Ask HN: Why technology is not hot about solving real life problems?
9 comments
There's a huge variety of automated machinery used in agriculture already. Tilling, sowing, and harvesting grains can be done by robots. Cows can be fed and milked by robots. A "roomba for weeds" sweeps the fields scanning every plant and spraying herbicides only on the weeds, leaving the veggies untouched. Self-driving tractors have been driving themselves up and down fields for over a decade.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Driverless_tractor
http://smartmachines.bluerivert.com/
http://www.precisionplanting.com/#products/
https://shop.deepfield-robotics.com/en/deepfield-connect.htm...
http://www.sweeper-robot.eu/
https://www.lely.com/the-barn/milking/
https://www.lely.com/the-barn/feeding/vector/
I don't believe it's true that everyone's working on self-driving cars to the exclusion of applications of robotics to farming... I also don't believe buying a $120,000 robot is similar to buying a tomato at a farmer's market.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Driverless_tractor
http://smartmachines.bluerivert.com/
http://www.precisionplanting.com/#products/
https://shop.deepfield-robotics.com/en/deepfield-connect.htm...
http://www.sweeper-robot.eu/
https://www.lely.com/the-barn/milking/
https://www.lely.com/the-barn/feeding/vector/
I don't believe it's true that everyone's working on self-driving cars to the exclusion of applications of robotics to farming... I also don't believe buying a $120,000 robot is similar to buying a tomato at a farmer's market.
It's not that common. I don't know even one farmer who uses autonomous tractors. Like literally..
Except..Right now, blue river tech's thinning machine in salinas but that's kinda hitched to a tractor, iirc.
And here is why..1. They are hundreds of thousands of dollars and it is not accessible to smaller farmers. 2. Current tech is more useful for commodity farmers and not the kind of farmers who bring your tomatoes or kale to the kitchen. 3. Corporate farms that cultivate a couple of thousand acres will have more use for it. Small farmers like me won't do it. 4. Even large farmers will be suspicious ..because as a farmer ..if something malfunctions(large machinery and threat of malfunction is a package deal)and it is a few tonnes heavy and your entire harvest over a thousand acres is dependent on machinery you didn't tool or fashion with your own hands, you tend not to sink in a lot of money in it. 5. It beggars belief that they won't come up with smaller robots for the field that is affordable. Because it dilutes risk. Most importanly, we need it. One can harvest a couple of hundred acres of sugar beets with a small crew and machines within a short period of time but when it's time to pick tomatoes, it has to be done by hand only..only with back breaking labour..perishables must be picked right ON that day.
This is important to us. Labour issues are not going to get any better. It was never in a good spot in the first place anyways.
Except..Right now, blue river tech's thinning machine in salinas but that's kinda hitched to a tractor, iirc.
And here is why..1. They are hundreds of thousands of dollars and it is not accessible to smaller farmers. 2. Current tech is more useful for commodity farmers and not the kind of farmers who bring your tomatoes or kale to the kitchen. 3. Corporate farms that cultivate a couple of thousand acres will have more use for it. Small farmers like me won't do it. 4. Even large farmers will be suspicious ..because as a farmer ..if something malfunctions(large machinery and threat of malfunction is a package deal)and it is a few tonnes heavy and your entire harvest over a thousand acres is dependent on machinery you didn't tool or fashion with your own hands, you tend not to sink in a lot of money in it. 5. It beggars belief that they won't come up with smaller robots for the field that is affordable. Because it dilutes risk. Most importanly, we need it. One can harvest a couple of hundred acres of sugar beets with a small crew and machines within a short period of time but when it's time to pick tomatoes, it has to be done by hand only..only with back breaking labour..perishables must be picked right ON that day.
This is important to us. Labour issues are not going to get any better. It was never in a good spot in the first place anyways.
You can see why technology advances less fast in these matters from this attitude. It's borne of experience, true, but real machines are less profitable in every way, so people do the capitalist thing and follow the profit margin. Google has a margin, after paying obscene salaries to its engineers, of over 40%. Sales cycles are 10-1000x faster, except for larger companies who negotiate - but the larger companies have lots more money.
Agriculture is the oldest and most essential part of civilization. However, that means we know the most about it, and therefore it is among the most unprofitable parts of it.
Agriculture is the oldest and most essential part of civilization. However, that means we know the most about it, and therefore it is among the most unprofitable parts of it.
When you take a snapshot of 'agricultural knowledge' in 100 BC and 100 AD..1800s and 1900s and post 2000s...it's easy to see that it's pretty dynamic. Everything from soil to weather pattern to water to labour availability to market changes. I have a kubota tractor that is about 15 years old. Since then, so many things have changed. Why am I still using tech from 15 years ago? Obviously agriculture techniques and methods ought to change too. It needs to be dynamic because agriculture in my grandfather's time is not the agriculture of today.
Even though everyone needs food..it's very necesscity has created an expectation that it is a human right to be fed. No one expects starvation deaths these days and if one hears about it, it is shocking. But it used to happen all the time.
A weird supply/demand equation has emerged. Instead of value going up for a universal necessity, it's value has gone down because it is seemingly more productive. But it is not. What we don't see is the invisible costs extracted to get to the point of making food so cheap that it has lost value.
It still blows my mind when people ask why food isn't free and abundant. I want to ask if they realize that it is tech intensive, labour intensive, environmentally expensive and cash enterprise. If food is cheap, someone is certainly being exploited and something is most certainly being abused. And somewhere someone is subsidizing it.
But with technology and robotics we have an opportunity to right the many wrongs and to maybe erase some of the damages..and yet, there seems to be little capitalistic will to do so...if capitalism doesn't accommodate the tech necessities, what else will?
One solution is to make food expensive again. I would wager that it might even contain the population explosion we might see..Italy and Japan are experiencing negative birth rates. Mostly because of economic depression, shrinking age and restricted resources. Maybe that will be the antidote to child like capitalism.
Even though everyone needs food..it's very necesscity has created an expectation that it is a human right to be fed. No one expects starvation deaths these days and if one hears about it, it is shocking. But it used to happen all the time.
A weird supply/demand equation has emerged. Instead of value going up for a universal necessity, it's value has gone down because it is seemingly more productive. But it is not. What we don't see is the invisible costs extracted to get to the point of making food so cheap that it has lost value.
It still blows my mind when people ask why food isn't free and abundant. I want to ask if they realize that it is tech intensive, labour intensive, environmentally expensive and cash enterprise. If food is cheap, someone is certainly being exploited and something is most certainly being abused. And somewhere someone is subsidizing it.
But with technology and robotics we have an opportunity to right the many wrongs and to maybe erase some of the damages..and yet, there seems to be little capitalistic will to do so...if capitalism doesn't accommodate the tech necessities, what else will?
One solution is to make food expensive again. I would wager that it might even contain the population explosion we might see..Italy and Japan are experiencing negative birth rates. Mostly because of economic depression, shrinking age and restricted resources. Maybe that will be the antidote to child like capitalism.
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a small market farmer's weeding robot in France is about 25k..not 120k. And they rent it out to farmers. We have no such system here. And even there it's not so prevalent but at least they are trying in Europe.
I sent an email to a univ that created a research farm robot that is being developed in Australia. They admit that it's not for production. Or a pricing issue. I spent a lot every year on unreliable labour. Even for a small farm. Even if I write it off in five years, a farm bot is immensely useful to me.
Regardless, why would I say if I have a 25k or 120k or 500k budget when I am trying to scope a project? I lose all bargaining power if I reveal how much $$ I am willing to spend? I am not trolling. I sincerely want to know how it's done in tech business circles. I am even willing to pay a retainer to assess their abilities. For all I know, they have no skills and are figuring things out at my expense. Thoughts?
I sent an email to a univ that created a research farm robot that is being developed in Australia. They admit that it's not for production. Or a pricing issue. I spent a lot every year on unreliable labour. Even for a small farm. Even if I write it off in five years, a farm bot is immensely useful to me.
Regardless, why would I say if I have a 25k or 120k or 500k budget when I am trying to scope a project? I lose all bargaining power if I reveal how much $$ I am willing to spend? I am not trolling. I sincerely want to know how it's done in tech business circles. I am even willing to pay a retainer to assess their abilities. For all I know, they have no skills and are figuring things out at my expense. Thoughts?
Custom engineering design and construction is very expensive because they cannot amortize the costs over many units. If it was like tomatoes, that is being produced by the thousands then you would be able to get a very specific price. But one-off are very hard to cost, especially in the absence of detailed design and specification.
You might be better off looking at what the established farm machinery companies are doing, for example John Deere has an autonomous tractor. There are also many companies who retrofit GPS and other automation to existing farm machinery. I found thousands of different automated farm machines with a quick Google search, so I don't know where you have been looking.
Another option is to contact the engineering faculty of a nearby university, they might be interested in solving a real world problem if you can produce a preliminary requirements specification.
You might be better off looking at what the established farm machinery companies are doing, for example John Deere has an autonomous tractor. There are also many companies who retrofit GPS and other automation to existing farm machinery. I found thousands of different automated farm machines with a quick Google search, so I don't know where you have been looking.
Another option is to contact the engineering faculty of a nearby university, they might be interested in solving a real world problem if you can produce a preliminary requirements specification.
I hear what you are saying. But in my opinion..it's exactly the huge farm machines that has created unsustainable conditions in agriculture. I think there is a tipping point. When population was sparse, we were able to get away with pulling a plough with buffaloes. As population exploded, we innovated by creating heavy machinery but sacrificed soil integrity and had to rely on pesticides and fertilizers etc. because of the volume, market value was also affected. We sacrificed soil. At this point, population is out of control and cultivable land is shrinking. Now we have to preserve land and change the way we farm because we can't use earth moving machines and keep ripping earth to feed people who are also taking up land for housing and land for industry. For regenerative agriculture, land has to be preserved and we have to go back to human scale farming but using smart techniques.
I figured that solution is in places who are facing the problem of shrinking ag land. I think we take the swathes of land from sea to shining sea for granted. Even assuming that soil has not become useless, there aren't enough people farming and with population increasing, it's going to go away. Think China..they are buying land in Africa to grow food for their people because their aquifers are drying up. We are already only growing commodities like corn, soy..and feeding them to hogs and chicken. Which is actually more expensive in terms of water.
I have started looking at countries that are ahead of the curve..where we will be in 100 years. Small countries, aging and shrinking population..yet less land.
There are a few nice robotic base chassis units on alibaba. Then I am going to start cold calling universities in places like Philippines, Vietnam, India etc because if anyone needs small/autonomous, it's going to be rice growing farmers. Maybe bring it back here for collaboration with univ here for the automation part.
Ag universities in the states are married to what works. Anything that hasn't been tried and tested is not taught and is frowned upon. I get it. I guess that's how academia works. I have spoken to some retired professors and current head of depts in ag colleges in the states and everyone says it can be done..but it's not worth it. One of them laughed at me.
Of course..why try something new when you can suckle at the teat of almost instant credit and subsidies. A farmer I know and work with has been diagnosed with valley fever. It's prevalent in Central Valley. It's a fungal infection where spores lodge in lungs during certain seasons...it comes from the soil and farmers and their children are the sickest and are often covered by barest minimum insurance if any..that's a cost of farming too. But no one sees it. Not even farmers. I am not a generational farmer and it amazes me that they keep going at it. And fewer kids are picking up the profession of farming. New generation grew up caressing smart phone screens to swipe..not driving heavy farm machinery or knowing how to fix its mechanical innards. No way they will do what their fathers and grandfathers did..
I remember the rotary phone. And how the wires snake up from phone to wall. Smart phones are mobile and fit palm of the hand. John Deeres and heavy farm equipment are the rotary phones of farming. If we keep basing design on them, we will never figure the next best design.
I do like the idea of universities. Thanks. I will mix it up a bit and try outside first. I don't believe it will happen in the states.
I figured that solution is in places who are facing the problem of shrinking ag land. I think we take the swathes of land from sea to shining sea for granted. Even assuming that soil has not become useless, there aren't enough people farming and with population increasing, it's going to go away. Think China..they are buying land in Africa to grow food for their people because their aquifers are drying up. We are already only growing commodities like corn, soy..and feeding them to hogs and chicken. Which is actually more expensive in terms of water.
I have started looking at countries that are ahead of the curve..where we will be in 100 years. Small countries, aging and shrinking population..yet less land.
There are a few nice robotic base chassis units on alibaba. Then I am going to start cold calling universities in places like Philippines, Vietnam, India etc because if anyone needs small/autonomous, it's going to be rice growing farmers. Maybe bring it back here for collaboration with univ here for the automation part.
Ag universities in the states are married to what works. Anything that hasn't been tried and tested is not taught and is frowned upon. I get it. I guess that's how academia works. I have spoken to some retired professors and current head of depts in ag colleges in the states and everyone says it can be done..but it's not worth it. One of them laughed at me.
Of course..why try something new when you can suckle at the teat of almost instant credit and subsidies. A farmer I know and work with has been diagnosed with valley fever. It's prevalent in Central Valley. It's a fungal infection where spores lodge in lungs during certain seasons...it comes from the soil and farmers and their children are the sickest and are often covered by barest minimum insurance if any..that's a cost of farming too. But no one sees it. Not even farmers. I am not a generational farmer and it amazes me that they keep going at it. And fewer kids are picking up the profession of farming. New generation grew up caressing smart phone screens to swipe..not driving heavy farm machinery or knowing how to fix its mechanical innards. No way they will do what their fathers and grandfathers did..
I remember the rotary phone. And how the wires snake up from phone to wall. Smart phones are mobile and fit palm of the hand. John Deeres and heavy farm equipment are the rotary phones of farming. If we keep basing design on them, we will never figure the next best design.
I do like the idea of universities. Thanks. I will mix it up a bit and try outside first. I don't believe it will happen in the states.
I really enjoyed reading your well presented review of the present situation. In a philosophical sense, you seem to share many observations in common with Dimitry Orlov and Howard Kunstler.
The biggest stumbling block to your vision is that very few people want to work in agriculture. It is too hard, dirty, unglamorous, uncool. The highly educated youth want to work in flash offices on the latest smartphone app. Then you have the big agribusiness who own the political system and exploit it to their own ends. As you have noted the situation is dire in first-world countries. These countries have moved from an agrarian economy to to capitalistic one. Ecology be damned if it gets in the way of greater profits.
In countries such as Vietnam, Thailand, Cambodia, etc - man power is not an issue. A sufficiently large proportion of the population still work on the land. Due to their low capital resources even cheap robotics are infeasible.
China is a special case. Whilst they have a massive population, a very large proportion of their country is of low agricultural potential. But they, like Japan in the 1980s, are gravitating to the cities - it is a prestige thing for many. When they are looking to Africa, it isn't just the land they are eyeing, they are looking at the large potential low cost workforce already there. Basically re-inventing the colonial ambitions of the British, Dutch and Germans in the previous century.
The biggest stumbling block to your vision is that very few people want to work in agriculture. It is too hard, dirty, unglamorous, uncool. The highly educated youth want to work in flash offices on the latest smartphone app. Then you have the big agribusiness who own the political system and exploit it to their own ends. As you have noted the situation is dire in first-world countries. These countries have moved from an agrarian economy to to capitalistic one. Ecology be damned if it gets in the way of greater profits.
In countries such as Vietnam, Thailand, Cambodia, etc - man power is not an issue. A sufficiently large proportion of the population still work on the land. Due to their low capital resources even cheap robotics are infeasible.
China is a special case. Whilst they have a massive population, a very large proportion of their country is of low agricultural potential. But they, like Japan in the 1980s, are gravitating to the cities - it is a prestige thing for many. When they are looking to Africa, it isn't just the land they are eyeing, they are looking at the large potential low cost workforce already there. Basically re-inventing the colonial ambitions of the British, Dutch and Germans in the previous century.
I am familiar with Kunstler and peak oil although I haven't delved too deep into those topics. Many of my permaculture farmer friends are fans of Kunstler.
For a while, I tried to farm without fossil fuels and it was tough!! I even considered aquaponics and hydroponics. While it can part of food production, it is too dependent on plastics and non biodegradable and is fossil fuel dependent. It is highly unstable to be trusted with growing food entirely.
The extent to which we are reliant on fossil fuels is rather mind numbingly shocking. And the markets and distributions are all so inefficient that maybe it does make more sense to bring our food from South America. But the flip side of it is a loss of food security and food sovereignty. What happens during a natural disaster here or from where we import..what happens if markets crash or if there is a war. Local food production is super crucial. As a nation, Americans have no clue where their food comes from or the true cost of it.
That's why I want my autonomous farm bots to be small in size, have mobility, to be able to swarm any sized farm, be modular and hopefully run on solar and be learning AI systems some day.
Food is really really expensive to produce. Really really really high non-renewable input spending..irreversible damage causing..very inefficient and leaky costs. This madness can be stopped by just acknowledging the costs. That would automatically lead to efficient means of resolving this invisible looming crisis.
What is stopping us is the low cost of food..and the assurance that the rest of the world won't let another human being starve to death. Should we raise cost of food? How can this be justified with any kind of conscience? Altho many in developed countries have no qualms about the habitat and lives and environmental damage caused in third world countries from where cheap food comes from...when rain forests are destroyed to grow soy and quinoa or fad of the week, we are so far removed from any awareness to be even accused of exploiting the vulnerables of the global economy. It's ignorance and not intentional malice. But it is likely that when we eat..chocolate or quinoa porridge or soy protein in smoothie, someone somewhere is being exploited.
So how to work around this..can't raise prices for food. We can try some things like: 1. Decentralized local hubs of urban agriculture with commodity farming in certain rural areas. 2. Eliminate ag subsidies entirely. 3. All farming on corporate scale should be non-profit as food is a basic human right and no one should be able to profit off it. 4. A certain percentage of land should be allocated to agriculture. I think crowded cities and shrinking resources would bring forth the reality of our planet's limitations. 5. Agricultural land cannot be sold to non citizens. 6. Incentivize sustainablity/self sufficiency. 7. Incentivize small families and incentivize even more those who do not procreate. 8. Make it illegal to waste food(as they did recently in France) 9. Redefine distribution with local coops and farm guilds. 10. Tax imported food to be more expensive than locally grown. 11. Every town or county has land set aside as non transferable allotments like in the U.K.
Imagine if we are cut off from oil supply..imagine if infrastructure breaks down..if dollar loses its value ..what would we do? Ok. I am being a little extreme here but consider it a thought experiment. What do we do? Where are our seeds? You can't save seeds if it's GMO. Without seed sovereignty, there is no food. If the only way farmers can get rid of weeds is to drive in 1000/ of lbs of equipment running on fossil fuels. Or rely on chemical weed killers. Or have an army of low paid farm workers pulling weeds, we might as well eat weeds. Where is our water going to come from? Regenerative agriculture is super drought tolerant. Urban edges should be the first line of defense and be the perimeter within which there is everything for self sufficient human habitats.
AI that can learn from environmental inputs can be a great way to predict weather or droughts to create crop plans. We are already late. I am not saying that we should prepare for the zombie apocalypse(well..), but we need to get smart and real about our food.
I am just a little insect in this whole picture and I only want to pitch in with innovating self sufficient clean energy and smart food production system. I just don't know how to go about pitching it to the right ears. In a few weeks, the next growing season in California will begin..the rhythms of farming will start again...I was hoping to maybe change at least one little process this season, but maybe next year. Thanks for hearing me out. Any input on disrupting or innovating food production to make it more smart is appreciated. It will give me something to think about all summer long as I weed my little field.
For a while, I tried to farm without fossil fuels and it was tough!! I even considered aquaponics and hydroponics. While it can part of food production, it is too dependent on plastics and non biodegradable and is fossil fuel dependent. It is highly unstable to be trusted with growing food entirely.
The extent to which we are reliant on fossil fuels is rather mind numbingly shocking. And the markets and distributions are all so inefficient that maybe it does make more sense to bring our food from South America. But the flip side of it is a loss of food security and food sovereignty. What happens during a natural disaster here or from where we import..what happens if markets crash or if there is a war. Local food production is super crucial. As a nation, Americans have no clue where their food comes from or the true cost of it.
That's why I want my autonomous farm bots to be small in size, have mobility, to be able to swarm any sized farm, be modular and hopefully run on solar and be learning AI systems some day.
Food is really really expensive to produce. Really really really high non-renewable input spending..irreversible damage causing..very inefficient and leaky costs. This madness can be stopped by just acknowledging the costs. That would automatically lead to efficient means of resolving this invisible looming crisis.
What is stopping us is the low cost of food..and the assurance that the rest of the world won't let another human being starve to death. Should we raise cost of food? How can this be justified with any kind of conscience? Altho many in developed countries have no qualms about the habitat and lives and environmental damage caused in third world countries from where cheap food comes from...when rain forests are destroyed to grow soy and quinoa or fad of the week, we are so far removed from any awareness to be even accused of exploiting the vulnerables of the global economy. It's ignorance and not intentional malice. But it is likely that when we eat..chocolate or quinoa porridge or soy protein in smoothie, someone somewhere is being exploited.
So how to work around this..can't raise prices for food. We can try some things like: 1. Decentralized local hubs of urban agriculture with commodity farming in certain rural areas. 2. Eliminate ag subsidies entirely. 3. All farming on corporate scale should be non-profit as food is a basic human right and no one should be able to profit off it. 4. A certain percentage of land should be allocated to agriculture. I think crowded cities and shrinking resources would bring forth the reality of our planet's limitations. 5. Agricultural land cannot be sold to non citizens. 6. Incentivize sustainablity/self sufficiency. 7. Incentivize small families and incentivize even more those who do not procreate. 8. Make it illegal to waste food(as they did recently in France) 9. Redefine distribution with local coops and farm guilds. 10. Tax imported food to be more expensive than locally grown. 11. Every town or county has land set aside as non transferable allotments like in the U.K.
Imagine if we are cut off from oil supply..imagine if infrastructure breaks down..if dollar loses its value ..what would we do? Ok. I am being a little extreme here but consider it a thought experiment. What do we do? Where are our seeds? You can't save seeds if it's GMO. Without seed sovereignty, there is no food. If the only way farmers can get rid of weeds is to drive in 1000/ of lbs of equipment running on fossil fuels. Or rely on chemical weed killers. Or have an army of low paid farm workers pulling weeds, we might as well eat weeds. Where is our water going to come from? Regenerative agriculture is super drought tolerant. Urban edges should be the first line of defense and be the perimeter within which there is everything for self sufficient human habitats.
AI that can learn from environmental inputs can be a great way to predict weather or droughts to create crop plans. We are already late. I am not saying that we should prepare for the zombie apocalypse(well..), but we need to get smart and real about our food.
I am just a little insect in this whole picture and I only want to pitch in with innovating self sufficient clean energy and smart food production system. I just don't know how to go about pitching it to the right ears. In a few weeks, the next growing season in California will begin..the rhythms of farming will start again...I was hoping to maybe change at least one little process this season, but maybe next year. Thanks for hearing me out. Any input on disrupting or innovating food production to make it more smart is appreciated. It will give me something to think about all summer long as I weed my little field.
I think this was a great post, and it touches on a lot of things that I think about daily.
I live in a rural area, with farms all around. Every day a new field goes up for sale, and a new subdivision of mcmansions is built where crops were once harvested. It's insane to me...where does it end? How much farmland can we give up?
As to unsustainable, automated mega-farming practices, I'm very much against this style of agriculture, but it's all about money. There's huge money in doing it that way, regardless of the cost in terms of soil destruction and health costs from producing food that is not nutritious (corn products are in every processed food these days - a lot of this stuff is like industrial waste).
I don't have many answers, the system is too large and complex for me to understand without devoting my life the the effort. I do worry about it every day though.
I live in a rural area, with farms all around. Every day a new field goes up for sale, and a new subdivision of mcmansions is built where crops were once harvested. It's insane to me...where does it end? How much farmland can we give up?
As to unsustainable, automated mega-farming practices, I'm very much against this style of agriculture, but it's all about money. There's huge money in doing it that way, regardless of the cost in terms of soil destruction and health costs from producing food that is not nutritious (corn products are in every processed food these days - a lot of this stuff is like industrial waste).
I don't have many answers, the system is too large and complex for me to understand without devoting my life the the effort. I do worry about it every day though.
But money is an artificial construct. We literally print money, yes? But food is real. Land is limited. You can't print land and once the top soil is gone, it's gone. Once it's under asphalt, it's gone. Once groundwater is polluted, it's gone. It's like cutting off a branch you are sitting on..we construct on land we grow food to accommodate expanding families but what will those families and their families eat if there is no land to grow food.
It beggars belief. no words.
It beggars belief. no words.
I agree with you. I can't comprehend that the incentive to behave this way is great enough compared to the destruction it causes. It's a guarantee that I'm missing a piece of the equation.
Autonomous cars solve transportation problems. Autonomous cars improve safety and saves lives. Drivers don't get tired, and drunk people don't control them. Autonomous cars increases accessibility and reduces the cost of transportation; a fleet of them can patrol the city 24/7, servicing people who would otherwise be ripped off by taxis/uber or stranded because local transportation means stop late at night (subways, buses, trains).
But it's human labour in the hot sun that brings food to our table. Isn't it important to figure how to move beyond manual labour when we have tech available for creating something we need for our sustenance?
We can survive without cars..self driving or not..but not without food. Which deserves a tech revolution? It's not a competition..why not both?
Even if we don't have to 'break our backs' ourselves..in say..America and our vegetables come from Mexico or Guatemala or Honduras or wherever its cheap so it's plentiful for us..people are still working hard in those countries? Shouldn't this be an universally urgent issue to resolve? People die of hunger in poor countries. We send $ or clothes or someone sends aid etc..but if they are able to find a way to eat..to exploit and preserve and regenerate natural resources, they don't need any help at all, no? I would like to think that tech has a reach beyond borders and solves problems that are crippling. I don't think I am wrong in that expectation.
We can survive without cars..self driving or not..but not without food. Which deserves a tech revolution? It's not a competition..why not both?
Even if we don't have to 'break our backs' ourselves..in say..America and our vegetables come from Mexico or Guatemala or Honduras or wherever its cheap so it's plentiful for us..people are still working hard in those countries? Shouldn't this be an universally urgent issue to resolve? People die of hunger in poor countries. We send $ or clothes or someone sends aid etc..but if they are able to find a way to eat..to exploit and preserve and regenerate natural resources, they don't need any help at all, no? I would like to think that tech has a reach beyond borders and solves problems that are crippling. I don't think I am wrong in that expectation.
The problem is that the car market is bigger, and massive investment there hasn't yet produced a viable product. A farm robot would have added challenges and is a much smaller market. Anybody that can design robots that can do what you want at this time would not be sitting on the technology and anybody doing new R&D here is going to go for the massive, easier market before the smaller, more difficult market.
It's not that difficult. Everything is open source these days. I can licence the tech. I find it worthwhile to put my own money into it. But I am baffled by the stone wall I face because no matter how earnestly I make my case..even if I pay for it, it's peanuts compared to the driverless cars or even let's say..the toy robot market..
I wanted to buy one from EU but they can't sell in US because radio frequencies used don't conform to US norms.
I wanted to buy one from EU but they can't sell in US because radio frequencies used don't conform to US norms.
Maybe it's more advanced than I thought. Maybe you can get a farmers coop to invest in it, if it is almost commercializable?
It's specialized and I want a paradigm shift in how we grow food..not refine existing design.
I am not even looking for investment to get the design down. I feel like I am stuck explaining to engineers because it feels like we are talking different languages.
When I show a sketch that I want to be drawn technically, they immediately go back to an existing tractor or a vehicle..and we are back to a 2000lb behemoth.
I can't work my way around the engineer's tendency to keep tinkering. Example: I asked a dear friend for help..now..I have known him for 20 years and I am pretty sure he can read my mind at this point. And we spoke for 5 hours..I kid you not..5 hours! And I left to take a personal call and within 20 minutes, he was excited to show me that it can now also chop wood with an elegant tweak and refining design.
I almost wept. It was brilliant, yes. It worked, yes. But it is not what I needed. Sometimes simple is enough. I couldn't rein in that horse in the engineers' mind anymore. I am in awe of such cerebral dexterity but I want cunning nimbleness of smaller machines.
Also..I am beginning to think it's a gendered issue. Maybe I am wrong. Or not. Every male engineer that I have spoken to wants big machines that can multitask in the field. But I want choices and smaller machines..I want to be able to mix and match with lots of options. Each task is specialized. One big machine with brute force is not going to cut it. I can't translate that philosophy into a language engineers can understand. It's very frustrating.
I am not even looking for investment to get the design down. I feel like I am stuck explaining to engineers because it feels like we are talking different languages.
When I show a sketch that I want to be drawn technically, they immediately go back to an existing tractor or a vehicle..and we are back to a 2000lb behemoth.
I can't work my way around the engineer's tendency to keep tinkering. Example: I asked a dear friend for help..now..I have known him for 20 years and I am pretty sure he can read my mind at this point. And we spoke for 5 hours..I kid you not..5 hours! And I left to take a personal call and within 20 minutes, he was excited to show me that it can now also chop wood with an elegant tweak and refining design.
I almost wept. It was brilliant, yes. It worked, yes. But it is not what I needed. Sometimes simple is enough. I couldn't rein in that horse in the engineers' mind anymore. I am in awe of such cerebral dexterity but I want cunning nimbleness of smaller machines.
Also..I am beginning to think it's a gendered issue. Maybe I am wrong. Or not. Every male engineer that I have spoken to wants big machines that can multitask in the field. But I want choices and smaller machines..I want to be able to mix and match with lots of options. Each task is specialized. One big machine with brute force is not going to cut it. I can't translate that philosophy into a language engineers can understand. It's very frustrating.
I'm no expert in this area but I thought the main issue with agricultural robots is not about form factors but the practical problem that they aren't "smart" enough yet for basic tasks, like weeding, you need machine vision, planning, manual dexterity, locomotion, a lot of tough software components that either don't exist or aren't good enough as COTS solutions, so it sounds like a years-long research project. But things move fast, it could be further along than I think.
Dexterity is definitely a problem. It goes beyond tasks in the field..even past harvesting, how do we grade them, wash them..pack them. So far only greens can be packaged robotically. I think earthbound farms have a robotic packing system for lettuce/spring mix. However another company tried packing peppers in a clamshell and just the intuitive way human packers will slide, squish, rotator and pack peppers was such a big deal because that's not something you figure with sensors or or grippers or vision system or algorithms. Because nature doesn't produce replicas of standardized sizes of sweet peppers.
What is required is to change the shape or size of the clamshell to suit robot pepper packers. That's a shift. Many such shifts in design are required.
I think that's a long long way away. For myself (and there are so many different tasks that can automated in farming), I have picked just seven field tasks that are repetitive manual tasks in small acreage farms that are in the area of soil prep, seeding and weeding.
Small farms don't enjoy economies of scale that large commodity farms do..how you grow corn is entirely different from how eggplants are grown. Everything we have automated and standardized in vegetable farming is compromised from the natural way to grow things.
There is a minimum acreage that justifies existing automation wrt costs. It's economies of scale. How do you grow 15 acres of eggplants with machines? If you can't deploy an army of hand weeders: 1. You can spray pesticides(cost=toxic) 2. You can select hybrid seeds that are resistant to certain diseases(cost=eliminates or drastically reduces bio diversity) 3. You can just export it(cost=loss of food security and sovereignty)
only small farms can produce vegetables. Mega farms produce commodities.
Building a tractor sized bot with sensors, vision system, gps, lidar is massively expensive. Too much data to aggregate. Just not viable. Not worth it. An acre of eggplants will yield about $6000 worth of eggplants. What is the point of spending million plus on an autonomous tractor? But.. A $30k machine that swarms an acre of two/day..even just to check when it's ready to pick, do a bit of weeding, monitor water and soil..do automatic seeding and transplanting...spray compost tea or spread compost is totally worth it. The key is that it does it by itself. Which means that when I am tweaking my website and selling tomatoes from my stand and chatting with my customers, my Eggplant bot is doing all the work. By itself.
I can watch from my screen. And if malfunction occurs, I would maybe lose one or two rows of eggplants. As long as the rest of the swarm functions, work gets done. But when the sole autonomous tractor breaks down, everything is lost.
That's 2k/Year per acre. Wages: One single employee would cost..at minimum wage..$15 x 40hrs/week x 4 weeks/month x 8 months = $19200. You'd need more than 2 workers to tend to 15 acres of vegetable farm. Even if the robot has a working life of 2 years, it's worth it.
Plus: human labour is better used elsewhere. It's kinder to human beings. 3. Machines learn and collect data. 4. Better health for soil, air and human beings. 5. Bots can work more than 8 hours a day and for more than 40 hours/week. They can work in the dark, cold and heat. They work efficiently. We save on $ on water, fertilizer etc that would otherwise be wasted on non-precision ag methods.
How is the costs on farm bots NOT being justified?
Building a 300lb human scale robot that does human tasks is relatively easy. Deploying a swarm of robots over 100 acres is relatively easier than sending one mega tonne tractor to do the work over 100 acres.
I think there might be some tasks that can never be replicated by machines. But it is viable if they are small machines. Industry is working on large machines because they are trying to model it like self driving cars. Designs come from existing farm Machine designs without innovating. Because farming by itself doesn't seem to deserve tech disruption. Which..again..baffles me.
And you are absolutely right. Getting something to do something as simple as weeding would be a 2 year project for me if I engage and exploit and stand on the shoulders of giants. Remember that you can only field test once a year. Because soil changes with seasons. Weather changes every day. Which is why advances in this field must have started 5 years ago. Why it's stalling now and is compared with self driving vehicles is a mystery to me. The two are nothing alike. For starters..farm bot needs to go on a straight line..no opposing traffic..high torque low speed..low power. Trying to overlap the challenges of an autonomous car on something that is so much simpler in scope and trying to match them re costs doesn't make sense to me. The biggest pitfall imo is that they are trying to make massive tractor sized bots..that's the biggest stumbling block. Even if they come up with something miraculous like that, no one is going to be able to afford it. Frankly, I think it's daft.
Let me attempt an example:
I was weeding a row of violas a few days ago. Over fall/winter, it had grown super weedy. It takes me 90 mts to weed a 100 ft long row that is about 3 ft wide. There are three rows of violas and are staggered. That's about 300 violas plants and covered with all manners of weeds. This is what I do if I were an intelligent farm weeder:
1. I detect violas and weeds.
2. I gather Viola plant.
3. I search for the roots of the weeds.
4. I pull the weeds out.
5. I check for slugs or pests on violas.
6. I check soil.
7. I fluff soil.
8. I tamp the soil down.
9 repeat around next viola plant. Do it again 299 times.
This is what a robotic weeding crawler should do. It has a picture of viola plant. It slices the tops of the roots of everything that it can't recognize as violas of Viola leaves. Or A robotic rodent can be let loose in a row of violas and it will 'chomp' down everything that it doesn't recognize as a viola plant.
A tractor can never weed a row of 50 rows of violas. I would look to nature. In nature, gophers and bunnies and small critters destroy the plants. Machine solutions for farms should be based in nature.
I want a robot rodent to eat my weeds. I will let loose a dozen of them over 50 rows. They will be done in 2-3 hours.
I don't want a million dollar self driving fancy tractor mounted AI system to kill the weeds between a row of violas. It will not and can never do the job.
When you work soil, it pushes back. Every square feet of earth has resistance that works against you. Thats why farm machines weigh zillion tonnes. But a human being weighing 150lbs takes a hoe to a row and does it by hand without compacting soil. But he has to do it for hours and hours. It's slave labour.
Sometimes less is more. And in farming, this is certainly true. Nature should be an inspiration for farm bots. Not machines.
Do you still think farm robots have to be expensive and complicated? It's very helpful to me to hear other perspectives because it means someone who isn't entrenched in the kind of work I do sees it with a diff set of eyes. Many thanks and Regards.
What is required is to change the shape or size of the clamshell to suit robot pepper packers. That's a shift. Many such shifts in design are required.
I think that's a long long way away. For myself (and there are so many different tasks that can automated in farming), I have picked just seven field tasks that are repetitive manual tasks in small acreage farms that are in the area of soil prep, seeding and weeding.
Small farms don't enjoy economies of scale that large commodity farms do..how you grow corn is entirely different from how eggplants are grown. Everything we have automated and standardized in vegetable farming is compromised from the natural way to grow things.
There is a minimum acreage that justifies existing automation wrt costs. It's economies of scale. How do you grow 15 acres of eggplants with machines? If you can't deploy an army of hand weeders: 1. You can spray pesticides(cost=toxic) 2. You can select hybrid seeds that are resistant to certain diseases(cost=eliminates or drastically reduces bio diversity) 3. You can just export it(cost=loss of food security and sovereignty)
only small farms can produce vegetables. Mega farms produce commodities.
Building a tractor sized bot with sensors, vision system, gps, lidar is massively expensive. Too much data to aggregate. Just not viable. Not worth it. An acre of eggplants will yield about $6000 worth of eggplants. What is the point of spending million plus on an autonomous tractor? But.. A $30k machine that swarms an acre of two/day..even just to check when it's ready to pick, do a bit of weeding, monitor water and soil..do automatic seeding and transplanting...spray compost tea or spread compost is totally worth it. The key is that it does it by itself. Which means that when I am tweaking my website and selling tomatoes from my stand and chatting with my customers, my Eggplant bot is doing all the work. By itself.
I can watch from my screen. And if malfunction occurs, I would maybe lose one or two rows of eggplants. As long as the rest of the swarm functions, work gets done. But when the sole autonomous tractor breaks down, everything is lost.
That's 2k/Year per acre. Wages: One single employee would cost..at minimum wage..$15 x 40hrs/week x 4 weeks/month x 8 months = $19200. You'd need more than 2 workers to tend to 15 acres of vegetable farm. Even if the robot has a working life of 2 years, it's worth it.
Plus: human labour is better used elsewhere. It's kinder to human beings. 3. Machines learn and collect data. 4. Better health for soil, air and human beings. 5. Bots can work more than 8 hours a day and for more than 40 hours/week. They can work in the dark, cold and heat. They work efficiently. We save on $ on water, fertilizer etc that would otherwise be wasted on non-precision ag methods.
How is the costs on farm bots NOT being justified?
Building a 300lb human scale robot that does human tasks is relatively easy. Deploying a swarm of robots over 100 acres is relatively easier than sending one mega tonne tractor to do the work over 100 acres.
I think there might be some tasks that can never be replicated by machines. But it is viable if they are small machines. Industry is working on large machines because they are trying to model it like self driving cars. Designs come from existing farm Machine designs without innovating. Because farming by itself doesn't seem to deserve tech disruption. Which..again..baffles me.
And you are absolutely right. Getting something to do something as simple as weeding would be a 2 year project for me if I engage and exploit and stand on the shoulders of giants. Remember that you can only field test once a year. Because soil changes with seasons. Weather changes every day. Which is why advances in this field must have started 5 years ago. Why it's stalling now and is compared with self driving vehicles is a mystery to me. The two are nothing alike. For starters..farm bot needs to go on a straight line..no opposing traffic..high torque low speed..low power. Trying to overlap the challenges of an autonomous car on something that is so much simpler in scope and trying to match them re costs doesn't make sense to me. The biggest pitfall imo is that they are trying to make massive tractor sized bots..that's the biggest stumbling block. Even if they come up with something miraculous like that, no one is going to be able to afford it. Frankly, I think it's daft.
Let me attempt an example:
I was weeding a row of violas a few days ago. Over fall/winter, it had grown super weedy. It takes me 90 mts to weed a 100 ft long row that is about 3 ft wide. There are three rows of violas and are staggered. That's about 300 violas plants and covered with all manners of weeds. This is what I do if I were an intelligent farm weeder:
1. I detect violas and weeds.
2. I gather Viola plant.
3. I search for the roots of the weeds.
4. I pull the weeds out.
5. I check for slugs or pests on violas.
6. I check soil.
7. I fluff soil.
8. I tamp the soil down.
9 repeat around next viola plant. Do it again 299 times.
This is what a robotic weeding crawler should do. It has a picture of viola plant. It slices the tops of the roots of everything that it can't recognize as violas of Viola leaves. Or A robotic rodent can be let loose in a row of violas and it will 'chomp' down everything that it doesn't recognize as a viola plant.
A tractor can never weed a row of 50 rows of violas. I would look to nature. In nature, gophers and bunnies and small critters destroy the plants. Machine solutions for farms should be based in nature.
I want a robot rodent to eat my weeds. I will let loose a dozen of them over 50 rows. They will be done in 2-3 hours.
I don't want a million dollar self driving fancy tractor mounted AI system to kill the weeds between a row of violas. It will not and can never do the job.
When you work soil, it pushes back. Every square feet of earth has resistance that works against you. Thats why farm machines weigh zillion tonnes. But a human being weighing 150lbs takes a hoe to a row and does it by hand without compacting soil. But he has to do it for hours and hours. It's slave labour.
Sometimes less is more. And in farming, this is certainly true. Nature should be an inspiration for farm bots. Not machines.
Do you still think farm robots have to be expensive and complicated? It's very helpful to me to hear other perspectives because it means someone who isn't entrenched in the kind of work I do sees it with a diff set of eyes. Many thanks and Regards.
When I had a vegetable garden, I had similar ideas. Tiny bots swarming over a field seems much more likely to replace human field labor than giant AI combines. Free robotic labor would eventually change farming totally.
I don't really know at this point why this hasn't happened yet, either because of technical challenges or just a lack of investment because it's not aligned with the way big agribusiness operates. I'm sure there are still huge technical challenges. I'm not sure whether or not there's a viable product there yet, like a weeder recognizing viola plants. Nature had millions of years head start designing the rodent, we can't copy those things yet. But maybe there are some things on your list that can be done with current technology though. If not, it probably won't be long.
I'm located in China right now and have some contacts in robotics, I don't know if I can help or not, but my email's in my profile.
I don't really know at this point why this hasn't happened yet, either because of technical challenges or just a lack of investment because it's not aligned with the way big agribusiness operates. I'm sure there are still huge technical challenges. I'm not sure whether or not there's a viable product there yet, like a weeder recognizing viola plants. Nature had millions of years head start designing the rodent, we can't copy those things yet. But maybe there are some things on your list that can be done with current technology though. If not, it probably won't be long.
I'm located in China right now and have some contacts in robotics, I don't know if I can help or not, but my email's in my profile.
When we run out of land. And eventually oil..and there is no more rural land...all the giant farm machinery will be useless. When there are no more trained farmers because noone is doing it anyways because it's not a viable or $$ earning job, there needs to be a repository of knowledge about food production. I don't know if weeding violas would be necessary then but it wouldn't hurt to have AI keep a record of what violas look like..substitute violas with chard or Eggplant. It's about what to pick and what to leave behind.
For example..to recognize tomatoes ready for picking, colour sensors wouldn't work..there are so many diff colours to tomato and sometimes variegated shades. How would you know which tomato the bots got to pick? Certainly not by colour. Somethings like red apples and strawberries turn fully red when they are ripe..but not others.
There are firmness sensors..some sensors are so sensitive that when it grabs a fruit it can measure the minute 'give' when it ungrabs it..there are brix sensors. Altho I haven't seen them. I only know brix sensors from wine industry where you can pretty much measure sweetness of the liquid. But I have heard there are Brix sensors that can measure level of sugars without hurting soft fruits so only the sweetest fruit is picked and the unripe is left behind without being touched or squeezed by a robotic gripper.
I agree..simpler animals have had millions of years headstart with their design..but it's perfected to do their job. Ask any gardener about gophers(or see caddy shack) and they'd tell you that we haven't evolved to defeat them yet! The simple virus is the most elegant and beautiful and most advanced organism because it keeps mutating and we can't defeat it. So there is something to be said for nature(which is why it makes me nervous when it keeps disappearing due to human ignorance and apathy and arrogance)
I will certainly touch base with you. Thanks for the discussion.
For example..to recognize tomatoes ready for picking, colour sensors wouldn't work..there are so many diff colours to tomato and sometimes variegated shades. How would you know which tomato the bots got to pick? Certainly not by colour. Somethings like red apples and strawberries turn fully red when they are ripe..but not others.
There are firmness sensors..some sensors are so sensitive that when it grabs a fruit it can measure the minute 'give' when it ungrabs it..there are brix sensors. Altho I haven't seen them. I only know brix sensors from wine industry where you can pretty much measure sweetness of the liquid. But I have heard there are Brix sensors that can measure level of sugars without hurting soft fruits so only the sweetest fruit is picked and the unripe is left behind without being touched or squeezed by a robotic gripper.
I agree..simpler animals have had millions of years headstart with their design..but it's perfected to do their job. Ask any gardener about gophers(or see caddy shack) and they'd tell you that we haven't evolved to defeat them yet! The simple virus is the most elegant and beautiful and most advanced organism because it keeps mutating and we can't defeat it. So there is something to be said for nature(which is why it makes me nervous when it keeps disappearing due to human ignorance and apathy and arrogance)
I will certainly touch base with you. Thanks for the discussion.
IMHO it all boils down to economic interest of some strong powers:
in EU they're not cheap, but cheaper ...
I would like to say a lot about this, but I am gonna redirect you to some documentaries:
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Food,_Inc.
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_World_According_to_Monsant...
Thanks. They are good documentaries. I haven't seen world acc to Monsanto yet. Bayer is set to merge with Monsanto soon. Things are about to get 'interesting'.
Companies that had to do with production of zyklon b gas and agent orange involved with our medicines and our food. Life and death ..two sides of the same coin..taking turns. Trippy.
Companies that had to do with production of zyklon b gas and agent orange involved with our medicines and our food. Life and death ..two sides of the same coin..taking turns. Trippy.
One reason may be that the tech industry exists mainly in metro areas and is city-focused. These people live in the city and deal with city problems on a daily basis.
Also, farming is just not sexy.
Also, farming is just not sexy.
I think you are right. Farming doesn't get a lot of people excited. I can see that now.
I'd be curious to know what you want said robot to do
Weeding. For starters. That's where we use most manual labour. Followed by harvesting.
Long story short - larger market, more money to be made in the consumer's market. Blame investors not innovators.
Do you remember that Major Major's father made a good living by not growing more alfalfa than anyone else in the county?
But let's put things in order:
I think your assumptions are wrong. First I would deal with the automated driving, then with the farming business.
Automated cars are not only for people who don't enjoy driving their car towards the setting sun and enjoying freedom. Literally everything you can buy, eat and enjoy in life relies on transport. I would guess that none of the consumer goods you purchase are produced where you live - maybe with the exception of a bakery, restaurant and your local Starbucks. Automated trucks are simply a huge thing. You will be able to drive them non stop, distribute the traffic more reasonably etc. Passanger transport is another thing, no less important. A lot of white collar workers have to visit their clients in person and spend many hours driving. Their talents and competences are not used properly. If they don't have to focus on the road, there could be a huge boost in their productivity. Even if they would just be able to relax more during the business travells by watching films.
Self driving cars are not just a matter of leisure, but of significant reduction of cost of transport that everything relies on.
And why do we automate in the first place? - to free human energy. Sitting in a car and driving thousands of kilometers is just dumb. Necessary, but dumb and tremendously repetitive. Once the machines can do it, the man can focus on specialised tasks that only humans can do. I believe that is the major task of CS in general - to free human potential.
I have nothing to do with farming, but I believe your diagnosis is mistaken. Food production has been automated so heavily, that a single farmer is able to produce an incredible amount of food (it means farmers invested a lot in their current technology). Moreover, as indicated in the beginning, US gov. and other governments in Europe PAY farmers for NOT growing food. And food production is often not very profitable and has to be heavily subsidized. Farmers operate on very very narrow profit margins and therefore investment has to be able to cut (already low) production costs. Robots are sophisticated machines and the maintenance cost is high. On the other hand manual labour on farms is very cheap. I believe that the benefits of automatisations in the farming industry are still not good enough to balance the cost.
Moreover, there is virtually no shortage of food, especially in the west. The last big starvation (not caused by politics) in Europe was a matter of the end of 19th century. While transport is an ever growing business - we want more stuff, faster, delivered from further away, food producers are rather more concerned about governments keeping the subsidies and import tariffs to supress supply.
Considering all of the above - food production is not such a big problem, and its share in the economy is very very small.
Having said that, of course there is a potential market for even more machines and automation, but I am not surprised that the farmers are not interested in it at the moment.
But let's put things in order:
I think your assumptions are wrong. First I would deal with the automated driving, then with the farming business.
Automated cars are not only for people who don't enjoy driving their car towards the setting sun and enjoying freedom. Literally everything you can buy, eat and enjoy in life relies on transport. I would guess that none of the consumer goods you purchase are produced where you live - maybe with the exception of a bakery, restaurant and your local Starbucks. Automated trucks are simply a huge thing. You will be able to drive them non stop, distribute the traffic more reasonably etc. Passanger transport is another thing, no less important. A lot of white collar workers have to visit their clients in person and spend many hours driving. Their talents and competences are not used properly. If they don't have to focus on the road, there could be a huge boost in their productivity. Even if they would just be able to relax more during the business travells by watching films.
Self driving cars are not just a matter of leisure, but of significant reduction of cost of transport that everything relies on.
And why do we automate in the first place? - to free human energy. Sitting in a car and driving thousands of kilometers is just dumb. Necessary, but dumb and tremendously repetitive. Once the machines can do it, the man can focus on specialised tasks that only humans can do. I believe that is the major task of CS in general - to free human potential.
I have nothing to do with farming, but I believe your diagnosis is mistaken. Food production has been automated so heavily, that a single farmer is able to produce an incredible amount of food (it means farmers invested a lot in their current technology). Moreover, as indicated in the beginning, US gov. and other governments in Europe PAY farmers for NOT growing food. And food production is often not very profitable and has to be heavily subsidized. Farmers operate on very very narrow profit margins and therefore investment has to be able to cut (already low) production costs. Robots are sophisticated machines and the maintenance cost is high. On the other hand manual labour on farms is very cheap. I believe that the benefits of automatisations in the farming industry are still not good enough to balance the cost.
Moreover, there is virtually no shortage of food, especially in the west. The last big starvation (not caused by politics) in Europe was a matter of the end of 19th century. While transport is an ever growing business - we want more stuff, faster, delivered from further away, food producers are rather more concerned about governments keeping the subsidies and import tariffs to supress supply.
Considering all of the above - food production is not such a big problem, and its share in the economy is very very small.
Having said that, of course there is a potential market for even more machines and automation, but I am not surprised that the farmers are not interested in it at the moment.
Alfalfa..a cautionary tale and perversion of farming when sustainability is lost.
It is a mainly a story about California. The golden state that supplies over 1/3 of all vegetables in the USA..and about 2/3 of nuts and citrus. A state that has been ravaged by drought and yet grows thirsty crops like citrus, almonds and alfalfa.
In the 1970s, a farmer from the Midwest started exporting cubed hay to Japan. To this day, japan is one of the largest importers of alfalfa hay from the United States. The Middle East and esp UAE imports hay too. But the biggest importer of hay from the USA is China.
In the early 2000s, there was no hay exports from California. But it was the high season in Silicon Valley with iPhones and cheap plastic toys coming into our ports in giant shipping containers. Instead of sending them back empty..someone thought it was a good idea to sell hay to china. It made sense from a logistics pov because shipping hay would be win win for china as well as the USA.
Around this time in the early 2000s, china was barely importing 2% of our hay exports. Fast forward 15 years, china is the largest importer of alfalfa hay and takes almost 30% of the market share(if not more).
This happened because of the increasing prosperity in china and there was a spike in demand for milk. While dairy was once a luxury, now the prosperous middle class wanted milk for themselves and their families. But when they started dairy industry, they found that china was also losing arable land and there was no grazing land for the cattle. The aquifers were drying up and whatever water available was polluted with industrial wastes. Importing from USA was a good idea as alfalfa was high in protein and the best feed for milch cows.
How did this affect us? Imperial valley in California grows a lot of alfalfa for hay..you can do multiple cuttings in a year and fill all those empty containers returning to China. It was so profitable and the logistics made so much sense that it was cheaper to send hay to china than to the dairy central of California, Tulare.
Now American dairy farmers are competing with china for American alfafa. The pricing becomes competitive and the dairy farmers were going under because there was no way to make money on milk. Dairy industry is another out of control rodeo show but that's another story.
And then the drought happened. Alfalfa being a thirsty crop took a lot of water because it was more profitable to grow hay than food. But with little price wiggle room, we were selling alfalfa to china and exporting it to other countries cheaper than it costs because we were not taking into account of the cost of water. DURING a DROUGHT! How fucked up is that? It became a popular wry thing to say that our cheapest export was our water. We were selling water in containers to others while we were being asked to cut down our water usage and water rates was raised.
To make this all even more interesting, farmers were letting fields go fallow during the drought because water was too expensive. Citrus and almonds were becoming so expensive and they were our main exports. Many farmers lost everything and started selling pieces of their land. For which there were few buyers because there was no water!
And yet..why do we have this delusion that food is 'cheap and plentiful'. Because our food comes from South American countries..our quinoa..our gmo soy comes from destruction of rain forests and the break down of indigenous people from other places that are poor.
Our mega farms grow commodity crops like corn and exports what we do use for our hogs. Pound for pound, pork or meat is more expensive wrt water than vegetables. And here is the perversion, our biggest buyer of corn is Mexico. A country with a rich and diverse cultural and food history of corn..heirloom, native corn..has to buy gmo corn from USA while their own corn strains are disappearing. Their farmers grow tomatoes and chives for us because it's cheaper.
And round and round we go..a tangled web we weave...it's so messed up..I can pick up from here and tell you a 'dairy story' or a 'quinoa story' or a 'soy story'. It never ends and it doesn't have to be complicated.
Water needs to be treated as the precious resource there is..in a hundred years, countries might as well go to war over water not oil..and secondly, sustainability is key. Local food production is key. Govt needs to be reined in..they are taking away control of farmers over what they do best..they are making them into beggars and debtors. Lesser the govt interferes with our lives..and our food..it's better.
Nothing is sustainable..from the population of china ..to California exports to imports from Latin America.
And yet we imagine that all is well..food is plentiful and cheap..and food production is not something to worry about. I worry about it. A lot.
It is a mainly a story about California. The golden state that supplies over 1/3 of all vegetables in the USA..and about 2/3 of nuts and citrus. A state that has been ravaged by drought and yet grows thirsty crops like citrus, almonds and alfalfa.
In the 1970s, a farmer from the Midwest started exporting cubed hay to Japan. To this day, japan is one of the largest importers of alfalfa hay from the United States. The Middle East and esp UAE imports hay too. But the biggest importer of hay from the USA is China.
In the early 2000s, there was no hay exports from California. But it was the high season in Silicon Valley with iPhones and cheap plastic toys coming into our ports in giant shipping containers. Instead of sending them back empty..someone thought it was a good idea to sell hay to china. It made sense from a logistics pov because shipping hay would be win win for china as well as the USA.
Around this time in the early 2000s, china was barely importing 2% of our hay exports. Fast forward 15 years, china is the largest importer of alfalfa hay and takes almost 30% of the market share(if not more).
This happened because of the increasing prosperity in china and there was a spike in demand for milk. While dairy was once a luxury, now the prosperous middle class wanted milk for themselves and their families. But when they started dairy industry, they found that china was also losing arable land and there was no grazing land for the cattle. The aquifers were drying up and whatever water available was polluted with industrial wastes. Importing from USA was a good idea as alfalfa was high in protein and the best feed for milch cows.
How did this affect us? Imperial valley in California grows a lot of alfalfa for hay..you can do multiple cuttings in a year and fill all those empty containers returning to China. It was so profitable and the logistics made so much sense that it was cheaper to send hay to china than to the dairy central of California, Tulare.
Now American dairy farmers are competing with china for American alfafa. The pricing becomes competitive and the dairy farmers were going under because there was no way to make money on milk. Dairy industry is another out of control rodeo show but that's another story.
And then the drought happened. Alfalfa being a thirsty crop took a lot of water because it was more profitable to grow hay than food. But with little price wiggle room, we were selling alfalfa to china and exporting it to other countries cheaper than it costs because we were not taking into account of the cost of water. DURING a DROUGHT! How fucked up is that? It became a popular wry thing to say that our cheapest export was our water. We were selling water in containers to others while we were being asked to cut down our water usage and water rates was raised.
To make this all even more interesting, farmers were letting fields go fallow during the drought because water was too expensive. Citrus and almonds were becoming so expensive and they were our main exports. Many farmers lost everything and started selling pieces of their land. For which there were few buyers because there was no water!
And yet..why do we have this delusion that food is 'cheap and plentiful'. Because our food comes from South American countries..our quinoa..our gmo soy comes from destruction of rain forests and the break down of indigenous people from other places that are poor.
Our mega farms grow commodity crops like corn and exports what we do use for our hogs. Pound for pound, pork or meat is more expensive wrt water than vegetables. And here is the perversion, our biggest buyer of corn is Mexico. A country with a rich and diverse cultural and food history of corn..heirloom, native corn..has to buy gmo corn from USA while their own corn strains are disappearing. Their farmers grow tomatoes and chives for us because it's cheaper.
And round and round we go..a tangled web we weave...it's so messed up..I can pick up from here and tell you a 'dairy story' or a 'quinoa story' or a 'soy story'. It never ends and it doesn't have to be complicated.
Water needs to be treated as the precious resource there is..in a hundred years, countries might as well go to war over water not oil..and secondly, sustainability is key. Local food production is key. Govt needs to be reined in..they are taking away control of farmers over what they do best..they are making them into beggars and debtors. Lesser the govt interferes with our lives..and our food..it's better.
Nothing is sustainable..from the population of china ..to California exports to imports from Latin America.
And yet we imagine that all is well..food is plentiful and cheap..and food production is not something to worry about. I worry about it. A lot.
That's so funny. I actually do have a story about alfafa(which I will narrate separately after this).
First: I agree. Automation of driving is important but so is tech in farming. Like I said before, it's not a competition. Why not both? My gripe is that they want to get to farming automation after driving automation is perfected. Which seems wrong to me because they are looking at farm bot tech as a vehicle. As a farmer, I feel that it's entirely wrong approach. But that's my experience and opinion. Ymmv.
Secondly: farm production is semi automated for commodity food production. Can you live on grain alone? Can you live on sugar alone? Soy and corn are produced for livestock feed and for ethanol.
You say human labour is cheaper than machines. It makes me cringe. What about the human potential of the Mexican labourers picking strawberries and destroying his health? What about the thousands of farmer children who are sick from pesticide residue and dust pollution from excessive tilling? What about thousands of farmers and neighbours with asthma and auto immune disease just because they live in a rural area that gets tilled hence releasing fungal soil spores and orchards are sprayed.
Food and it's production is cheap only because the terrible price we pay for it is invisible.
You see the human potential being saved because of drivers autonomous cars can do something else. I see human potential being saved when a labourers doing repetitive manual tasks bent over and their spines vibrating from tractor driving(which btw isn't cheap..) are free to do other things. People who don't own state subsidied massive farms or have money to buy their own land are bonded labour. It is no different from slave labour.
Farmers aren't interested in it because no one has presented them with a viable produce. If I had a row crawling weeder, I will produce more and make more money. If I am presented with a million dollar automated tractor that I don't understand, can't afford and won't fully replace all my labour needs, why would I even look at it?
There isn't enough done for ag tech and what is being done isn't appropriate technology. Farmers are the 'technical lead' because what we know about soil ecology and plants and methods is the technical nuts and bolts. MBAs and money guys and engineers are designing and creating farm tech which when I showed to real farmers invited peals of laughter. It's just not appropriate tech because engineers are not farmers. We speak different languages.
And food production IS a problem. We bring in a lot. California feeds a lot of USA and we are paying for it..a terrible price. Florida grows tomatoes on sand and pesticides. The rest of USA will pay for it.
Ok. Alfalfa story coming up. It's not a funny story but rather an outrageous one. Sorry..I have some pending chores and will be back with it soon! Watch this space!
First: I agree. Automation of driving is important but so is tech in farming. Like I said before, it's not a competition. Why not both? My gripe is that they want to get to farming automation after driving automation is perfected. Which seems wrong to me because they are looking at farm bot tech as a vehicle. As a farmer, I feel that it's entirely wrong approach. But that's my experience and opinion. Ymmv.
Secondly: farm production is semi automated for commodity food production. Can you live on grain alone? Can you live on sugar alone? Soy and corn are produced for livestock feed and for ethanol.
You say human labour is cheaper than machines. It makes me cringe. What about the human potential of the Mexican labourers picking strawberries and destroying his health? What about the thousands of farmer children who are sick from pesticide residue and dust pollution from excessive tilling? What about thousands of farmers and neighbours with asthma and auto immune disease just because they live in a rural area that gets tilled hence releasing fungal soil spores and orchards are sprayed.
Food and it's production is cheap only because the terrible price we pay for it is invisible.
You see the human potential being saved because of drivers autonomous cars can do something else. I see human potential being saved when a labourers doing repetitive manual tasks bent over and their spines vibrating from tractor driving(which btw isn't cheap..) are free to do other things. People who don't own state subsidied massive farms or have money to buy their own land are bonded labour. It is no different from slave labour.
Farmers aren't interested in it because no one has presented them with a viable produce. If I had a row crawling weeder, I will produce more and make more money. If I am presented with a million dollar automated tractor that I don't understand, can't afford and won't fully replace all my labour needs, why would I even look at it?
There isn't enough done for ag tech and what is being done isn't appropriate technology. Farmers are the 'technical lead' because what we know about soil ecology and plants and methods is the technical nuts and bolts. MBAs and money guys and engineers are designing and creating farm tech which when I showed to real farmers invited peals of laughter. It's just not appropriate tech because engineers are not farmers. We speak different languages.
And food production IS a problem. We bring in a lot. California feeds a lot of USA and we are paying for it..a terrible price. Florida grows tomatoes on sand and pesticides. The rest of USA will pay for it.
Ok. Alfalfa story coming up. It's not a funny story but rather an outrageous one. Sorry..I have some pending chores and will be back with it soon! Watch this space!
Autonomous solutions for farm vehicles is far more important and necessary and urgent, but how come driverless cars are more important than the problem of growing food?
I am really struggling with understanding some of the responses/reactions to my queries for farm robots. It all comes down to $$. Some firms won't even give me a quote. They simply tell me to wait till autonomous vehicles becomes mainstream and robotics tech would become more accessible(I don't necessarily agree with this). I don't get it. It's food! Everyone needs it. Like..literally..every single person needs to eat. Not everyone needs to own a driverless car.
I guess I understand the reasoning why farmers are less important than those who can afford 100k cars that drive themselves, but I can't grasp the logic or rationality behind it.
I have some funds but everyone wants to know how much I can spend without giving me a quote. That makes no sense to me. If I were in a farmers market and a customer walks by my stall..and wants to know how much the tomatoes cost, I don't ask them how much they have in their wallet..I tell them how much it costs and they buy if they can..yea?
But let me tell you, this doesn't happen when a farmer approaches an engineering company to design a farm bot.
What am I doing wrong?