The amount of labor involved in grain crops like barley per dollar of output is minimal already - the guy running the tractor/combine/etc is mostly making sure nothing breaks and keeping an eye on things (which is important when you're operating $N00,000 worth of heavy equipment on open ground). You do need guys, however, for when things do go wrong, and for all the other farm tasks (equipment maintenance, fencing, maintaining irrigation, and so on).
Imagine, though, a time when the automation reaches a stage where all weeding and most insect killing can be done mechanically with a robot instead of chemically with pesticides. That will be a huge boon for the environment and for farmers' bottom lines.
Peter Corke and his huge team at QUT are doing great stuff in this area. They have spot-spraying robots, that zap only weeds and fertilize only crops, and also a great device that just mechanically smashes up weeds one-by-one.
Peter has an admirable ability to choose projects and deliver the goods on them. Robotics needs more like him.
The environment perhaps, but would it really be better for the bottom line? Mechanical weed control already lost out to chemicals because the chemicals were cheaper.
On top of that, chemical applicators are relatively simple and proven technology with few moving parts. Farm equipment isn't like your car that can go 100,000 miles without problem. Moving parts on farm equipment will break – constantly. On top of that, computer technology does not come cheap when it is low volume specialized systems, built to withstand the harsh environments of agriculture.
I have no doubt the technology is possible, but I do wonder if it is possible in a price range that would actually improve the bottom line.
Yup. A few days ago we (60 people) got bought by John Deere for $305M b/c our machine reduced herbicides by 90% using CV/ML. Our only moving part was a solenoid. Would not have survived if it had been more complicated. You clearly get it.
You bring up a good point that I forgot about. Some of these chemicals, like Roundup, are not just for pest control, but serve other purposes such as desiccation. Since you are going to need a chemical applicator anyway, a second machine to duplicate functionality further increases the cost ineffectiveness.
Not only that, but what I am sure most would consider the most devastating type of chemical in recent times, neonicotinoids, are applied as a seed treatment, planted with the planter. Even if you could devise an advanced machine that continually keeps pests from eating the seed while it is buried beneath the ground, that requires trips over the field that are currently not required at all. It is tough to compete with no additional trips over the field. Energy and wear is expensive and potentially devastating to the environment, including issues like carbon emissions and topsoil depletion.
(Neonics are already banned where I farm, but it is a good illustration of how chemicals can sometimes eliminate the need for machinery altogether and how the robo-pest terminator has to be able to compete with that)
The robots don’t have to necessarily compete with traditional farming.
They just have to make Naturland/Bioland/Demeter style organic farming (which except for very rare cases not even allow any chemical pesticides or herbicides) cheap enough that it becomes competitive.
I think it's a myth that Roundup is used as a desiccant.
However the robots are not trying to replace chemicals. As you point out, that's a losing proposition. But they can definitely reduce overall man-hours, and so provide constant value as long as they operate.
The impact on the final price of the produce matters more than the comparison to pesticides.
Like if pesticides represent 0.1 percent of the retail price of some vegetable, I personally would consider it reasonable to spend 10x avoiding some pesticides. Because it would only have a modest impact at retail.
I am interested to see how the pest ecosystem evolves in response to robotic "predators"... Can insects evolve effective camouflage? Will weeds evolve to mimic cash crops?
How will fungi/bacteria/viruses respond to a lack of other pests?
Something very similar to that has already happened - in (very often hand-weeded) rice, shattering appears to have evolved to de-domesticate the crop - making it essentially impossible for 'weedy' rice to be distinguished from the real thing - https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2013/07/130717132418.h...
It's here now. Blue River makes LettuceBot, which is a machine-vision system for killing weeds in lettuce fields. The machine is towed behind a tractor, looks down at the lettuce and weeds, and zaps weeds and too-close-together lettuce plants with targeted sprays of concentrated fertilizer.[1] It's a full neural net vision system, with many cameras and software borrowed from face recognition. They train the system with pictures of weeds and pictures of good plants, and as it rolls over the field, it targets the bad stuff and sprays it.
This isn't experimental. It's now owned by John Deere and is currently doing 10% of the US lettuce crop. Next, cotton. There's no problem with plants becoming resistant to weed-killers. Unless pigweed learns to look like lettuce, it's going to get zapped.
It's sold as a service. For $220 an acre, Blue River comes and zaps your weeds. Now available in the Salinas Valley and Yuma, AZ.
Insects are never gonna be killed mechanically, those are too small and too many in count. Modern trend is to use biological controll: you "plant" organism that eat them or eat their eggs.
Just to expand on my comment, biological control is quite varied, but the main theme is selectivity: you don't want to destroy all the insects or butterflies, just those who do harm to your produce.
So you basically have couple of forms, either some microbes, viruses or some form of insects that eat on just one type of insect or of insect class. Another main form is pheromone confusion thingies: you put them in your orchard/vineyard/market garden and it make hard for males of your target pest to find female and procreate.
Certain pests (mainly large beetles or their larvae) used to be controlled by removing them manually - it's more expensive than pesticides, but it was feasible (and worth it!) to do it simply by bunch of people going over the crops. This means that they could be controlled mechanically in the future.
We are absolutely not. Productive farmland in the USA is fairly expensive and farmers are extremely interested in preserving its value. Most "destroyed" topsoil is due to eg suburban developments spreading into former agricultural areas, but it's still minimal in the grand scheme of things.
Development of arable land is a problem, but our agricultural practices are a major one. I think shanev is speaking about the effects of modern agriculture on top soil. We should prioritise the _creation_ of soil. Instead, top soil is being degraded and then lost though erosion. There are other issues, such as the planting of monocultures, overuse of nitrogen fertilizers and so on.
As climate change brings us longer droughts and larger downpours, we should be farming in ways that build top soil for more resilient farmland.
Yes this is exactly what I was getting at. Thanks for putting it more eloquently than I did. I’m just used to getting downvoted anytime I talk about monoculture farming, soil, and climate change so I don’t put effort into it anymore.
I think the pro-GMO crowd thinks talking about sustainable farming is anti-science when it actually involves more science at a macro level to understand the effects of synthetic monoculture farming on soil, and it’s effects on climate change.
"Imagine, though, a time when the automation reaches a stage where all weeding and most insect killing can be done mechanically with a robot instead of chemically with pesticides. "
Why bother with that when we already have controlled facilities where pests simply can't gain a foot hold in the first place, making that labor totally unnecessary?
I don't think you understand how indoor vertical farming works. In 1/8 of an acre you can produce an entire acre of crops, utilizing upwards of 99% less resources.
To boot, you don't even need tractors to harvest. You can just pull the entire tray yourself once the NFT solution's drained from the channel.
I can take 1/8th of an acre of land, and produce a full acre of wheatgrass in two weeks and harvest it myself with no mechanical methods required in less than a couple of hours.
Some of my family members drive truck at farms during harvest and I've rode along a lot. The guy driving the combine can mostly be automated except the part of having to stop and clear out metal or other jams that stop them. The machines have sensors which shut them down instantly when they detect metal because the cutter is expensive as hell. Not sure there's really a way to automate that. There's a lot of other less common things that cause the chopper to stop but foreign debris is the most common.
As far as field trucks go, well they're mostly old 15+ years with new-ish trailers because well trucking doesn't pay shit so it'll be long time before self driving trucks replace the current fleet (you have to figure the new trucks on the road now will because part time field trucks 20 years from now). If can get GPS accurate enough you could automate a lot of it, but trucks get stuck all the time in the field which mean the guy driving the chopper has to stop and pull the truck out.
It'll be tricky to automate all the weird oddities you come across out in the field. In the end these guys aren't making very much so the cost benefit doesn't really seem to be there but we'll see.
I had one vineyard planted this year using fully automatic planter using gps and laser mavigation. There was driver inside, but he was just a controller: once he moved few cm out of the path whole thing just shut down and he had to drive back to spot.
Yeah this isn't terribly exciting. People have been demoing self driving tractors and farm machinery for decades. Ford had one in the 1950s. Most of the hard work like actually picking the crop has already been solved, and making the tractor self driving just saves a few hours of work at most.
What would be really cool is automating crops that still require lots of manual labor. Like vegetables. That's the reason they are still so expensive. An automated greenhouse would be enormous news.
My observations have been that vegetables are so inexpensive they're often thrown away?
Obviously these cheap crops are often grown in a monetarily cheap but environmentally destructive way but I've no idea where you're seeing these expensive vegetables for sale?
I meant expensive in a relative sense. A pound of corn is a few cents, a pound of vegetables is a few dollars (it's far worse when you compare price per calorie.) Maybe expensive is the wrong word to use, but the economic impact of automating this would be quite enormous. And I have seen people complain that eating healthier is more expensive.
> What would be really cool is automating crops that still require lots of manual labor. Like vegetables. That's the reason they are still so expensive.
Same deal with coffee beans, which contributes to their higher price. The coffee beans do not ripen at the same time, so they must be hand-picked so the worker can identify which ones are ready. Lots of manual labor.
And with coffee being so widely consumed, savings here would easily be felt by a lot of people, although I doubt Starbucks would like it...
Why would starbucks be against lowered supply prices? Either the whole market drops in price and starbucks keeps the same profit margin but lowers actual price, or starbucks just sells the same price but now with higher margins than before
Because Starbucks has found a carefully balanced point between being affordable enough that it has mainstream appeal, and expensive enough that it seems premium.
Any change, absolute or relative, would reduce their margin.
Do you claim that the current price of coffee beans is the price that happens to maximise Starbucks' profits? (This seems implausible to me, unless Starbucks has fairly strong control over the price of coffee beans.)
Interesting. Between farm labor automation and self-driving cars, do you foresee a point where it's cost effective to give certain foods away for free and monetize via advertising? Even if it's slightly offbeat stuff like dandelion greens and seaweed or whatever?
I wonder if there will come a time when buying food harvested by stoop labor will be considered immoral. Perhaps human diets should target foods that can be produced through mechanization where possible.
It's a very nice proof of concept. Also I bet these guys collected a lot of info important to develop robots for more finicky crops. This could be the most valuable part of the project.
This is essentially the argument against automation - that a human is so versatile, we can be "programmed" (convinced, paid, trained, etc.) to perform many disparate tasks. Our exception handling is so robust (what happens if it floods?) that it's a problem solving engine unto itself. As with a grocery store, the self-check machines can't sweep the floor or stock shelves when business is slow.
> You do need guys, however, for when things do go wrong, and for all the other farm tasks (equipment maintenance, fencing, maintaining irrigation, and so on).
How far away is automation of those kinds of tasks, I wonder? I don't have much of any idea, myself.
Very far away. Computers can't even drive cars autonomously yet, which is a far simpler task. As it stands computers can't deal with any sort of irregularity that humans would deal with through basic creativity. I've also not seen robots plan fine manipulation yet, even though I feel that should be achievable with current technology.
Wasn't there a huge multi-rotor that cost $15,000 haha, it was water proof I think and had radar... crazy. I really like the concept of little robots running around doing their thing. Like those under water drones that are in the oceans.
True, but that is because the farmers have access to huge fields which let them deploy their equipment efficiently. Autonomous farming would let you theoretically use more marginal lands which are not currently suitable for manual farming.
I expect you are suggesting that small parcels of land that are far away from large fields are not worth the travel expenses? I'm not sure that robots really improve on that, as fuel, wear and tear, etc. going field to field remain a big detractor. There are plenty of farmers who do it for fun. They'd be happy to spend the time in the machine if labour costs were the only reason to avoid those fields.
I already farm a field that is one acre in size and one that is three acres because they are near to a large field that does justify the travel costs. Any that fit that description are likely to be already in production.
Not necessarily small - mostly marginal(I should have mentioned that it wasn't necessarily sheer size of field, but something like size*quality in my original post). I don't agree with your characterization about farmers doing it for fun. I'm sure there are a lot of people, say, within 10 miles of a major city who would farm for fun, but outside of that radius you mostly have people who either already have farms or manually farm on their own house plot.
> I should have mentioned that it wasn't necessarily sheer size of field, but something like sizequality in my original postl*
Understood. Marginal traditionally refers to the quality, but I wasn't sure how you thought the math would work. And since you mentioned size before, I went in that direction.
I am still unsure of how the math would work out. I have a farm that is already bordering on marginal and even ignoring labour costs it is difficult to turn a profit. Honestly, labour costs are a drop in the bucket. It costs hundreds of dollars per acre for input costs (seed, fertilizer, fuel, etc.), there is a significant capital cost to having the land and the machinery, while the labour if I paid myself minimum wage would be maybe $10 per acre over the course of the year. And I think that's pushing it. That is only 2% of the input costs when my other input costs are $500.
If a field is only 2% shy of not being marginal, I'm certain there is already someone trying to make it work.
> I don't agree with your characterization about farmers doing it for fun.
Well, that's why I do it, so I have some experience there. If it was about the money, I know software development pays far better.
> but outside of that radius you mostly have people who either already have farms
I was assuming that those who farm for fun would already have their own farm. However, now that you mention it, I always see the retired farmers are still keen to get back into the equipment, so it is not strictly limited to those who have their own farms. Living hours away from the nearest city, I don't really see it being an activity of those near the city.
How much thoughts have been put to improve farming beside fertilizers and pesticides ?
I do wish for better food, and better life for farmers. Also I'm quite annoyed by mainstream tech (find it often uselessly improving the wrong parts of life).
Agricultural machinery size is now limited by train tunnel size for delivery.
Larger farm vehicles, although more productive per person are heavier and cause soil compaction, which then requires further treatments to fix. Mention was made of light robot tractors able to work wet fields earlier before they are dry enough for a heavy human tractor so extending they growing season. They show an example of a light weight tractor that can drive up and down on a wet field without turning it into mud.
> There’s still dirt, early mornings, dirt, more dirt
I have always wondered who are these farmers in the dirt in the early morning? Where I farm the environment is rarely suitable for 'being in the dirt' in the morning. Typically the field work starts in the mid-afternoon after the sun has had a chance to dry up the morning's dew or previous days rain. There are definitely some late nights though.
Im on a small hobby farm outside Brisbane. Mid afternoon you want to be inside to get out of the heat. Mornings are prime time to get things done. Or later afteenoon.
Hot arid climates? In the CA central valley there will be little dew in the morning in summer as it's probably already 70+ degrees F, so the earlier the better.
what I am interested in is robots that can reforest unused land. Imagine the possibilities with having armies of robots re-establishing green cover in Amazon delta. kinda like this but with robots:https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_GreenHands
good thing is that would be not require nearly as much 'babysitting' as growing crops just ability to charter uneven terrain.
It said that the capital to do this was $200,000 -- what was the inventory of robots required to accomplish this.
What will it take to have a small fleet of robots to manage small farms - but many small farms.
What if a community of gardens and farms were dispersed around a neighborhood/small town - and the town shared the use of the autonomous robots wherever possible.
Which robots are common to all farms and which robots are specific to a given crop?
Also, the downplay the robot-management tasks (refueling, recharging, interceding in really bad weather to tell the robots "that'll do robot, no farming today" sort of stuff)
An open library of farm robots, the tasks they can do, their cost options, how much crop area /number of farms/acres they can manage, if they can multi-task between activities specific to tomatoes in one farm and corn in another etc...
That would be interesting data.
Then couple that with the open source civilization plans - and update those to make those items more intelligent for efficiencies in their designed tasks.
In 100 years, if we can get an atmosphere on mars, we just send a fully automated pre-colonizing farm fleet to prep our invasion.
Regardless, we could still have a fleet of robots go build structures there, then another that will grow things in the structures...
We talk about sending men to mars, but I think it's short-sighted to not first figure out how to send and deploy resources and robots to pre-build infrastructure for said humans - and we should be practicing on the moon.
Or why is it that nobody seems to be talking about this? And specifically talking about practicing in the moon?
Spacex is really focused on a rocket that can get to mars, how much more quickly can it get to the moon?
> We talk about sending men to mars, but I think it's short-sighted to not first figure out how to send and deploy resources and robots to pre-build infrastructure for said humans - and we should be practicing on the moon.
As far as I know SpaceX is focusing on sending "stuff" to Mars, not just humans. Humans are better than robots in many ways though, as in they can do a lot of more versatile stuff. We can build rovers to explore and take pictures, but building a robot that can mimic the palette of actions of a typical human is far beyond our reach at the moment.
I thought that we're really not sure if even the dust on either our moon or Mar is that compatible with human life. This article is more than ten years old so we possibly have newer data on Mars at least.
http://www.airspacemag.com/space/stronger-than-dirt-8944228/
What I really need is an autonomous slug-killing robot on my allotment. Everything else I can handle. I've tried most existing controls, short of toxic Metaldehyde pellets, with little effect on the little buggers.
I estimate they destroyed over 50% of my (potential) crop this year, which makes you wonder how much toxic stuff goes on all those perfect field-grown cabbages etc you see in supermarkets...
Seriously they are brilliant and the eggs are just this great bonus. The more insects they eat the tastier the eggs! You do need to visit them at least once per day, however auto-feeders and automatic coop openers do mean you are only going to collect eggs and maybe refill water. They also have amazing characters.
If you have a good relationship with other allotment holders then they can also collect eggs and look after them for you if you go on holiday.
If you do consider getting some, get point of lay chickens as they will give you a lot more eggs in the long run. Rescue chickens are a friendlier than some of the pure breeds but you do not get the variety of egg colours.
You do not need a cockerel but do expect hens to crow after laying. They love shouting about it.
Unfortunately animals are not permitted on my allotment (except bees). Also the visiting-every-day requirement might be more of a commitment than I can muster.
But I'm curious, how would the chickens get to the slugs? Don't they have to be kept in a fenced off enclosure, away from the plants - otherwise they would damage young seedlings etc?
We do have a population of toads which I think eat the slugs, but they just don't eat enough of them! And the local cats, in turn, seem to be quite interested in eating the toads...
I used to keep young seedlings covered, but anything big they ignored but happily hunted all day. On an allotment I would suspect you would need to pen your allotment using a flexible electric fence IF people objected to chickens invading their allotment.
You might try mulching with woodchips to create a habitat for slug eating beetles. The slug problem might intermediately become worse while the natural balance is establishing.
Yeah I mean if you think improving ethanol and malt production is cool.
As far as actual food I'm more impressed by small scale open source farm bot projects and some of the innovative stuff permaculturists are doing without tech.
> Moonshots like this are understandably expensive, though, and since a huge chunk of that money went to capital costs (like buying a tractor and a harvester), the next crop will be vastly cheaper.
They would get a more accurate number if they calculated how much these machines depreciated over that period instead of just throwing in their total cost.
I have an acquaintance who works for a huge manufacturer of agricultural machinery. His stories about adventurous technicians who have to parachute into remote Australian farm lands to repair a stuck self-driving combine are always nice to hear.
I think my best tip is both to read (for amusement, education, and inspiration) and to write (as in - just do it, and if you're stuck silence your inner critic and just DO IT).
I'm just some engineer. But I'm a really imaginative and passionate person and I have a lot of ideas I care about. And so I write about those. I was inspired by reading The Martian, which was an amazing book written by a Software Engineer. It was after reading The Martian that I began writing.
Have you tried writing? What has been your blocker?
Disagree. Automate the production, which democratizes the supply.
Minimal supply chains are necessary if you can produce crops autonomously at the point of consumption (think rooftop solar). It would be wildly inefficient to grow in each person's backyard, but not so to grow in the outer rings of urban areas.
Automated production is essential. Supply chains for abundant, distributed resources are superfluous.
I think you might be correct in some domains, but farming isn't one. You simply can't grow all crops in all places, nor is that allocation of land a good use. Barley grows well in flat fields. Not so well in the wooded hills outside Atlanta. Hops won't grow at all where it doesn't freeze in the winter, and basil needs lots of sun and water. We've mostly optimized where we grow crops for land use and yield already, so, it is indeed a supply chain problem to move them to where they need to go.
Also, I'm not sure how automation of labor democratizes supply. supply isn't constrained by labor. It is constrained by yield. Automation won't solve that as much as chemical engineering or more land would.
> I'm not sure how automation of labor democratizes supply.
It puts the control back in the hands of consumers of the product, instead of producers (which is more often than not, multinationals or large corporations who are motivated to extract as much profit as possible from their business transactions).
You do not have time or resources to farm your own plot of land (generally speaking, hand waving away the homesteaders here). Your ag co-op [1] does. This is to farming as AWS was to infrastructure (if I may be permitted to torture an analogy).
Who do you really think will own the robots? It will be the multinational corporations again. Food is decently cheap already considering I have to eat multiple times a day. People will just spend their money on some place else. Like you said another corporation will extract profit from other transactions.
Well, society gets a say. Witness how both Canada and India have invalidated pharma patents, and how the US DoD is permitted to nullify patents when it suits them for strategic purposes [1].
Also, the US government can infringe on a patent with limited resource of the patent holder.
"Can the U.S. Government Infringe a U.S. Patent? (The U.S. Government Says it’s Impossible)"
"Although a patentee can sue the U.S. government for unlicensed use of its invention, Congress requires that those cases be filed in the Court of Federal Claims (CFC) rather than in district court. No jury trial is available, and the only remedy is a reasonable royalty." [2]
I think its a bit defeatist to throw your arms up in the air and say "there is no hope, big companies will always win", but I'm an optimist.
Automation provides the masses neither the automatons nor the land. It could make coops marginally better at producing, but it would cost money the coop doesn't have to buy the robots and systems, and would still be constrained by land and fertilizer. Labor just doesn't matter that much to yield.
Indeed the initial capital needs to come from somewhere, although I will argue that technology creates a deflationary spiral allowing automatons to be acquired cheaper than traditional tooling. Witness Tesla able to sell a $35k base EV that is superior to quite a few internal combustion vehicles on the market, with that price only going down as battery manufacturing scales up.
"The students involved in the Hands Free Hectare project also suggest that this was probably “the most expensive hectare of barley ever,” with an overall budget of £200,000 from the U.K. government. Moonshots like this are understandably expensive, though, and since a huge chunk of that money went to capital costs (like buying a tractor and a harvester), the next crop will be vastly cheaper."
