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Comment by torlok | Hacker News Reader

This is a Juicero of farming. The whole setup is easily replaced with a raised garden bed and a drip hose. Hearing about this a few years back, I was hoping it would at least do some weed control, but no.

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It is indeed a juicero of farming. It costs 4 grand for something that can handle a single garden bed. This is not suitable for even small commerical growers, they'd need hundreds of these things.

All commercial growers in my latitude start by sprouting their plants indoors, using e.g. soil blocks. Very little is direct sown.

If you practice no-till, weeding isn't even that big of a task.

This thing definitely does not provide value.

Value for me is to scratch the zombie apocalypse itch.

One feature request is some form of animal and pest protection. Squirrels and cardinals eat a majority percentage of the veggies in my raised bed here in Austin. I think some bats eat the vegetables as well but that’s difficult to validate.

How does it scratch that itch. This thing can plant seeds and water the plants. You can just run a hose through your raised bed and have a timer on your water valve. This thing won't grow food for you. If you're worried about the apocalypse, then start researching how seeds are produced, because your apocalypse garden plan will probably die right there.

You believe that this thing will have more usefulness in an apocalypse scenario? I think that anything high-tech immediately becomes far less useful if the infrastructure that supports modern electronics and computers collapses.

Some kind of high tech squirrel protection like mesh?

> The rotary tool features a 24 volt DC motor, interchangeable implements, and an adjustable motor angle allowing FarmBot to perform light duty weed whacking, soil surface milling, and drilling operations.

I'd expect either a camera setup to find and kill weeds, or at least a basic weeder that sweeps the soil and avoids the vegetables the bot planted, same as you'd do on an organic farm. Instead what you get is an attachment you have to fiddle with and manually point towards the weeds. It's a toy.

Wouldn't sweeping the soil be the equivalent of tilling? Thought the farm industry was moving to no-till to prevent nutrient run off from water and wind. I know University of Iowa has done a number of studies that show tilling is long-term harmful to the soil composition.

*fixed typo

Not at all. It has nothing to do with tilling. We're just talking about mechanical weed control using a rotary hoe or a tine weeder. The job of a tine weeder is to pull out the weeds just as they sprout.

The downsides of tilling happen because you flip the soil at a depth of 25-35cm, which disturbs the micro and macro fauna, and builds a layer of crust that the roots have a hard time penetrating, especially if you till in wet conditions. The issues with erosion are more a result of prolonged exposure of uncovered soil to the elements. You're not going to do any of that in a raised garden bed.

> I was hoping it would at least do some weed control, but no.

Looks like it does do weeding, kinda https://genesis.farm.bot/v1.7/assembly/tools

Drip irrigation is a PIA to setup in my experience. This looks a lot easier.

You have to correctly size and adjust every nozzle and need different sizes of pipe as you get further from the hose. It's more difficult than you would think.

A lot of the pieces fit together by friction alone and are a pain to put together. You have to use boiling water to soften the pipes in order to connect them without breaking them. It requires quite a bit of elbow grease.

EDIT: I think I must have responded to the wrong comment. Rereading my reply doesn't make sense in context...

Why not just bigger field instead of several raised beds and tape-irrigation connected to one pipe on the side?

What type of drip irrigation lines were you using? The ones I've used didn't require softening.

It’s a bit like a pick-n-place and conformal coat setup for circuit boards except gardening has none of the requirements for precision of circuit boards.

This kind of thing seems to be happening more and more as people get more and more disconnected from the specific fundamental reasons why we do things.

This is like building and programming a home-building robot to build one house, and then just leaving it on site to redo the roof every 20 years.

I agree. What they should have done is make the raised bed thinner and build a wheeled rover for planting. In exchange for having smaller beds, you can now let the rover service dozens of beds. The irrigation system should be integrated directly into the beds and the rover merely tries to check the soil moisture to conserve water and prevent mold.

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