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.
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 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.
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)
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.
It's an interesting problem and I am sure reference designs already exist. Maybe talk to someone at Nordic.
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.
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!)
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.
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?
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.
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.
See the book gardening with less water by David A. Bainbridge
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.
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.
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.
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.
So why isn't it done today? Probably still cheaper to rely on the weather or center pivot irrigation.
Put another way, drip is massively parallel. Robot waterers, not so much.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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/
As a result, we're still going to optimize for the most productive use of robots, just as we do for humans.
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.
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.
Changing farming methods along with automation might work better, like vertical farming techniques.
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.
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?
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).
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/
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.
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.
Indirectly by increasing yield per acre per day.
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.
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).
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.
Btw, I don't think plants are close to optimal efficiency in terms of using sunlight. See eg C3 vs C4 plants.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
If you want to see less fertile land covered up make it easier for people to make money growing on their own land.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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-...
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.
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...
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.