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Comment by arcadeparade | Hacker News Reader

I think there's a lot of low hanging fruit for hackers to make improvements to agriculture.

Unless that was an excuse for a pun (and I have no problem with that), you are underestimating how much work has gone into farm automation. All the industrialized countries have worked on this for decades, with some successes (GPS-guided tractors with pesticide spay patterns guided by aerial photography, good old milking machines, etc). This is a multi-billion dollar business in most countries and also a strategic issue of food security.

Israel in particular has spent a fortune on research into robotizing fruit production, since they have money but have complex relations with neighbours that make cheap labour immigration unreliable. They are working very hard on all the literal hanging fruit.

The newly-cheap aerial photography with drones is going to have a big impact. It's starting already.

Yeah, definitely.

The problem is that a farm is a dirty, corrosive, and stochastic place.

Equipment needs to be tough as nails and able to deal with each unique farmers challenges.

Things I see on the horizon :

Robotic weeding is going to be a HUGE deal. Improved robotic harvesting also. These both are almost entirely reliant on robust computer vision that can survive days in the field.

Drones are going to also be a huge deal. Imagine a quad copter that can go out and sample your 1000 hectares of fields, spotting disease or nutrient deficiency from images taken from above.

The promise is big, but integrating tech seamlessly is going to be damn hard.

"Drones are going to also be a huge deal. Imagine a quad copter that can go out and sample your 1000 hectares of fields, spotting disease or nutrient deficiency from images taken from above."

I believe that one is already a reality. Some quick Googling turns up: http://www.precisiondrone.com/drones-for-agriculture.html I'm pretty sure I saw a TV special too.

You don't even need a drone for that: http://www.terravion.com/

The FAA recently approved drones for agriculture use: http://diydrones.com/profiles/blogs/faa-officially-permits-d...

How about robotic pest control?

I don't know if this is meant to be pithy or serious, but I think I disagree. Agriculture is big business, farmers are smart people, and there is a history of lots of mechanization and interesting technology being applied. The productivity gains that we've already seen in the last hundred years (and before) are tremendous.

I'm sure that there are areas to be improved upon, but I expect a lot of the low hanging fruit has been picked, as it were.

I also tend to think of farmers as the original hackers, they often have problems, and they cobble together a solution that might not be pretty, but works.

I'm being serious. I come from a farming family and see companies selling new technology at huge prices, and other areas where nothing has been done.

Once I finished some other projects I'll looking into Arduino or something similar to start hacking at some ideas I have.

By the way, you are indeed right that farmers have already done most of the hacking themselves.

I'm interested in your opinions on holes in the market - is it a cost thing? Also, if you want to bounce ideas around, my email is in my profile.

He's right. I don't know about openings where absolutely nothing is being done, but I see opportunities for simplifying and bringing costs down. A lot of farm machinery is geared towards large producers with prices to match, leaving smaller farms to either DIY or do without.

I have/had a few ideas I was researching and at least one I plan on testing on my own acreage this summer. Figuring out how to market to a population that doesn't seem to have a big online presence is the hurdle I haven't crossed yet.

Unfortunately, some of these productivity gains have been in the wrong direction from a sustainability and health standpoint.

One of the things that I'm looking at (as a hobby research topic) are automating managed intensive rotational grazing for cattle and remote herd management.

I just picked up my first client in the sector last Friday.

Can you discuss what you'll be doing?

It's probably not a big deal, but there are a few things to sign yet. Most of my analysis work is related to developing peptide-drug conjugates, so this will be a departure. The general idea is to improve on a specific QC process for acquired field data, adjusting correction factors on the basis of observed phenomena. The results should boil down to improved efficiency in some regard, but I'm not sure about the specifics yet.

I'm very interested. Could you please elaborate some more?

> I think there's a lot of low hanging fruit

Surely, these projects sow the seeds of eventual progress.

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