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.
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).
$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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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).
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?
>> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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?
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.
> 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...
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.
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.
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.
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".
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.
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.)
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.
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.
> - 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.
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.)
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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?
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.
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...
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.
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
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).
Readit News
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).
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.
https://www.opensourceecology.org/
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.
See the book gardening with less water by David A. Bainbridge
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).
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Countryfile
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Shout out to Tractor Wars, which I never expected to enjoy as much as I did.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UgtHQUi8AvQ
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.)
I work for john deere. But I don't have non public information and I don't speak for the company.
Very unfortunate for cows that they're able to produce milk for human consumption.
Of course, the individual cow might (or might not!) disagree.
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.)
Milking is the least bad thing we do to them, I would recommend focusing more on other parts of farming/ranching if you care.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mosquito_laser
aka Vaporware
https://youtube.com/watch?v=V3A6L2Dao6s
Great idea, I hope it works.
https://royalsociety.org/science-events-and-lectures/2024/06...
There’s almost a 7 hour video posted on Vimeo on the page.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
The overwhelming majority of the rice comes from the Mekong and Red River Deltas which are, like all deltas, extremely flat.
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
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).