of that era. The non-Saigon/Hanoi/DaNang/DaLat kids who didn't get that opportunity attended the hundreds of ESL schools like "Wall Street English" and "California English" in town

"Hi, what is your name? Where are you from?"

It was pretty mediocre and that was the depth of it.

Unless you're in a private school, my experience is that education here is still pretty poorly handled. Kind of "blind leading the blind".

What I'm seeing now is that even the older generations are speaking some English too now, where previously I would just get the infamous jazz hands.

I'm also in a big city... it'll be interesting to see how things are when I head out into the country side again.

> that education here is still pretty poorly handled. Kind of "blind leading the blind".

It is, but the tourism boom began around sa decade ago as well, which pushed (pidgin) English fluency front and forward in Tier 1 cities (eg - https://laodong.vn/chinh-sach-giao-duc/dieu-kien-lam-giao-vi...).

Most Vietnamese born after 1980 who consume foreign content prefer Korean, Chinese, and Japanese content over Western (based on my wife and her extended family's experience)

In Saigon at least there was a push for English teaching in K-12, and ik international teachers (mostly Pinoy) were hired as contractors to teach part time in that initiative.

> Most Vietnamese born after 1980 who consume foreign content prefer Korean, Chinese, and Japanese content over Western (based on my wife and her extended family's experience)

Agreed, I've noticed this as well from when I was living here before. The difference today is that I'm noticing more english youtube content being consumed. I wish we could see youtube stats on this.

My partner is 1983... grew up in D3... near perfect english... only likes western content. A bit of an oddball in that regard, which sets them apart mentally from the rest.

In Hoi An, locals are known for their English fluency since more than 10 years ago, when I came back there last year, I was blown away by so many locals speak Korean just as fluent.

Money talks. A decade ago a good portion of people could speak Russian in Da Nang because of the large number of Russian tourists that come to vacation on the beaches.

From what I understand, it is more now that the war in Ukraine is going on...

Glad to see human ingenuity at work here! Pictures in TFA remind me of scenes from the movie The Creator.

I can see this making sense for monitoring and observation and even for very targeted application of pesticides. But bulk application of pesticides and seed, I just can't imagine land vehicles aren't more efficient in terms of energy use and longevity. Maybe rice fields are particularly unsuited to it. But buying a drone as an investment for your children... I don't think it's gonna last that long.

Do you mean that you don't think the drone's electronics won't physically last long enough to pass down to their children? The lithium ion batteries will need to be replaced every few years, and eventually the motors and control boards and other parts will need to be replaced as well (rotors), but why wouldn't they be able to pass the drone and the skills and knowledge down to their children?

To go further, drone models will improve. Drones that last, Drones that can be repaired, the drones that can be maintained cheaply. These things should happen unless a monopoly forms...

Batteries need to be replaced, yes. But overall flying things need to be light, and light things are either flimsy or expensive and often both. So whatever the baseline is, it'll break more often than non-flying equipment.

> I just can't imagine land vehicles aren't more efficient

Farming drones aren’t all airborne. I guess the ones driving around on the ground might be called robots though? At least in English.

I imagine that the main reason these ones fly is because you can’t drive around a rice field as you mention. Here in Denmark though most drone tech aimed at farming drives around. Flying drones are mostly used for surveillance, to see which areas need to be watered and such.

As far as repairs go, drones aren’t that bad in comparison to a lot of other farm equipment. This is because farmers can 3D print almost every part of a drone. Of course some manufacturers are going to struggle with this, and this is actually one of the major reasons keeping farming tech “slow” since a lot of the actually sellable solutions are build by startups which John D and his friends struggle to figure out how to make money of something that’s cheap and easy to repair.

Anyway, farming drones is probably the most interesting field of technology you can work in right now. At least in my opinion.

> Farming drones aren’t all airborne. I guess the ones driving around on the ground might be called robots though? At least in English.

As far as the etymology goes, back in the days a drone was a male bee, so by default airborne. You can trace that meaning back two thousand years or so. It was first used to mean remote controlled aircraft in 1946.

Of course, languages evolve and now it can mean any untethered robot; air, land or sea.

Vietnam has lot of terrace farms done on side of hills. Maybe land vehicles aren't optimized for them.

Not really. We have a very small minority of them in picturesque areas that are extremely poor because making rice terraces is a last resort thing in poor farming areas.

The overwhelming majority of the rice comes from the Mekong and Red River Deltas which are, like all deltas, extremely flat.

Definitely not, unless you are in the highlands its all pretty flat. Most of the farming is happening in very flat land.

I am not so sure about that.

A lot of the farming that is happening in Vietnam is on these smaller scale farmer levels. Drones are a harder sell in America imo because you have large multi-hundred/thousand acre farms in a country optimized for cars. In Vietnam the farmer will have a much much smaller plot of land and in the countryside often the roads will look more like sidewalks to a westerner.

I am not sure how effectively you could move tractors around in the countryside and you would be doing it often with the size of these farms.

This was my thought but I suspect for rice farming its easier than wheeled based devices.

As you can imagine rice paddies are a bastard for wheels, because its muddy as fuck. Its not like its economical to put a cement pan underneath as some rice plants have >1m roots[1] so you can't treat it like watercress (thats a wild assertion, maybe you can)

Also, the banks that hold the water to make it a paddy are unlikely to be regular or load bearing. Moreover, the fields are not laid out with a road to link them all together.

So conventional tractor with thin wheels/floaters just won't work. And smaller vehicles are just impractically heavy or impossible to get into most fields.

As for the AI shit, I don't think there is acutally that much. It looks a lot like its just standard drone mapping/possible machine vision to detect the state of the crops/border of the field.

Would this scale up for western style large fields? no. but for small irregular terrace style fieldlets, it would

[1]https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/pdf/10.1626/pps.3.281

I have a friend that owns a huge forrest. Currently seedlings come from human harvesters who go into the forest and gather cones. This doesn't necessarily represent the best candidates, but 'good' candidates that people could get to. A drone that could gather cones from any tree would add to the diversity of future forests and allow better choice candidates to be selected.

Keeping ahead of beatles is a big thing for him. Better aerial detection would be good. Currently he misses stands that could have been managed better earlier.

Documenting and automating what current forresters would be huge because their kids aren't interested and aren't spending the time to learn and will be managing things much more like a farm than a healthy forest if they manage at all (most likely they will just harvest it all and then sell the land).

Despite this optimism, I wonder what the tradeoffs are for the drone services. Does it actually spray pesticide as thoroughly as a worker manually applying it? Can it spread seed and fertilizer as well as someone who has tended the land for decades? Is there really a difference in quality of produce?

It's a good question. One thing I can think of is that drones can accurately use a pre-determined map of which areas need how much of an input, in a way that would be really difficult for a human on the ground to do.

You are thinking way too hard about this. Vietnam is the wild west, there are some levels of cost optimization but these farmers are not usually well educated living in the poorer country side. In the country side you will just fill up your sprayer and chuck the fertilizer/pesticide packaging on the ground like your own personal landfill. Maybe you might every now and then collect some of the trash and create a fire that is no where hot enough to burn trash so it will smolder a wonderful scent for a day or so.

That guy spraying in the article is most definitely not wearing any PPE, maybe a cloth mask at best, fertilizers/pesticides have not been used in Vietnam for as long as they have in the rest of the world.

These drones are absolutely all benefits.

- No more guy inhaling chemicals all day.

- Hopefully more programmatic approach to spraying where some level of measurement is happening.

- If you have business being built around spraying, they will eventually optimize around using the right amount for their service.

Are drones being used in the US as well? This type of labor savings seems like a pretty obvious win. Of course I’m just a CRUD monkey living in the city so I have no idea how farmers actually operate.

Absolutely, and ironically, given recent news, I think DJI is one of the top manufacturers used.

VN and China have a FTA (part of the ASEAN FTA)

> Are drones being used in the US as well

Yes. We even funded a couple prominent players in the space that got acquired a decade ago.

Chicago, Champaign-Urbana, Pittsburgh, and Ames used to be hubs in this niche back then.

Yes. Until recently though, spraying by drone was a near impossible permitting nightmare (now it’s only a minor permitting nightmare) and was inefficient because you needed a Part 107 pilot and a Visual Observer for each individual drone. But, things have gotten better. Before, spray drones over 55lb (the limit for a Small UAS in the US) had to go through an experimental aircraft registration program and be granted a tail number. Now, a select list of drones are authorized for spray operations with a special waiver instead, which is way easier.

Interesting!

In Australia we see drones mapping areas that need to be sprayed, then that data is downloaded into a tractor which traverses the field spraying (or adding nutrient) according to data collected by the drone. Haven't heard of spraying drones yet

This makes way more sense. Spraying with drones is a huge waste of energy.

But driving a tractor over a field is a huge waste of land. Energy can be easily renewable in sunny regions such as vietnam.

Is it possible to buy a piece of land and just get a rule that says "I can pretty much fly anything 100 feet up in the air above my property"?

It's kindof frustrating that this isn't the case.

If you're a company developing drones, for instance, how do you even test them?

Just do whatever you want no one patrols for this. Someone would have to call it in then a cop would have to show and do something about it in a timely manner. Fat chance IMO. I see either hobbyist or real estate photography drones overhead my property all the time, no way any of that has a permit. How would I even report the tresspass? They are gone in a few minutes. Cops aren’t showing up that fast without a body.

People are getting away with using drones as you mentioned, but the FAA's rules have had a real chilling effect on the hobby, which is a problem. Where drone piloting is a now a necessary skill for soldiers to have, and we're not encouraging the hobby, I think the next few decades aren't going to play out as well as they could.

The sort of drones the military are going to pilot in the next few decades are going to be nothing like what you can pilot as a consumer. Either way the youth is trained pretty well for electronic warfare. Just mate the drone to a video game controller or a mouse and keyboard and people will be elite immediately just like they are the first day a new video game is released to the world.

That's not true. First, many operations the US military engages in are with partner nations who only have access to commercial drones. The US military is behind them in effectively utilizing these drones (commonly DJI, which the US military can't even practice with due to the ban). Second, there's a huge push to shorten the drone procurement process, and reduce the cost of drones. This allows them to be used in harsh EW environments as one-offs, and allows the operator to be safer (the more expensive the drone, the more likely a unit will be sent to recover it if it's downed). It also allows for faster adaptation to EW and changing circumstances. The US military drones of tomorrow will look a lot like Skydio drones today, if the US can get it together and update their procurement process to the 21st century.

Interesting listen to on the topic: https://irregularwarfare.org/podcasts/drones-automation-and-...

The military doesn't rely heavily on skills developed by hobbyists. In the vast majority of cases, you learn to shoot a rifle or drive a tracked vehicle or weld a nuclear reactor at the military's expense, after enlisting, even though you could have learnt those skills as a hobbyist. This isn't 15th century England where every man was required to keep a longbow and cricket was banned because it distracted from archery.

Just because you can learn to fly a drone at 18 after enlisting doesn't mean you wouldn't have more skilled populace to draw from if kids started flying drones at 12, every high school had a drone racing team, and there was a competitive sport at the level of the Superbowl. It's not the 15th century, it's 2024. Even if you don't want to call it world war III just yet, there's hot conflict in two regions and cold conflict elsewhere.

Conflict in two regions? You live in a dream world.

More like 100: https://geneva-academy.ch/galleries/today-s-armed-conflicts

I'd recommend not to rely on media for the topic "war" but to educate yourself. Otherwise you end up quickly in a war yourself:

> Naturally the common people don't want war . . . but after all it is the leaders of a country who determine policy, and it is always a simple matter to drag the people along, whether it is a democracy, or a fascist dictatorship, or parliament or a communist dictatorship

H. Göring

The Civilian Marksmanship Program begs to differ. Congress specifically established that program because too many military recruits were showing up without knowing even the basics of safe and accurate shooting.

https://www.usar.army.mil/News/News-Display/Article/1028255/...

...in 1903.

While the world has changed since 1903, the point remains that having a more educated population is desirable for a country to have.

Is above your property in a controlled airspace?

You'd probably get a license to fly drones to test the drones. Wouldn't you expect a test driver to have a driver's license?

In most (many?) US jurisdictions, you don't need a driver's license to drive on private property.

I would go so far as to claim ALL jurisdictions in the US. Does anyone have a counterexample?

I had thought that as well, but California provided a counter-example, at least for "privately owned roads which are shown as private roads on maps filed in the County Recorder’s office":

"9.24.020 Driving unlawful without license. No person shall drive a motor vehicle upon a private road unless they hold a driver’s license issued under the provisions of the California Vehicle Code, except such persons as are expressly exempted under the California Vehicle Code."

https://www.codepublishing.com/CA/SantaCruzCounty/html/Santa....

You can fly indoors, where the FAA has no jurisdiction (probably, ask a lawyer). You can get all kinds of waivers as well, but I don't know if there's one for that - they tend to be more one-off exemptions from a single regulation, type of thing. There are some dedicated test sites as well where the FAA might be more relaxed with the regulations: https://www.faa.gov/uas/programs_partnerships/test_sites/loc...

Most companies though probably have a part 107 pilot on staff, or have had some of their employees in other roles certified as such.

Until recently, we manually checked fields before mowing in order to flag fawns.

Now it's done by drone (and IR makes for good contrast).

Yes! I know of at least one instance where a farmer in Colorado is using them for seeding and pesticide spray.

But can they mount speakers and play Ride of the Valkyries

Anyone know the model name of the drone used?

Looks like a DJI Agras model to me! Amusing considering the recent news regarding DJI being banned.

One reason of them being banned is they are very good and hence very popular.

The main reason is a fear - which as far as I know is unsubstantiated - that China's got backdoors in tech sold in the west. But with so many hackers and national security agencies disassembling and analyzing these things, surely they'd have found it by now?

Therefore, I wouldn't be surprised if it's more about market protection. Which doesn't make much sense to me because is there a major US drone manufacturer that can't compete with DJI right now?

It's a fear that US has no similarly competitive drone companies

Check out Guardian Ag

> with so many hackers and national security agencies disassembling and analyzing these things, surely they'd have found it by now

This is a common misconception. With OTA updates, the backdoor can be introduced at any time in a future software version. For example, right before an attack.

I'm not sure whether they can be exported even if DJI is not banned.

Just check [0], their latest agricultural drone T60 sold in China has 60KG payload and AESA radars. (No English page provided)

They also has a T50 [1] with English introduction page.

While the air force of some countries in the world still does not have AESA, DJI already uses AESA to grow crops.

[0] https://ag.dji.com/cn/t60/specs

[1] https://ag.dji.com/t50/specs

If we are moving to neo feudalism, even upper middle class families might have a better air force than many smaller and poorer countries.

Article says brand is XAG so must be one of these: https://www.xa.com/en/plant-protection-uas The photo looks like either XAG P100 or P100 Pro.

>> fly the drone with no physical effort and no direct exposure to pesticides—some of which have been associated with diseases of the eyes, ears, nose, throat, skin, and gastrointestinal tract.

Slightly tangential, but what's the thinking here?

We don't want to get it on us while spraying it, but then we'll eat it and it'll be fine?

Rice grows inside a husk. And, white so-called "polished" rice has the outer coat removed. So, insecticide/pesticide residue on the surface isn't such a big deal, even for brown rice.

Ingesting and breathing in the concentrations of insecticide associated with spraying is orders of magnitude worse risk to the farm worker and people around, than incidental food contact risk post production/packaging.

Many chemicals are also broken down in sunlight and water, or are absorbed into the rootstock, not the fruiting body.

(not an agronomist or food scientist. I too wondered at the Merryl Streep ad 30 years ago where she's washing broccoli with soap..)

> Merryl Streep ad 30 years ago where she's washing broccoli with soap..

???

https://academic.oup.com/chicago-scholarship-online/book/173...

In 1989, Meryl Streep became the celebrity spokesperson for a Natural Resources Defense Council campaign to publicize the risks of pesticides and chemicals applied to food, especially the danger of Alar-laced apples consumed by young children.

I'm pretty sure you will eat some, yes.

However, irrigation and the rice's own metabolism will remove some pesticide. And rice grains have a peel which is later removed, often after a drying process at somewhat high temperatures, which will further degrade "safe" pesticides.

This is just the best compromise we can make between labor cost (both financial and human; I have worked in rice crops and it is no joke) and safety, practically speaking. If I had to dream a better solution, I would have our crops grow in completely artificial environments out of planet, while tended by robots. Then insecticides wouldn't be needed, and genetic manipulation would be less of an issue. But, as they say, choose your dreams.

Yes, that's the thinking.

To elaborate that thinking: when absorbed in the quantities experienced by a farm worker in this context, some pesticides can have irritant or toxic effects. They (or rather their application methods and cocktails) are designed not to permeate the food products of the plant, although some do with some foods and this is ongoing research. Farmers need to consistently produce healthy produce people can afford, and want to do as little harm as possible to people in the process.

> We don't want to get it on us while spraying it, but then we'll eat it and it'll be fine?

I suspect that a big part of the issue is the amount of exposure.

Dental x-rays aren't dangerous to the patient, but they are dangerous to the dental technician, because they're (potentially) exposed to many x-rays every day.

Same deal here - if you consume say... 100 lbs of rice a year that's not that big of a deal. But if the worker is spraying entire fields - they're just in contact with a lot more pesticide. And that's beyond the fact that white rice has the husk removed, etc.

The laborers spraying the pesticides get an order of magnitude more exposure, repeatedly and in its raw, most harmful form.

While we do consume some amounts of them it’s minuscule, more so when the food is prepared after proper washing and boiling/fried etc.

The thinking is that you clean the food before eating it.

Without getting in too deep, a lot of pesticides we use degrade in sunlight and/or water. So as long as it isn't sprayed near the end of harvest, where it would then be stored in a dark dry place, most agricultural chemicals will have degraded.

Some pesticides are short-lasting agents, which are acutely toxic, to the target pest, and also humans. But they dissipate or break down fairly quickly. Even just pure nitrogen or carbon dioxide gas can be used for pest control, and a minute of venting makes it safe after. Come to think, fully automated warehouses handling food, could be kept under an oxygen-free atmosphere. Probably impractical but it'd substantially reduce spoilage and it'd stop any rats or cockroaches pretty quick.

(Of course, the history of pesticides is full of pesticides that don't actually dissipate, or break down, as much as claimed.)

Is there any innovation in sowing rice?

What kind of innovation are you thinking about? They have transplanting machines in various sizes if that's what you're thinking about: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rice_transplanter.

You guys reckon with a big enough drone (or a few of them) you could hoist a pivot line spin it around the center, then fly to a new field to rinse and repeat. Get rid of those monstrously huge Fixed Center Pivot that are only in use 15% of the year??

Slightly related, but a bit off-topic, too :-)

If you are interesting in planning agriculture, with or without drones, you can help us by filling out our survey:

https://survey.permaplant.net/

I wonder if drones will change the placement of farms. Right now, farms are very wide and flat, this makes it easier for tractors and spraying pesticides.

Would be interesting to see overtime.

Terraced paddy fields have been used for centuries in countries such as Sri Lanka (where I'm from), Bangladesh, Vietnam and Indonesia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paddy_field#/media/File:Pana_B...

Even if you can do all other crop tending from the air, in the end you'll still need the tractor to harvest, pulling a heavier trailer than all crop tending jobs would have required.

So I think flat, reasonably level fields will stay with us for some time.

Most of these high tech drones are from DJI (check out the Agra lineup). You know who has great use for that? US farmers. Instead they get an all-out ban on DJI and they’re stuck with provider-locked John Deere tractors.

I really don’t understand how easy it can be to fool the American public just by saying “national security”, even when it’s clear that large parts of the public will not be best served by Washington’s “China bad!!!” policies.

Because the Blobs saw how's drone perform in Ukraine war and they are spooked that US has no national champions for drones.

>>even when it’s clear that large parts of the public will not be best served by Washington’s “China bad!!!” policies.

The majority of the public do not own or fly drones. The government has bigger concerns than a few people getting burnt on their DJI purchase.

Disposable drones are the future of warfare. Would you really want to subsidize China's ability to develop and manufacture them? While also letting China collect data from drones flying over your country? Better to rip that bandaid off sooner rather than later imo.

At Guardian Ag we’re building aerial products for American scale farms. This tech is taking off world wide!

Sorry, but an overwhelming amount of people commenting in here are extremely ignorant of the modern agri-food system.

The notion that robots and drones will eliminate monocultures and chemical inputs is wildly untrue. In some minor cases they will reduce the need.

It amazes me that software engineers think they have the panacea for whatever faults they see in our food system without a full understanding and history of it.

TLDR:

> Because drones spray or scatter the ideal concentration uniformly over a precise area, farmers require less pesticide and fertilizer than they would if applying materials by hand, says XAG engineer Long Hung.

I hope Long Hung knows that for sure and not just fantasizes.

What about using drones to spread and plant seeds? Is that something being done?

> The drones can be configured to scatter seed, spray pesticide, or spread fertilizer.

It's right there in the article.

Completely missed that somehow. Thanks!

In the article they didn't write about side effect but In Turkey My relatives also using drones for rice farming. And trees are dying since they need to fly drones higher then trees. Birds are dying as well.

Previously I remember there were so many birds but now there is none. I also remember there were frogs, snakes etc. and now there is none.

I doubt that it's drones causing those issues. More likely it's the poor environmental practices carried out in Turkey. Turkey is a truly beautiful country, but most of the natural beauty is falling to disuse as the government prioritizes other industry, of course with a massive dollop of corruption on the side.

Why you doubt that? Before drones there were no issues about birds at least. I hope Vietnam will not have same future since they are not Turkey.

I dont get it.

I dont farm rice or have experience in vietnam in particular. Yet in my experience, pesticide etc has always been done thru the already existing irrigation system with a pump.

Of course with advice from a technical person.

The irrigation system requires an upfront investment of course but you are already going to irrigate the plot so this is is a no brainer. Therefore unless the rice grows without any irrigation system, I dont see how drones could be any more cost effective.

I know rice is traditionally grown on flooded plains but that seems very risky - you are leaving your harvest in the hands of nature. Is Vietnam still growing rice subject to the whims of nature?

I'm pretty sure the irrigation system is flooding the plot. You set up berms and then periodically flood the entire plot with water. This isn't subject to the whims of nature because the flooding is done intentionally by farmers.

Rice fields are flooded as a means of weed control, but flooded fields also generate a lot of methane. There are direct seeded crop variants coming that eliminate the need for flooding.

https://www.bayer.com/en/agriculture/rice-practices

> I dont farm rice

> I know rice is traditionally grown on flooded plains but that seems very risky

A recurring HN trope is people who don't know about a subject feel like they have to have an opinion on it anyway. Why do you believe it's very risky / in the hands of nature? Flooded plains (aka rice paddies) have been used for thousands of years; rice is a semiaquatic plant so it needs to be submerged, and paddies are designed to retain water to not be subject to the whims of nature.

Anyway, what alternative are you suggesting? Keep in mind it has to be scalable to feed billions and affordable.

History is also replete with droughts that killed millions of people

We are in 2025. We have plastics.

Anyway thats nit my question. My question was simple: how is is that continued, ongoing drone expense -into perpetutity- was cheaper than a one-time investment in irrigation system which can be used for water, pesticide, and even fertilizer?

> We are in 2025

Irrigation pipes have tiny holes which can be blocked by calcium deposit in hard water. You'll need filters, a lot of filters in order to operate them, and the filters needd to change for like every year or so, so it's not a one-time investment.

What you are missing is that as it grows most of the rice is not underwater. You need pesticides to protect what's above the water. Average height is about 4 feet (1.2 meters).

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