It sill looks like the software is written by people who don't know how to care for plants. You don't spray water on leaves as shown in the video; you'll just end up with fungus infestation. You water the soil and nourish the microorganisms that facilitate nutrient absorption in roots. But, I don't see any reason the technology can't be adapted to do the right thing.
But spraying water on leaves is not only the way water naturally gets to plants, it's often the only practical way to water crops at scale. Center-pivot irrigation has dramatically increased the amount of and reliability of arable cropland, while being dramatically less sensitive to topography and preparation than flood irrigation.
The advice to "water the soil, not the leaves" is founded in manual watering regimes in very small-scale gardening, often with crops bred to optimize for unnaturally prolific growth at the cost of susceptibility to fungal diseases, but which are still immature, exposing the soil. Or with transplanted bushes and trees where you have full access to the entire mulch bed. And it's absolutely a superior method, in those instances... but it's not like it's a hard-and-fast rule.
We can extend the technique out to mid-size market gardens with modern drip-lines, at the cost of adding to the horrific amounts of plastic being constantly UV-weathered that we see in mid-size market gardens.
Yes, but as GP said that doesn't scale. I live in an agriculture heavy community in the desert (mountain-west USA), and drip irrigation is only really used for small gardens and landscaping. Anyone with an acre or more of crops is not using drip.
I certainly agree that drip is the ideal, and when you aren't doing drip you want to minimize the standing water on leaves, but if I were designing this project I would design for scale.
But drip irrigation doesn’t scale because you would need to lay + connect + pressurize + maintain hundreds of miles of hoses. It’s high-CapEx.
A “watering robot”, meanwhile, can just do what a human gardener does to water a garden, “at scale.”
Picture a carrot harvester-alike machine — something whose main body sits on a dirt track between narrow-packed row-groups, with a gantry over the row-group supported by narrow inter-row wheels. Except instead of picker arms above the rows, this machine would have hoses hanging down between each row (or hoses running down the gantry wheels, depending on placement) with little electronic valve-boxes on the ends of the hoses, and side-facing jet nozzles on the sides of the valve boxes. The hoses stay always-fully-pressurized (from a tank + compressor attached to the main body); the valves get triggered to open at a set rate and pulse-width, to feed the right amount of water directly to the soil.
“But isn’t the ‘drip’ part of drip irrigation important?” Not really, no! (They just do it because constant passive input is lazy and predictable and lower-maintenance.) Actual rain is very bursty, so most plants (incl. crops) aren’t bothered at all by having their soil periodically drenched and then allowed to dry out again, getting almost bone dry before the next drenching. In fact, everything other than wetland crops like rice prefer this; and the dry-out cycles decrease the growth rates for things like parasitic fungi.
As a bonus, the exact same platform could perform other functions at the same time. In fact, look at it the other way around: a “watering robot” is just an extension of existing precision weeding robots (i.e. the machines designed to reduce reliance on pesticides by precision-targeting pesticide, or clipping/picking weeds, or burning/layering weeds away, or etc.) Any robot that can “get in there” at ground level between rows to do that, can also be made to water the soil while it’s down there.
What is the scale you are talking about here? Because at any significant scale the hard part is not where and how you spray the water but how you get the water there. Are you imagining a robot with a tank? How much water can that carry?
For non precision watering, we have existing options.
For other things - There are probably opportunities in adapting the existing center pivot systems with their pivots and tracks and wheels, with heavier truss segments that support robotic actuators up and down the line.
Fair point, the robot could lower its nozzle to the ground and jet the water there, much like a human would, with probably not a lot of changes required. That does seem like it would be a good optimization.
Isn't it better to mist plants, especially if you can't delay watering due to full sun?
IIUC that's what big box gardening centers do; with fixed retractable hoses for misting and watering.
A robot could make and refill clay irrigation Ollas with or without microsprinkler inlets and level sensing with backscatter RF, but do Ollas scale?
Why have a moving part there at all? Could just modulate spec valves to high and low or better fixed height sprayers
FWIU newer solar weeding robots - which minimize pesticide use by direct substitution and minimize herbicide by vigilant crop monitoring - have fixed arrays instead of moving part lasers
An agricultural robot spec:
Large wheels, light frame, can right itself when terrain topology is misestimated, Tensor operations per second (TOPS), Computer Vision (OpenCV, NeRF,), modular sensor and utility mounts, Open CAD model with material density for mass centroid and ground contact outer hull rollover estimation,
There is a shift underway from ubiquitous tilling to lower and no till options. Tilling solves certain problems in a field - for a while - but causes others, and is relatively expensive. Buried lines do not coexist with tilling.
We are coming to understand a bit more about root biology and the ecosystem of topsoil and it seems like the 20th century approach may have been a highly optimized technique of using a sledgehammer to pound in a screw.
> IIUC that's what big box gardening centers do; with fixed retractable hoses for misting and watering.
Speaking from experience - they're making it up as their go along. Instructed to water the soil rather than the leaves and a certain number of seconds per diameter of pot, and set loose. The benefit of 'gentle rain' heads (high flow, low velocity, unlike misters) at close range is that they don't blow the heads off the blooming flowers they're selling, which is what happens if you use the heads designed for longer range at close range.
> * By 2023, farmland with strict no-tillage principles comprise roughly 30% of the cropland in the U.S.*
The new model used to score fuel lifecycle emissions is the Greenhouse Gases, Regulated Emissions and Energy use in Technologies (GREET) model: https://www.energy.gov/eere/greet :
> GREET is a tool that assesses a range of life cycle energy, emissions, and environmental impact challenges and that can be used to guide decision-making, research and development, and regulations related to transportation and the energy sector.
> * For any given energy and vehicle system, GREET can calculate:*
> - Total energy consumption (non-renewable and renewable)
> - Fossil fuel energy use (petroleum, natural gas, coal)
> - Greenhouse gas emissions
> - Air pollutant emissions
> - Water consumption
FWIU you have to plant cover crops to receive the new US ethanol / biofuel subsidies.
> Some biofuel groups were encouraged the guidance would recognize climate-smart farm practices for the first time in ethanol or biodiesel's carbon intensity score. Others said the guidance hurts them because their producers have a hard time growing cover crops and carbon scoring shouldn't be limited to a few specific farming practices. Environmental groups said there isn't enough hard science to prove the benefit of those farm practices.
I have "The Living Soil Handbook" by Jessie Frost (in KY) here, and page 1 "Introduction" reads:
> 1. Disturb the soil as little as possible.
> 2. Keep the soil covered as much as possible.
> 3. Keep the soil planted as much as possible.
FWIU tilling results in oxidation and sterilization due to UV-C radiation and ozone; tilling turns soil to dirt; and dry dirt doesn't fix nitrogen or CO2 or host mycorhizzae which help plants absorb nutrients.
Bunds with no irrigation to not till over appear to win in many climates. Maybe bunds, agrivoltaics, and agricultural robots can help undo soil depletion.
more tricky frequently because you need to measure the moisture for each plant as maintainance is difficult without, but this is generally the most efficient low cost method in very arid regions from what I have seen (dad is prof in the field, so exposure is years of unpaid labour as a child and student)
If you are concerned about plastic you could substitute terracotta half-round channel pipes and do a micro-canal / channel irrigation. More expensive than plastic irrigation pipes but worth it if you’re determined to avoid plastic. Wood would be a cheaper alternative but requires a lot more maintenance and replacement. We’re talking small scale agriculture with these robots anyways so either option is practical especially compared to the cost of the robot.
You seem like you very much actually know what you’re talking about. Do you have any recommendations for books for laypeople for understanding modern agriculture?
The best way to water a garden is drip irrigation. You do have to manually lay the tubing and then in the fall roll it up. But there are farmers doing it in large fields so a small garden should be possible. Once everything is hooked up it can be pretty well automated. Home Depot now in some stores has drip irrigation supplies.
you don't need anything fancy for drip, a small hole in the pipe and a timer on your pump is is generally enough. If you really want to go fancy you can isolate the system and use moisture sensors, which are cheap.
Moisture sensors that measure conductivity are pretty useless unless frequently recalibrated but time domain reflectometry sensors are much better and more accurate.
A few years ago I saw on a tropical island some open ended poly tunnels growing salads and things that, in my own open air garden, are very heavily predated. They had a simple but very effective solution: they ran misters for a few minutes every hour. This made an environment that the plants thrived and insects left alone. And they lost very little water (on an island where fresh water was conserved generally) even though the tunnels were not closed at the ends. Fungus wasn’t mentioned when I asked about them. It was very simple tech level but I was struck by the smarts and knowledge behind it.
Part of the problem is water composition. Water which contians fertilizers, surfactants etc is going to damage the protective waxy layer on leaves, while rain water will do so less. Next, when watering youre doing so as frequently as the plants can make use of, to encourage maximal growth rates. It would never rain that frequently. finally, the size of droplets is different. Rain drops tend to be big and fat and roll off the waxy leaves while smaller dropplets sit on / stick to the surface where they create a nice wet and likely to rot environment.
Here's a wild thing: at many of the high end vineyards they'll do low-level helicopter flights over the vines every time it rains to blow the water off the leaves and fruit specifically to prevent infection and rot.
Yep. I recently visited some high end vineyards in Arizona, and the grapes really thrive because of how dry it is. They are able to irrigate carefully to avoid wetting the tops of the plants.
I could certainly be wrong about the timing. I’m definitely not a grape growing expert by any means, I mostly know about it from being in the UAV world and having had some discussions about replacing the helicopters with drones for getting the water off.
having worked at a cargo drone company, that is one thing that our platform would have excelled at. although ours had a tendency to simply flatten vegetation when "cornering" at low altitude.
Yes and that's a problem. Many modern plants aren't selected to grow in natural conditions. They're breed for properties like high yields, large fruit and often other characteristics are traded off to achieve that because the farmers can change the environment to deal with those problems with greenhouses, chemicals, fertilizers, irrigation etc.
I think it’s the difference in frequency. There’s likely other factors too, I’d suppose rain purges mold spores from the air for example, as it does with particulate pollution.
I agree with all of your examples. But his sentence misses the crucial to be part to be correct. I'm just wondering whether this is deliberate and just a way of speaking informal english, or just the person doesn't know it's incorrect
I'm a native English speaker, and if I'd spoken what they said out loud then I would've said "there's" precisely because "there're" is more difficult to pronounce. It's also how I'd write it, even though I know "there is" is not correct; it's just an evolution of the language, like "ain't".
Yep. The thoughts are evolving during the speech process. The speaker might start the sentence thinking about one factor, but decides to make it plural after the first words have already started.
1. If you accidentally say There is and want to use a plural after, (for example, a lot), you can just say a number in between. The sentence stays correct, you just have to say 2 additional words. I personally never had this problem
2. This is internet. You are free to edit your comment and reread it a million times before posting
Hope you understand what I'm trying to say, not being native sometimes restricts my ability to properly articulate semi-complex stuff
These are all things people can do, but might not be in the natural flow. Any it depends how the person is speaking. To use a car analogy, a driver can either be looking far ahead and flowing smoothly or looking only a short distance ahead and having to make lots of awkward adjustments. I personally go back and edit things most of the time, but that takes more time for only "style points" in most cases.
hell, I'd argue that it should be fine for formal writing as well. Ideally, the gap between written and spoken language is as narrow as possible, since ideally a written text communicates with the reader directly, with as little hurdles to parsing the content as possible. Having to maintain a secondary vocabulary is exhausting and creates barriers. There is a limit to how permissive I am with this personally though, generally I'd only be happy with changes that are semantically near identical, or introduce words which represent genuinely novel concepts rather than slang that re-brands existing concepts.
The point is it shouldn't be spoken like this. It's just wrong. I'm wondering whether the person is unaware or is this some slang I don't know about. I've seen a bunch of people speak like this, I'm trying to understand the reason
Language is ultimately descriptive, not prescriptive -- so common patterns are never "just wrong". But as someone who taught English for many years, I'm actually fascinated by what you've noticed. Because as an overeducated native English speaker, I observe that:
- "There's likely other factors" sounds totally fine to me.
- "There is likely other factors" sounds horribly wrong.
- "There's other factors" sounds wrong, but not horribly so.
- "There are likely other factors" sounds fine, but you wouldn't usually say "there are" as two distinct words, you'd say...
- "There're likely other factors" which would sound fine if perfectly enunciated, except the "'re" tends to get swallowed up and it will easily sound like "There likely other factors" to the listener which will sound wrong
So my theory here is that, in order to aural eliminate confusion between "there" and "there're", there's an unwritten rule in spoken English where we substitute "there's" instead when the plural object isn't immediately following, but has an adverb intervening.
I'm not 100% sure this is a full explanation of the phenomenon, but what I can tell you is that criticizing it is useless. It's just how native speakers talk -- it's conventional English (at least in the US). What is interesting is investigating it, though! So thanks for noticing a little quirk of English like that.
Nature isn't perfect and has disadvantages compared to us.
We don't have to invent ex post facto explanations for why something is the case in nature or why there is some un-intuitive reason as for why the natural way is better.
> Nature isn't perfect and has disadvantages compared to us.
That's assuming that we are somehow outside of nature.
> We don't have to invent ex post facto explanations for why something is the case in nature or why there is some un-intuitive reason as for why the natural way is better.
We don't have to , no , but we do , because that's how we learn.
Nobody was claiming the "natural" way was better, just that it might serve a purpose.
> Hey and you were wrong. You are pretty bad at understanding what other people are saying.
Or you are bad at conveying an explicit meaning.
> It wasn't related because the other person was correct in that you misunderstood my statement.
I've outlined why i thought what i did, if that was a misunderstanding of your intention I'm willing to accept that, doesn't mean what you said was clear.
Well, actually it's extremely obvious there you aren't actually attempting to understand my argument.
The other person noticed it as well.
Notice, how instead of going on about this, you could have instead gone back to my message and actually tried to figure out what my argument was.
But you didn't.
Because you aren't interested in understanding what my argument was.
> that a 50% failure rate
Oh you still aren't getting it.
It's not a 50% failure rate. It is a 0% failure rate. Instead it is that someone else noticed they you werent even trying.
Of course you aren't going to admit that.
But if someone else backs me up, thats really good evidence.
I am fully confident that the success rate is 100% and actually you could understand the argument if you stopped doing what we both know you are doing right now.
I've clearly stated what my interpretation was, with an explanation of how i got there.
A single line explaining how "people vs nature" doesn't imply that people and nature are different things would have cleared this up easily but instead we get multiple instances of you saying "it's so obvious I'm not going to explain it"
However, you have full confidence that everything is cleared up, so i guess it must be.
Saying something like rain serves a purpose is backwards. Plants have evolved to survive in conditions that include rain, rain has not been deployed to serve a purpose for plants. There may be other conditions that are easier for plants to thrive in.
Nor are we perfect and we've been wrong about much in nature more often than we've been right over the past many millennia. The previous poster didn't imply either case regardless. The post simply pointed out an assumption being made.
Frankly, I prefer the way that thinks of 'ex post facto' explanations for nature. At least that keeps us hypothesizing and not sitting there tooting our own horns.
> Nature isn't perfect and has disadvantages compared to us.
Wow we have completely different world views. I think nature is perfect and it's us who have gone too far away from it to notice and hence we are far from perfection as well. Ideally we should not be comparing us to nature since we are part of it. But somewhere deep down we know we are not aligned with it so we end up comparing it to humans which seems pretty grandiose on our end.
How can nature be perfect when it is constantly changing? We alter our environment out of necessity, we would only be able to survive in a very small number of climates on Earth if we did nothing to change our surroundings. Lucky you if you happen to be somewhere with year round fruit to pluck from the vine and temperate climate in the winters but that leaves the other 8 billion people to die of starvation and exposure.
I'm sincerely fascinated by your perspective. I haven't heard this viewpoint before.
Why do you think nature is perfect? I.e. what is your "gold standard" against which you measure?
Something that immediately comes to mind for me is all the death and suffering that is abundant through nature. If the only thing that matters is propagation of life, then nature does seem pretty good at it, but as a being that operates some layers above the selfish gene, it seems far from perfect.
> Something that immediately comes to mind for me is all the death and suffering that is abundant through nature
What if this is the best it can do with all the things that can go wrong or are going wrong. Perfection does not mean things will never go wrong. They can and they will. I can give you example of process that is near perfection: photosynthesis. Nature can store energy and then utilize it without creating adverse effect on other life. This is just one example but there are many processes like this.
If modern farming protocols are to water at the soil, I would be strongly willing to bet that is the best way to water, at least for our particular situation of growing the crops we grow on the farms we grow them on.
Much has gone into studying how to best grow these crops, both at universities and research centers and on the field at farms themselves.
Yes, and rain fall causes the spread of fungal infestation as said above and it is why we farmers use drip irrigation when possible. FarmBot defenitly has a great marketing video, 3d animation and logo though!
in the wild, plants compete for space and resources and the leaves act as a funnel to direct water (including dew) to the roots that might not otherwise be captured. the leaves can also serve as a shield to prevent the soil around the roots from being eroded by rainfall.
in a garden where plants do not have neighbours competing for space and water isn't scarce, there's no reason to water the leaves when you could just water the roots directly.
Just a mild pruning: in natural/wild environments (I.e. not the sterile labs of monocultural agronomy), plants actually cooperate in the resources department, because each species and stage of maturity has different needs and resource extractive capacities. They’ll “use” their root systems and mycorrhizal connections (which are only reliably present in wild soil) as a medium of exchange.
We do plants a disservice by studying them when they’re grouped together by species and age cohort, and generalizing their behavior under those conditions.
You can recreate these circumstances in your garden by, for example, planting the three sisters (beans, squash, corn) together. You can also opt to grow perennial versions of your crops and stagger their planting / surround them with annuals the complement their chemical needs.
Reminds me of when I got into electric skateboarding only to realise late in the game every around me had never had a skateboard when they were younger, they were all engineers. This was back in the day when it was only affordable to make your own. Not disrespecting anyone I just found it funny and surprising.
You seriously think they haven't thought of that? I have no association with this project but it has been going for many years, has sold to many customers and institutions and the pictures certainly look like many healthy plants. Probably there is a cost/benefit trade-off to engineering watering at the soil level. Perhaps leaves would get damaged by the hardware.
I had the same thoughts when watching this. Cucumbers either require twine, in which case they grow quite tall), or each plant will take up half that raised bed. Tomatoes are not planted directly from a seed, you first need to grow seedlings, a very laborious process that’s hard to automate. Tomatoes can also get quite tall, with some plants exceeding 5 feet. You don’t need such elaborate setups for irrigation either - this is trivially solved with drip irrigation stuff available at any Home Depot. And so on and so forth. I grew up on a farm and will probably retire on a farm. The most labor intensive part was weeding and pest control. If you want to do something real, automate that, without making any unwarranted assumptions on how the various crops are planted.
Growing tomatoes as starts that are transplanted is not required if your frost free season is long enough. The benefit of using starts is you can give plants a head start and only plant the strongest.
I can’t emphasize this enough. I mean, I’m using the GardenGrid watering system and an Orbit automated timer to water my 8 raised bed. So the intensive watering problem is solved.
Automatically planting the seeds? I can take it or leave it.
But the really intensive work is pulling those extraordinarily hardy weeds and pest control.
The cost of this thing at nearly $3000 including taxes is just too high for effectively an automated watering system that is easily solved at HomeDepot and the GardenGrid.
I get maybe 50 or so tomato plants in about 1 square meter in my garden, just from the seeds that are left in the ground from last year's tomatoes. (Of course I don't let all 50 grow and instead give most away.)
Those are not going to bear impressive fruit. People who grow tomatoes for sale almost exclusively plant hybrids. Making hybrid seeds is even more involved, and they cost more, but the crop is much larger, so it’s worth the hassle.
I think the idea is that using the CNC style design for everything makes it a simpler system? Watering from the soil may be better, but harder to automate to such an extreme? Automating the setup of irrigation lines with a CNC head seems like a pretty cool project though.
Drip irrigation is a once and done setup and also automated. I feel like this project is insanely cool, but ultimately not practically useful at the pricepoint.
Watering is definitely a solved problem in agriculture. There is absolutely no scenario where two plants growing right next to each other would need drastically different amounts of water. The project, founders and company are utterly useless.
This is 99% urban legend. You can just barely create it in a lab with just the right plant (with thick hydrophobic trichromes) under just the right light with no wind... but that's not what happens in nature.
Exactly. When it rains in nature, 95% of the times a) there isn't enough sunlight for the droplets to focus and make a burn spot, and b) the droplets don't stay on the leaf but flow down instead.
The original advice is solid and not an urban legend, but it applies to cases like watering plants in your balcony when the sun is out, bright and hot. Source: I have caused burn spots in plants of my own.
I believe watering at night will generally lead to more fungal rot problems. Better to water early morning, when the water will have a chance to sink into the soil, but will be pulled up into the plant by evaporation of water from the leaves (the leaves’ own water, not water you applied)
Shove some Bravo once in a while in the solution and your fungus worry is gone. If you're going with a chemical solution with fertilizer, etc, you might as well use other chemicals like fungicides and pesticides.
Yes it is. Water freezes and provides protection from freezing cold as funny as it might sound. Of course watering systems for huge gardens or orchards are expensive even if you have access to enough water.
There's a thing called foliar spraying, where you do spray water and nutrients on the leaves. You don't do it in the sunshine though because the water droplets will magnify the light and burn the leaves.
Thanks for busting that myth. Foliar isn't about hydration state, it has chemicals and surfactants and it's recommended to do it in morning/night. according to this AL extension office, it can causes a phytotoxicity (leaf burn) at high leaf temps (probably because higher uptake rate of the chemicals) https://www.aces.edu/blog/topics/lawn-garden/foliar-feeding-...
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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...
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.
Seems an interesting engineering project, but like a terrible product. Who is the customer? If you like gardening, why would you pay thousands of dollars so that you don't need to do it? If you don't like gardening, you obviously wouldn't be interested in having a robot do it for you.
I just can't imagine who would buy this. Gardening can be done very cheap and I believe that most people do it because they like spending time outside, working with their hands, being involved with the food they eat and saving a bit of money. Why would such a person want to have a robot which does away with that?
On an industrial scale this thing is of course totally useless.
It took steam engines 100 years to reliably outperform horses. Maybe in 100 years the situation will be different. Until then, I might buy one because I want to tinker with it. After all, it's 100 years of tinkering that got us there with steam engines.
> Seems an interesting engineering project, but like a terrible product.
Couldn't you say that about half the stuff posted here?
To me that's the "product" - an interesting engineering project targeted at people like us; a starting point for learning that can be taken further and those advancements potentially fed back into it, like all good open source projects.
As that kind of product, similar to a large chunk everything else built around RPi's and arduino's posted here (and... celebrated), it looks great to me and I don't get the hate. I was really excited to see it.
> Why would such a person want to have a robot which does away with that?
The same reason they want the many, often entirely pointless automations posted here daily, only this is not just fun, but also useful?
If this actually produces enough consumable food reliably (idk if it does, and be nice to see criticism along that angle), maybe also the cost could be justified?
IIRC it's ~$3K for the base model, seems it could pay for itself in a year or so if it could supply a years worth of fresh veges to a couple of people, depending on the local cost (which can vary a lot).
I think this is a fairly valid point. From my own anecdotal perspective I don’t much like “gardening” but when we wanted to grow vegetables we did research enough to know that this product is basically a waste of money. If you want a self-watering system you’re going to go with that, and maybe even have some fish for cleaning. If you just want easy low maintenance vegetables you can build a raised bed and water it with a hose on evenings during a dry period. That’s basically all you need to do.
I’ve removed a ton of weeds from between our tiles, I’ve removed exactly three from the raised bed. The watering takes like 30 seconds a few nights a week. The real trick is to plant something with a high output and no maintenance required like squash.
I agree that the watering adapter is basically pointless when this thing is built on a raised bed. You can build the watering into the base of the bed with a simple water level sensor and let capillary action wick the water up to the roots.
The gantry design is limited for sure, but extending it into a more independent system might be possible, and the software they wrote to manage crops could potentially be quite useful with a more general system. It seems like a final v1 for a "farm bot".
Nothing you wrote in this or the original post implies that people who don't like gardening wouldn't want to have a garden on their own property managed by a robot.
Having a product for gardening and selling it to people who don't like gardening is genuinely retarded. With this robot you still have to do gardening, only somewhat less.
If you don't like gardening why would you spend 2k on a robot doing it for you instead of buying the produce?
You seem to be struggling with the idea that someone might want the results of hard work without actually doing that hard work, especially if they can get those results by playing with something they do enjoy, like robotics. Let me know when that sinks in.
Are you aware of supermarkets? There you can buy food that others have produced for you, admission to a supermarket is usually free and food can be bought in minutes instead of produced over months.
Is this your project? Why are you so emotional over it being a shit product?
It might be difficult, but maybe strain your imagination to consider scenarios where people live remotely, off grid, or in areas with unreliable supply chains, or they might even live right next door to be more self-sufficient. Accepting that other people might have different values than you can be challenging, but I have confidence you can do it.
Farm bot is allegedly open source, so you have access to every part of the design. If you're building some to use off grid, you're a DIYer and are already relying on yourself for many things. You can also stock spare parts when you do the initial build.
The initial build will require shipping parts to a location for pickup, but this is a rare event.
He's going to blow his mind when he learns I have two AeroGardens in my kitchen, but don't want to do any farming. I could just hop down to the grocery store to buy the same amount in minutes. I can't believe the company is still in business!
I want higher quality food than my local supermarket. Tomatoes are work to grow but what you can buy is awful. I wouldn't use this for wheat as I can't tell any difference.
They have these things called farmers' markets where you can buy fresh produce and it's much cheaper than $4000. You could probably buy fresh produce for a whole year and not have it come to that total. A year's worth of food is likely more than the robot could produce in your lifetime, so the market is a much better deal.
So in your mind, economics is the only value worth considering. So I suppose that entails that you were paid to write your reply to my comment? Why else would you bother engaging on this site if you're not getting some monetary deal out of it?
When it comes to buying things, I would say yes. I could buy an expensive robot to grow a small amount of fresh food for me, or I could buy the same fresh food for much cheaper from a farmer. The former has little appeal when the latter exists.
You are wrong. Industrually one can have one of these to work for perhaps 50 beds that go in a conveyor belt or a single large belt conveyor. One would then need only the small version.
Hire an accoutant. Research where humans consume unusually lots of fresh produce, ensure it works with one bed for that produce, buy a warehouse (near where most Uber Eats users are), and set up a conveyor belt that will be expanded over time. Engineering friend would help with this. While waiting for first produce & collecting data, work on branding, buy fake accounts & hire group of third-country freelancers with Good English to do your marketing, make a media plan ("interview" plan), work on photography, and research Uber Eats, GrubHub, DoorDash matters (talk to them on phone, figure out the most cost-effective still good looking & functional packaging etc.), and reach out to popular cafes (especially popular chains) to get them use your below-profitably sold produce in exchange for attention (ghost restaurants may also be interested).
The profit comes either B2C or B2B (probably a fallback). You sell fresh, consistently high-quality local produce at low cost around the year, cheap because you have no employees and thus no salaries to pay.
Consider expanding out from your first warehouse as a franchise.
> buy fake accounts & hire group of third-country freelancers with Good English to do your marketing
I can't really argue with most of the rest, however I can't help but laugh (and cry?) that the hustle obviously has to contain blatantly immoral tactics.
I realized today that "hustling" is actually very irrational for normal person not only due to prospect theory but ALSO due to the fact that you are not investing in a business with known revenue. For example, having proven that the belt system can work, a VC can probably guess whether this would bring in money. On other hand normal humans "hustle" based on illusion that A brings money because it has "successful" history IN OTHERS' BUSINESSES (probably still high failure rate of course, but say they accounted for that), but they actually should hustle only if they know their A has brought money. This has, with the manipulation of humans to make them "hustle", lead to increased consumption of business "investments" EG SEO-tools, designers, and whatnot—side consumption instead of side hustling.
Maybe you like gardening but also want to vacation during the summer. The overhead of having to water every day can be a chain for doing other things you love.
This checks out with someone I know who grows their own plants, and me, who doesn't spend time growing plants. We're both not interested in the product.
Maybe it has a niche. Millionaires who want to go on holiday but still like to grow plants. It seems more like a gimmick.
We could do with a lot less grass lawns and a lot more gardens. Even just growing flowers adds tremendously to the local ecosystem of insects, while adding beauty to your life. If this gets more people thinking about gardening, I'm all for it!
Maybe it's just a grass-is-greener thing but the more Kubernetes I have to stomach, the more interested I become in BEAM languages like Elixir.
Not like they're alternatives exactly, but I get the feeling that the BEAM way is to solve the ops problems in a way resembles how you solved your dev problems. More holistic, less ad hoc.
It’s using the Nerves project! I’m bias since I work directly with the Nerves Foundation a lot these days but it’s such a wonderful development experience to get Linux based embedded stuff up and running :)
Not a huge erlang person but I think the idea is that redundancy and robustness is managed by the BEAM process on each host, so that layer is much higher in the stack. Compared with k8s where it’s like okay die if something goes wrong and the container orchestrator makes you a whole new chroot as if you just rebooted.
Well, you're hearing it from a guy who has written hardly any Elixir or any other BEAM language. (For a proper intro I recommend this video https://youtu.be/JvBT4XBdoUE). Less practitioner, more fanboy. So I may not be the best source. But I'll try anyhow.
The BEAM is a virtual machine, I guess kinda like the JVM. So just like you can write Java or Kotlin or Clojure or a million other JVM languages, so too can you write Erlang or Elixir or Gleam (I like the look of Gleam)... And expect similar interoperability.
The BEAM has its roots in the telecom world. So while Sun Microsystems was doing the Java thing to make webservers or applets or whatever for the JVM, Ericcson was doing Erlang things to make things like long distance phone calls happen on the BEAM.
(I'm not a fan of Java, I just think it's a decent thing to compare with in this case)
The BEAM folks take a different approach to concurrency than is common elsewhere. BEAM processes are much more lightweight than OS processes, so while it might be insane to run a separate copy of your server for each user, it's less insane to run a separate BEAM process for each user.
BEAM processes interact through message passing. Of course most other processes do to, but only because the developer built it that way. With the BEAM it's built in, each process periodically checks its mailbox for a message which matches its criteria, and if there's no message, it sleeps until it is revisited by the scheduler. There's no async/await business. They're all single threaded and sequential. Instead, you achieve coordination by having many of them, some of which are in charge of starting/stopping/organizing others. (I guess they build structures out of these things called "supervision trees" but I don't precisely know what that is).
This has all grown up in a world where nodes are expected to be physically separate (like either end of a phone call) so you end up with a bit more fault tolerance than if each process is expected to be on the same machine.
In Kubernetes you've got this mountain of yaml which you craft to tell the container orchestrator how to treat your app. And then you've got your app itself which is probably not written in yaml. So I find it very jarring to switch between my dev hat and my ops hat.
And Kubernetes... That's Google's baby, right, so it makes sense that it doesn't feel the same as the underlying app. As a cloud provider, they need a rather high wall between the app and the infra. But I think it causes all kinds of problems. At least in my world, the apps are either in Python or Go, so when there's a problem someone will come along and solve it with yaml-glue to add an additional container which may or may not resemble the app which has the problem.
My brain struggles to hop from Python to Yaml to Go (and there's usually some bash in there too).
The BEAM, by contrast, expects processes to start and stop other processes. So your orchestration logic and your application logic are in the same language. You don't have to express your wishes in yaml and then navigate all of these superfluous layers (e.g. the container entrypoint script, port forwarding, in-cluster DNS, etc) to have your wish granted. That kind of communication is handled by the BEAM's inbuilt message passing system.
If I got to rebuild our stack from scratch I'd use Kubernetes as a cloud-provider-agnostic interface to get access to compute, but instead of expressing anything about the app in YAML, I'd handle all of that extra stuff (e.g. log scraping, metric aggregation, whatever hacky fix is needed today...), I'd handle it in the BEAM, right alongside my app.
People like to say "build security into the app" or "build observability into the app", but standard practice is to bolt on solutions that don't resemble the app at all. My (probably flawed) perspective is that if you scratch those itches within the BEAM, then you're going to end up with fewer superfluous layers of abstraction. Also fewer distinct niches that you now must find a specialist to fill when the old one quits. Also, you end up more in control of your app because since you more or less wrote the orchestrator, you're relying less on the cloud provider to be a reliable puppet master.
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It's slow going, one class per semester, but I've been taking biology classes on the side. I sometimes think about making a break for it and trying to build something like farmbot but for driving a microscope, or a pipette, or maintaining the temperature/pH/etc in a bioreactor.
These are, for now, just dreams.
Sorry for the diatribe, but you did ask me to elaborate :)
Different person, but thank you for the writeup! Very interesting.
For anyone else reading: Please write more comments like this, they're one of the best parts of HN.
To elaborate a little bit on the supervision tree thing then: there's a bunch of different behaviours you can associate with process failure depending on your needs. Let's say you have a Postgres connection pool and for some reason the pool manager process dies. You can set it up so that the death of the manager will:
- kill all of the child processes that the pool was managing
- return an error to all of the request handlers who had active queries going while not touching the request handlers who didn't
- restart the pool manager
- once it's running, respawn the managed pool processes
This is all machinery that's pre-built into the OTP runtime. While that's all happening your app as a whole can keep trucking along and everything that doesn't need to make a database query carries on without even noticing that something was amiss.
The slogan "let it die" gets tossed around the Elixir/Erlang community quite a bit. This is referring to Erlang Processes (the internal lightweight processes, not the host process with a formal OS PID associated with it). Your whole app doesn't die, just the broken parts, and the OTP supervisor subsystem brings them back to life quickly.
This worries me from a positioning standpoint. I imagine a large amount of people with a garden bed, even a large one, garden because they like it, this would get in the way of that. The device doesn’t appear like it would scale well to anything large enough, and even then it would compete with much more sophisticated solutions that do this.
I feel like it’s actual market may end up being pretty narrow, not that it isn’t it a cool idea, it is, but it just gave me that gut reaction that it falls squarely in the uncanny valley between industrial users and hobbyists.
It makes more sense targeted towards "people that like robots" rather than "people that want to grow their own food".
I'm in a rural area and my first thought seeing this was "Good kit to play with for a growing teenager interested in agricultural automation" rather than "Serious industrial end use tooling".
I posted elsewhere on this story about this, but I have a flower garden I like to grow and fiddle with each year, and I'd still be interested in doing something like this Farm Bot too. I don't think I'd purchase one, I'm more interested in building one from scratch (so I appreciate that it's open source), but just seeing what kind of automated vegetable operation I can set up with a raspberry pi, a few servos and some moisture/sunlight sensors has been a project I've wanted to do for a couple summers.
Part of the draw is the potential for iterating on it, collecting whatever data might be collectable, adapting it to my environment or what I want to grow, etc. I've got a black thumb for vegetables anyway – that's why I grow flowers instead – so I really don't care if some or all them end up dying because the robot fails.
you can look into 'Precision Agriculture' and find quite a few solutions. Deere is pretty much at the front of the game with automation and data that provide farmers with the ability to make super informed decisions.
My hope would be that in 20 years everyone has a little bot that 24/7 runs a garden for you and provides every family with 80% of their vegetable need.
Imagine the amount of acreage we could return to nature / co2 sinking.
Is this not the best way to start on that path, an open source project yhat shares all the info so others can join branch and improve. Yiu cannot climb the mountastarting at the top !
Same goes for cooking your own food, doing your own laundry and picking your own clothes. Efficiency has its place in times of scarcity, but there is a cultural component on top. Part is education, part is carrying and renewing traditions, part is the ikea effect, sure.
These robots will not help avoid famine, but they will help rich first world people be more cognizant of food and agriculture. Which in turn will help them make better choices with the food they buy. This can only work against calory-dense inudstrial food, which arguably is the larger problem than efficiency in large parts of the world.
Rich people are the healthiest in society. They eat the most fresh food already. The people eating calorie-dense industrial food are mostly too poor to afford a $4000 robot and a plot of land to put it on, especially when it produces a very small amount of fresh food.
You're very right. And growing food is not cheap either, the initial investment is on the hundreds, even for a small vegetable garden and it takes time for the plants to grow, the yield is very small, counting the loss to pest and critters and it's a daily effort to care for the plants. After all of this, there are people who leaves too far north and the season is too short, or in too dry area, the thing is a nightmare. I love doing my own vegetable garden, but damn, the farms market is much easier.
From what I recall, it depends on your definition of efficiency. Large farms are more efficient in terms of mass of produce per unit of labour but less efficient in terms of mass of produce per unit area.
Absolutely. Biointensive gardening blows conventional ag out of the water on yield per area, it’s just way more labour involved since you’re companion cropping everything.
But would you get those same efficiency gains with one of these robots? They seem similar to mass farms in how they are laid out, and they also are going to wast some space for the machines to move around. They would need a truly staggering amount of metal and parts compared with a mass farm, and that metal has to come from somewhere which takes up land.
That explains something I was puzzled about recently. How the Amish can keep buying land for their famously many children, while using less modern technology than their competitors.
For homeowners with a garden it's not necessarily about efficiency.
I have a little garden and the food quality is just way better in terms of freshness and taste.
I agree with you overall, but some vegetables were found in a recent study to be more efficiently grown at home. Also, a lot of people already have turfgrass farms and converting those to veggie farms would be a huge net win. Finally, if you think that people have a fairly static amount of time/energy to spend on hobbies, hobby farming would likely be a net benefit because some hobbies have much greater negative externalities.
One large farm needs to optimize for their own needs instead of mine. I want tomatoes that taste good but they barely exist at the store. Large farms want to sell flavourless tomatoes that look nice and last a long time.
Home gardens are cheaper than stores, since seeds are cheaper than finished fruits/veggies. Of course it depends on free labor of The Gardener which this may address.
In some ways yes, in other ways it isn't though. Far less shipping, and some fruits and vegetables are just straight up better and healthier when harvested ripe instead of early so they can be shipped and stored. There is also a lot more wasted food that doesn't sell in a store well because they don't give you a discount for lesser specimens, but that people can and would eat otherwise.
There are already some good points made about efficiency, but I’ll also add that for an individual sometimes it’s not about efficiency but about survivability in the event of a crisis. As we saw in 2020, over indexing on efficiency can lead to cascading failures that put individuals at risk, so it’s logical that some would want to mitigate the risk of food production failures.
By the looks of things we did make out of COVID-19 just fine (from a civilization standpoint even if not at the individual level for all individuals) so not sure this supports your point.
“Just fine” is relative I suppose. We were fortunate that COVID-19 was relatively mild compared to what could have happened, but if you recall, there were major supply chain issues and at least in my area there were shortages, outages, and elevated prices on food items. Given what we saw, it seems reasonable to me that some people would want to hedge against something even worse by growing at least some of their food at home.
> As we saw in 2020, over indexing on efficiency can lead to cascading failures that put individuals at risk
I don’t know what you mean here. By 2020 I assume you mean the covid-19 pandemic? I agree that the pandemic itself put people at risk. But what do you mean by “cascading failures that put individuals at risk”?
From my perspective society and systems of it kept on going despite the large scale upheavals happening. If for anything I would cite 2020 as evidence that things are not as fragile as we suspected. But maybe you have a different perspective?
I suspect they are referring to the whole "we can't even produce face masks" kind of fiascos. Yes we got out of it alright, but in good portion out of pure luck that covid-19 isn't as deadly as ebola...
This is probably not true for a lot of produce with a limited shelf life.
If you factor in wastage and the expensive supply chain logistics for things that spoil quickly it's probably cheaper to grow them closer to the point of use, especially if you can keep down labor costs with automation.
But balance that with centralised farms meaning that food needs to be distributed which is currently very bad for the environment. Shipping oranges from Spain is not exactly carbon friendly.
A combination of clean energy transportation/more local growing would help.
People generally want a varied diet and lots of stuff only grows in specific places (or only grows well in specific places). So reducing shipping, maybe, but I wouldn't count on it.
For a while I was considering something similar, where instead a couple of windows at a home would be miniature greenhouses/aquariums with openings arranged so that if the interior access was latched it would be impossible to gain access from the outside, but it would be possible to fill up consumables and drop off additional items (think tilapia for a scheduled dinner, but the usual protein product would be shrimp).
That said, I think making room for something like:
Supposing the locals enforce this, that would be evidence that property rights in the Yukon still have the consent of the people. Will they in 20 years? We'll see.
I would love to grow some of my own food, the way I did when I was a kid. But alas, I will never be able to afford a garden, and the soil here is heavily contaminated with PFAS, heavy metals, and goodness knows what else.
Every family having to have a robot instead of a handful of tractors for every ten thousand families or so. And that is likely a less optimal use of acreage. I think what you might actually be advocating for is “people should convert more residential land into gardens” which is always fun. I love my garden as a hobby.
We keep trying to un-invent the division of labour.
Edited for unnecessary pre-coffee poor behaviour. Sorry.
I did some quick math on this 10,000 number and I think it’s off by at least an order of magnitude. You have to assume everyone needs the tractors at roughly the same time and the cost/time of transporting, loading, unloading, etc severely limits the efficiency in a suburban environment.
It’s probably wrong, yeah. I made a wild guess at magnitude just to make a rhetorical point. Are you saying it’s more like 1,000 or 100,000?
I’m not a farmer but I live in a farming city, and one thing I notice is that the crops around here are definitely not all harvested at the same time. Some are harvested months before others. Even the same crops like corn or various beans are harvested weeks apart. For corn sometimes months. Farms also share a lot of equipment. Though a lot of farms are just absolutely massive corporate farms so it’s not really “sharing” but has the same effect.
You're yuck. There is no need provides your tastes thanks, especially ones that support destructive farming practices based on idealogical fluff.
It's much healthier and ultimately economical to have a bot tending crops locally, because small scale farming is also more productive per acre, and we have no way of transporting food or growing it industrially without burning the biosphere.
What OP is referring to is a world not yet created, where relocalization occurs, because we should't be doing things at scale that we don't benefit from doing at scale - and growing food is definitely one of those things.
Or maybe you have a sustainable way of doing industrial agriculture which doesn't use non renewable fossil fuels?
I am, it's not very much, and compared with the packaging for food in every market, it's just a rounding error.
The thing about growing food locally, is that you don't need individually package your apples in plastic. You just harvest it, then eat it, in it's healthiest possible form, while also not doing insane polluting.
You'd be better off doing the farming the old fashioned way if the goal is to feed a family. Farming is a terrible business to be in today, but that's mainly due to the abysmal profit margins. When your goal is to feed your family rather than turn a profit, that stops mattering.
Most people with any yard or outdoor space could get to the point of growing/raising a large portion of their own food without too much investment or work. A garden doesn't have to be manicured and ready for Instagram, it just needs to produce quality food. Meat and dairy would be the outlier lowering that % if you eat a lot of it, though chickens work well with a modest sized yard and finding a local dairy or farm for meat is still a big improvement on grocery store meat and dairy.
I've talked about this on this site over the years. My family is close to providing enough food on its own little farm for the whole family, all year (except dairy products and wheat products).
It has taken decades. And about 15 acres. And honestly I don't know how many hours. Tens and tens of thousands.
You can grow a small amount of your own food "without too much investment or work". To replace a substantial portion of your food with home grown takes a shit load of work and time.
That's interesting, I've had a very different experience. Maybe it comes down, partially, to a difference in climate?
We're on a larger piece of land actually, mainly because we have cattle that we may eventually use for meat and dairy. Were producing a large chunk of our food on about 1 acre though, and even then most of that is non-productive land around our house.
We have chickens that give us 6-7 eggs every day. Our garden is 2,500 square feet but well be expanding it a bit for next year. We're very hands off with our garden, though, compared to how most people do it. We don't till, partly to avoid any potential disturbance to the soil and partly out of laziness. We did have to water too much for a couple weeks in June, but that is about it for this year.
We haven't hit the 80-90% goal yet but are on track for that next year, our third year here. Right now I'd estimate us at around 40-50% with the rest supplemented mainly from local farms.
It is work, no doubt about it, especially if you aren't used to working outside. I haven't yet felt like the amount of work has blown past what it costs to buy groceries from the store though, and bonus that we know it's all local without any pesticide or herbicide use.
We live in the southeast US now, the climate is helpful for farming. I lived in Seattle for a few years and that climate would have been much harder to work with. I don't particularly like the task of preserving foods, here we don't need to do nearly as much of that.
> We live in the southeast US now, the climate is helpful for farming. I lived in Seattle for a few years and that climate would have been much harder to work with.
Because of (a lack of) winter sunlight? Or something else?
A combination of a shorter growing season and less rainfall. Seattle has an interesting rap for being extremely rainy, but their average rainfall is around 38 inches while I get around 60 inches per year here.
We've had cattle on the land with us for the last two years, and though we have had to buy in hay its has been to supplement for 2-3 months rather than 5-6 months. We actually have the pasture space to grow and cut our own hay, that's just a comparatively big investment that we haven't taken on yet but is on the list to next year.
We don't own a tractor and aren't interested in getting one. That is our main blocker for producing our own hay, today everyone assumes you have a heavy tractor and all the implements needed to do the job.
Also in the southeast, and it should be pretty easy to find someone to come and bail your hay for you and take a percentage of the hay for themselves. I believe we do 9 acres, and get two harvests. After splitting it with the bailer that's still enough to feed about 25 head of cattle through the year. Though we do supplement with some feed for nutrition reasons. (Our Nutrition, not the cows, we eat them). Late in season the bailers will also typically bring us free hay too because they will cut some fields and have extra. You would still likely need a tractor to move the hay though but you might could figure something out with a trailer. Look for the market bulletin in your area if you haven't already subscribed.
Yep, all of that is definitely on the table. Our first year on this property we actually did talk with someone about cutting hay on a 50:50 split. He used to lease this land and built most of the fences that are still here. It didn't end up working out that summer but we're keeping that in our back pocket for later.
As far as moving hay goes, we have bough square bails the last two years and aren't afraid of hauling it around by hand. If we bring someone in to cut and bail hay wed probably just spend around the same amount the first year around to buy a round bail trailer we could pull with an ATV or mini truck.
Hell I figured I eat about one onion a week, and one whole garlic bulb. I planted 75 onions and 40 garlic bulbs expecting that that would keep me going for a year.
Not even close. Between some of them dying, many of them producing tiny output, and the difficulty of keeping them stored I exhausted my harvest in about four months.
I have a small patch of land, 10m x 10m, and I grow potatoes, garlic, cucumbers, and similar things. But I quickly realized I would never become self-sufficient, not unless I dedicated the whole patch of land to 100% potatoes, which would be far less fun and start to feel like work.
I grew up in a family of 6, we had a 1 acre garden and 3 acres for goats and sheep, 2 acres of fruit trees. Yes, it was a full-time job for my parents, but we canned and froze everything for the winter and only went to the store for sacks of flour. It's possible to do on less land. It took about 5 years to get to the point of sustainability.
It doesn't need to be ready for Instagram but you need to keep weeds under control, you need to keep insects under control, and you need to keep deer, rabbits, and other veggie-loving animals away or barricaded. You also need to provide irrigation when needed, and of course harvest the vegetables when they are ready. It's quite a bit of work if you want to maximize your harvest. Any kind of serious vegetable garden probably demands at least an hour a day of your time, large gardens may require much more than that.
Its all in expectations I guess. We have been focusing on balancing yield with investment. If we can get half the production for a quarter of the work, we'll take that trade off.
We've actually been running a test this year that has been interesting to watch play out. Our garden isn't very dense comparatively, and its planted into what was pasture before. We did cut the grass when planting and have trimmed it a few times, but its far from a garden free of weeds.
We also planted a space along the lines of a milpa or a chaos garden. We planted corn in rows, untilled and effectively just a grass pasture that we clipped short to start. When the corn germinated we followed behind with a variety of beans, peas, squash, and greens. It isn't nearly as productive per foot as it could be, but we haven't put much time into it beyond planting and a few deep waterings during a drought.
I think an hour a day is a totally reasonable expectation. To me that's worth it, but that wouldn't work for everyone and finding an hour a day may not be an easy ask depending on your lifestyle. I would argue, though, that if it isn't worth an hour a day to you you probably aren't too concerned with growing a large portion of your own food.
To summarize the analysis: you would need 100-200 square meters of farmbotting to get 2000 daily calories from farmbots alone. If you're just trying to get your daily recommended servings of veggies, you instead target volume of veggies, because that's how the recommendations work, and it's a much smaller quantity. It ends up being 3-7 square meters per person for that.
A small farmbot covers 4.5 m^2 and costs $3,000, an XL covers 18 m^2 and costs $4,500.
I think 3-7 sq m makes sense as a practical range, maybe round up to 10 to have some wiggle room.
In all seriousness, from a real life feeding people farming perspective, it's well short of sufficient unto itself.
It's a lightweight gantry system for seeding, watering, and (chemical spray) weeding.
Handy for big seeding greenhouses and some leafy greens.
It's not going to significantly help with you apple, lemon, orange, fig, grapefruit and etc. trees.
It's not going to significantly help with your potatoes and other root vegetables.
It's not going to tend to and protect your lambs, goats, chickens, etc.
FWiW I do have one spry old chap born n 1935 who can do all that already, has a few decades of experience, and can feed an easy magnitude more than just four.
Fun project, needs a wee bit of work.
And, there are scaled up Farm bots for farms, not just for oversized regular garden beds.
It would take 31 of their largest model, the Genesis XL to cover that area as each robot covers 18 square meters. So for the low low cost of 31 × $4,295 = $133,145 you could buy enough farm bots to feed yourself. Then you'd just have to worry about the cost of repairs, land, processing, and harvesting.
At about $110k for 8000 daily calories, you might as well just wait for android robots to be capable of farming and then buy one from a company like Figure, though you'd then have to worry about it getting hacked and trying to knife you in your sleep.
The unit of a "cup" there is sourced from the US government, and thus it's well known to be a volumetric measurement that is equal to 1/672 of a standard oil barrel's volume. It's not vague for US customers at least.
It hurts my soul that it's using a volumetric measurement for leafy food, like if you cut lettuce leaves into pieces, they have the same nutrients but take up way less space, so 3 cups of roughly cut lettuce leaves is different from 3 cups of finely chopped lettuce leaves, which is also different from 3 cups of uncut lettuce leaves. Just give it to us in mass or calories please (like grams or fractions of an oil barrel's mass, or fraction of a barrel of oil's calories and nutrients).
But, wow apparently the FDA rounds cups in nutrition labeling to be exactly 240ml “legal cup”, which I agree is super annoying. It’s 1.4% more.
“For purposes of nutrition labeling, 1 cup means 240 mL, 1 tablespoon means 15 mL, 1 teaspoon means 5 mL, 1 fluid ounce means 30 mL, and 1 ounce means 28 g (21 CFR 101.9(b)(5)(viii))”
a bit steep still, plus the maintenance nightmare of keeping 31 machines working..
it's a fun farm to envisage though.
p.s. I don't think that this gantry has very harsh stiffness requirements; I guess one could scale the thing to a larger size reasonably easy -- akin to a configurable MPCNC machine.
I've always wondered why this robot uses a gantry system.
Would be less intrusive and thus easier to work alongside a human if it was a polar system, with a single pole in the middle/corner, like a tower crane.
I toyed with a cable-bot (like what is used for top-down shots at sporting events) for gardening. Needs three towers and probably difficult to make sturdy enough for watering but way cheaper at large scales than anything rigid and relatively more portable.
Sturdy enough for watering should not be too hard I guess. I'd say weeding it harder, depending on the method. Pulling out weeds with roots and all (most effective IME) requires some force and torque.
The idea of introducing robotics to farming is very attractive. It doesn't seem like this is a scalable solution for farming, but a sufficient one for gardening.
They started this project a decade ago. But robotics has advanced quite a bit in that time. Surely, today it is much more viable to have four wheeled robots watering, weeding etc at the same precision this product can. Then why build a gantry.
Your points are largely valid and there are many examples of mobile robust at scale autonomous robot vehicles for "big farms" today, it's still a growing market domain with much innovation.
> Then why build a gantry.
Part of at scale agriculture is growing seedlings (fruit trees, etc), conducting ANOVA trials (small plots to test many seed varieties).
There's a good chunk of "big agriculture" taking place in warehouse sized greenhouses with roller topped tables, big sliding trays, tightly packed young plants, overhead gantries for cameras | sprays | lifting hooks, etc.
This is a lightweight garden bed gantry .. but there is a place for big gantries in agriculture.
The cheapest option is to buy $40 worth of hosing, then lay hose around the plants with small holes in it so that water drips out onto the ground at a constant rate.
Come on, there are obvious solutions to this like having lanes, same as farm use for machinery right now. :p
Having a roomba like (yes, obviously different to the standard look of a robot vacuum cleaner; but a small autonomous robot; eg a watering can on tank treads, or a bb8 rolling ball) bot with a docking station out of the weather seems enormously more sustainable and scalable.
How many harvests would it take to offset the emissions that go into producing a kit? My guess is that this uses more steel per sapling than almost any other method of tending to a vegetable
This system is electricity-based, whereas traditional agriculture is fuel-intensive.
Even fertilizer production is fuel-intensive, and this system avoids using any.
Multiply by the time scale you want the system to last, and you get your emissions savings.
Steel contents is a one-off emissions investment.
Now if you want to compare this system to an other electricity-based, renewable energy only, agriculture, say with electric trucks etc, that'd be interesting.
I'm surprised no one has mentioned hydroponics. For $2800 you can build a very nice, large, and mostly automated hydroponics setup. It would have higher yields, no weeding, minimal pests if indoors, better nutrient control, a smaller footprint, more reliability, and less complexity.
Soil farming (think small family farm) in a field has the advantage of being stupidly cheap. Free sun, free water, free nutrients, as long as you're not going for 150% yields like the big mono-farms do. The tradeoff is lack of consistency. It's easy to have a bad season that gives you shit yields. Plus it's a ton of work. There's a reason we've worked so hard to automate so much of that.
Hydro gives you a significant amount of control. Exact amount and wavelength of light, exact timing and amount of nutrients, exact temperature, humidity, co2, wind, etc. All with significantly higher costs. There's a reason that those "hydroponics in a skyscraper" basically grow lettuce, because it's the same growing profile as weed, which is a high profit crop.
Seems like a cool project, but not something I would pay thousands of dollars for as a hobbyist gardener. By the looks of it, might work for smaller plants, but not much use in growing larger varieties of tomato or cucumber for example.
Really the only thing I would trust and want to automate is watering when I'm away, and that can be done much cheaper. The most burdensome part right now in my greenhouse is actually keeping the large plants in check, prevent them from growing too much by taking away right leaves/branches. The robot probably wouldn't do too much to help with that. Weeds are a problem outside, but that's way too large of an area to cover with this kind of robots.
Would be interesting if they could get it to work in a circular pattern with multiple layers, where one FarmBot traverses each ring of the garden's "onion".
For an optimized garden to feed a family, you need 549 square meters[0], which is a circle with a diameter of 26.4 meters (86.7 ft). That's all the vegetables for your entire family, mostly automated.
That's a future I would love to see, even though it's way less efficient than industrial farming.
That seems like an efficient approach for a commercial scale version. The form would essentially mirror center-pivot irrigation [1] so you can keep a fixed point for delivering energy, water, fertiliser etc and cover larger circular patch with a series of smaller linear robots. Each span could also be modular to adapt to different sizes as suitable for the landscape.
Everyone should absolutely do a small garden in their yard instead of grass or other wasteful landscaping.
As a farmer, this looks like it would be massively expensive per acre and massively wasteful of environmental resources. I currently farm 5,000 acres including 400 irrigated acres for $300,000 per year. I grow enough food to feed thousands of people a year.
You would need 200 of these systems to farm one acre. I could not find a list price on the website, but based on my knowledge of CNC machine pricing, each machine probably costs in the neighborhood of $10,000. So this machine would cost $2,000,000 per acre to farm. Insanity.
Government bureaucrats want you to starve to death, so I am sure money will go to this and be taken from ordinary farmers.
The system also appears to be an environmental disaster... Enormous amounts of heavily machined aluminum, stainless steel, and plastic to do tiny bits of work already done far more efficiently in other ways.
My first thought was exactly this. How reliable can it be to run autonomously and how long before parts start breaking down.
On the other hand this is cheaper than apple vision pro.
It doesn't really look like it can handle weather or ordinary dirt getting into the belt drive and rails. Automating the watering isn't hard with existing technology. if it can't remove weeds, I don't see what's the point.
ROI shouldn't be calculated based on the costs of transportation, because no one goes to the store to buy just vegetables (and not everyone drives to the store, it's a purely suburban american thing). Not to mention 'CO2 costs' that you don't pay at all
> and not everyone drives to the store, it's a purely suburban american thing
I live in a german town at the edge of a large city, the grocery stores are evenly distributed among this town, max 15 minutes by foot or 5 by bike. I love my bike and use it all the time.
On a nice day, there will be 20 bikes and 60 cars at the store. On a rainy day there will be 2 bikes and 80 cars at the store.
"Only americans take the car to the store" is a myth that you shouldn't spread.
A lot of people are criticizing this product. Does anyone know what "best in class" small-scale farming or gardening projects are? Very curious! Also any community recommendations would be great.
> Does anyone know what "best in class" small-scale farming or gardening projects are?
I think you're misinterpreting the criticisms. It's not "this particular product is a bad implementation compared to other one-size-fits-all tech-solutionism products", but rather "a one-size-fits-all tech-solutionism approach to this problem space doesn't make any sense"
This is a very typical tech-industry "everything looks like a nail" type issue: going into an area you don't understand with a solution to problems that don't exist.
A small subset of problems here:
1. A robot should automate things you do often/regularly - developing complex machinery do to one-off seasonal steps steps like seeding & pulling is immensely wasteful - that's going to raise the cost of the product a lot just in order to automate tasks you rarely do.
2. It doesn't do those tasks well: the pulling examples are contrived & the failure rates look high.
3. The watering mechanism is developed to suit the robot design rather than designing the robot around optimal watering strategies - this completely ignores generations of optimising watering approaches. The watering mechanism is actively harmful to many crops.
4. Very unadaptable to different plants' needs.
TL;DR: There is no best of class product in this area because only someone who doesn't understand the problem space would try to develop a product to do this.
Modular hydroponic pods have always been a better idea and if someone handed me 100 million I'd use it to develop standardised farming skyscrapers/towers to hydroponically grow food in towns/local communities with minimal water, electricity usage and human intervention.
It's so crazy that we have the tech to do this sort of thing now, but don't. We could do so much if things weren't so profit focussed and the wealthy weren't able to skim most of it off to dump into tax havens.
> develop standardised farming skyscrapers/towers to hydroponically grow food in
Land use for vegetable farming is really not an issue. Just build your hydroponics setup on the ground, you'll cut costs by an order of magnitude.
If you actually want to reduce land use, get people to eat less meat. The crops that use the most land by far are corn and soy, and most of those ends up just being fed to livestock.
this is very wastefull and stupid, you can buy a auto prinkler with a timer for 100 euros, and seeding can be done by hand in the same time the bot does it.
I can't help but feel like this is a satirical send up of "tech bros solve farming," except it's not satire.
I am a software engineer, I also runs a small family farm. I have 3d printers and laser cutters and lots of aluminum extrusion and raspberry pis... but I keep those things indoors, away from the dirt, sun, and rain. I can't imagine a real farmer using a contraption like this. Tools have to be reliable to last. I have to replace my solid steel shovels every few years because they wear out, how is this supposed to work?
I'm both as well. Imagine all that maintenance of keeping a hobby electronics project outside, all just to remove maybe 5% of the effort of growing vegetables. You can't even grow anything tall with it.
If they have a solid planning software that accounts for crop rotation, companion planting, etc. then that's already a much better value proposition.
Lol dirt is going to get in all of it and it's very hard to clean extruded aluminum rails, not to mention how small those wheels were. How's it driven - belts / gears? How often are you going to disassemble and maintain this thing? what's the maintenance schedule like? I would bet it is more demanding than planting a 4x8 raised bed.
That said I still love the project. I don't think the point is to grow plants maximally efficiently at this point, it's a early release of something cool and it's open source.
I found it to be incredibly annoying, with overly dramatic music and narration, not to mention nonsensical claims. This kind of thing immediately turns me off to any product.
I don't want to be accused of pedantry...but isn't this a gardening robot? I don't see how it scales to fields.
I don't really see what problem it solves. Growing in a raised bed with drip irrigation looks a lot less hassle than setting up a giant cnc watering machine. If you mulch once a year you don't need to add nutrients to a no dog bed at all.
If it was just a automated irrigation system and a camera with some detection for seeing if the plants look oka and can send a ping if a human needs to intervene. I remember hearing about this year's ago, and find it really cool, but it probably does to little, or is to expensive to be able to justify.
I think it's like, "I want to help in an industry I don't know anything about". This is not scalable. I understand that this person would like to help, but this is not the help that Farmers and needed.
I wonder if he asked farmers about their problems before creating this project.
The negativity comes from the fact that it's obviously stupid to spend $4000 on an AI robot that waters plants on a single small plot of land. The selling point of this product is "I want fresh food but I don't want to garden" which is much better served by going to a market and buying the food from a farmer.
I would argue that negativity comes from you even if the project is not that great yet. But i see passion, openness and someone trying to tackle a very big problem. What did you do today? I tell you what I did… i have been negative with post that are negative about a project. So peace on earth and hopefully we can make together a better world.
Okay Mr. High Horse. My issue with them isn't passion, it's pride. Every other week some tech-minded person will look at something which works perfectly well and think "I know nothing about this but I'm sure it could be improved with a robot". The robot is almost always a bad idea because it doesn't take into account the actual needs and wants of the people it's being sold to, and sometimes those people are forced to use it anyway. The only reason it exists is because its creators know about technology and when all you have is a hammer your problems start to look like nails.
The main criticism against this seems to be it doesn't kill weeds. But it's an open system, with standardised, autonomously selectable attachments. Can someone come up with an attachment or two for it that could control weeds?
My garden bed has a slug problem. How can FarmBot help me with this? Is there a tool, like a grabber, that automatically catches intruders and carries them away?
I would love to contribute to something like this for cattle ranching. Track your herd with a mapping app, analyze the cows' vital signs, estimate how much land you need for grazing, etc.
The amount of work required in getting this up and running and maintaining it could never pay for itself. The capital cost alone would take decades to pay back of ever.
This is very cool and I immediately wanted one. Hobby gardening is not exactly cost effective but I can think of cheaper ways to outsource growing vegetables...
Having watched Clarkson's Farm, I can't help but feel that farming is extremely antiquated. The sensitivity to unexpected weather and the low profit margins despite the high investments of time and money seem terrible. I can't see us as an advanced species doing this in 100 years, except for specialty experiences.
Modern farming is anything but antiquated. A lot of science goes into it, and it's the most efficient use of national resources to produce food. The downsides you mentioned is purely the fault of the market, not farming itself.
I understand that a lot of science and technology goes into modern farming, and that it's much better than it used to be. You did not address one of the main downsides I mentioned, which is that it still seems to be extremely reliant on the weather.
It also makes use of the sun and rain for free, unlike controlled setups. Weather is an issue, but it's not an issue everywhere at once. Even now with the progressing climate change farmers are adapting. You have introduction of regenerative farming to mitigate erosion and help with water retention, planting wind barriers, more resistant plant varieties, and much more. It's all designed to help mitigate weather fluctuations. Startups growing wheat under UV lighting are not going to feed the planet.
There's a reason hundreds of miles of abandoned stone walls are hidden inside forests all throughout the Northeast US - people deforested everything and tried to farm, but abandoned it all until nature reclaimed it again. It's tough.
Lol @ most of you who think this is real. It's a troll post w Sora or something. Turn your fucking brain on. By the time you fuck around with that, you could have done the garden by hand 20 times.
Looking at the pricing and the area the robot covers, isn't it too expensive?
I mean, with that land size, it can be easily done by a human in a few minutes? And I'm guessing most people who grow crops at that size do it for a hobby, which means they don't mind doing the work?
My retirement project is going to be this but at larger scale.
Remove the tires from two old bicycles to run them on rails, build a gantry between them mounted to seatposts and handlebars. Probably drive it with chains on winches for robustness.
Use movable wall elements so that the pick and place machine can set up both shade and increased illumination. Maybe have portable rain protection too. Maybe deploy close-up UV and IR lamps.
I'd like to know the max size that a single gantry can serve, see how high its utilization can be.
My guess is that it all can pay off once it's big enough. I just don't know where that point is. 100ft long? 200ft? 300? And 20ft wide?
There is a lot of discussion in a lot of threads about the design of the robot to water "from the top" by spraying the leaves instead of watering directly on the roots, and whether that's a good or bad thing, and whether the designers of the robot thought about it.
Here's the problem with watering the leaves: yes, plants ultimately get their water from rain. But under normal conditions, the rain comes in sporadically in large quantities -- not every day -- and soaks into the soil, which is where the plants actually pick it up. Flood irrigation does largely the same thing. Spray irrigation doesn't attempt to water the soil that deeply, it tends to give the plants just what they need for the next 24-48 hours, and that encourages wilt and fungal infections.
Also, domesticated vegetable crops are far more susceptible to wilt and fungal infections than natives, and than grain crops, which are at the end of the day grasses. So you can in the same garden have perfectly healthy corn but all of your melons and squash have such bad fungal infections that the leaves are literally white. You can criticize the selection of vegetables for yield and not hardiness, but the fact is this is where we are with vegetable crops.
This is an interesting project, but IMHO it isn't practical, and there isn't any way to make it practical. The X-Y gantry design, for gardening, has a number of intractable problems, watering from the top being just one of them. Another is that the design doesn't scale. You can't make this thing handle a 25 by 100 foot grade bed, which is the size you'd need to even start making a serious dent in the nutritional needs of one person. It can't really weed, and there's no way to modify the design to make it weed effectively; you'd have to add degrees of freedom to the gantry so that it could reach down to soil level and grasp roots (or, alternatively, to very selectively apply an herbicide). Garden crops grow to dramatically different heights; micro greens will be a few inches about the soil, zucchini will be three feet high, tomatoes can be 4-5 feet, and corn depending on cultivar can be as much as 9 feet tall.
And finally, watering and weeding, if you know what you're doing are actually the easiest parts of the problem. Preparing the bed so you don't have to weed is a lot more work. To do that, you plant your crops and then apply large amounts of mulch. If you've never prepared beds, shoveled dirty barn straw for mulch or tried to wrangle weed barrier cloth on a hot, humid day, you haven't lived, my friend. That's the physically hard part. THe mentally hard part is diagnosing problems in your crops before they become problems. Noticing that those shiny weird insects flying around are squash vine borer. Looking at the underside of leaves and seeing squash beetle eggs or going around your tomatoes with a blacklight looking for cutworms.
If you want to apply robotics to gardens, you either need a low mobile base, or you need to carefully lay out rows with fixed spacing, and have a high mobile base that can clear the height of the crops, and can take a variety of attachments, e.g. tillers to handle weed control. Which means you need think about monocropping. Which starts to look like the mid 20th century basic garden tractor, the International Harvester Farmall Cub, just with maybe an electric power plant and an autonomy appliqué kit. THis makes sense because the mid 20th century was the last time people in North America practiced gardening as a survival mechanism, and the Farmall Cub was the result of 50 years of practical design by people who knew how to garden when it counted.
I used to love things like this, now I realise that actually caring for living things is quite nice and life affirming, and spending yet more time behind a screen really is not. 40 hours+ per week obligate online-time plus recreation is not a great way to live life. Our working lives are too long and our hours per week are too many. The sooner we learn to touch grass regularly, the better. Robots are evidently not the way to do this.
This project sucks ass - I know some research groups (non-engineering, they were more ag programs) who purchased it from them for a few thousand dollars and pretty much shelved it after a few months - unreliable hardware, buggy software, minimal support - all in all it would probably have been much more easier if we hired a bunch of engineering undergrads to build something like this from scratch.
I have a garden that I enjoy, but after years of trial I've learned to only plant hardy native plants and wild flowers because I have a black thumb for vegetables. My main issue is a lack of patience -- I don't want to go out to water everything or monitor if things are getting as much sunlight as I thought they would. But for the last couple years I'd been considering setting up a raspberry pi, some moisture sensors and some kind of drip system as a fun summer project to add on top of my flower garden, so that'd be a journey for me.
It's a cool toy, but in the end you're going to be spending more time and money maintaining and troubleshooting this contraption than you would have by just touching grass and getting your hands dirty.
