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Open Source Farming Robot

getpost
77 replies
15h11m

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.

SoftTalker
40 replies
15h7m

Doesn't rain fall on the leaves as much as the soil?

jahewson
13 replies
14h34m

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.

efilife
12 replies
12h49m

May I ask why you used there's instead of there are? There is likely sounds wrong and is wrong and I see it very often

ac29
5 replies
12h23m

Its written the way it'd be spoken, which seems fine for informal writing

efilife
2 replies
3h19m

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

seabrookmx
0 replies
2h16m

According to whom?

Why are we grammar policing on hackernews? This is a tech and startup forum not a language forum.

crazygringo
0 replies
3h0m

It's just wrong.

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.

HPsquared
1 replies
8h8m

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.

efilife
0 replies
3h15m

I don't think this is the case.

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

skywhopper
2 replies
6h31m

That’s a natural way to speak in American English anyway. You wouldn’t say “there is”. But “there’s” is fine.

efilife
1 replies
3h23m

It's not about the contraction of there is, there are has a completely different meaning

ajuc
0 replies
1h8m

If something is used often to mean X - it starts to mean X. That's how language works.

TheDong
2 replies
10h53m

"other factors" can be treated as a singular group noun if you want, so I think both are correct.

By example:

"There are likely to be cows over that hill" - correct, many cows

"There is likely to be a herd of cows over that hill" - correct, one herd

"There are likely to be other factors" - correct, many factors

"There is likely to be a number of other factors" - correct, one collection of many factors

"There are likely to be a number of other factors" - correct, emphasizes the factors over the collection

"There are likely to be other factors" - correct if you want to treat 'other factors' as a singular group. Up for debate.

Also, "there're" is very hard to say, so using "there's" as a contraction for "there are" is, in my book, okay, even if it's not technically correct.

efilife
1 replies
3h20m

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

nozzlegear
0 replies
1h32m

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".

r2_pilot
9 replies
14h43m

Isn't the point of being smart human beings is that we do things better than what occurs in nature?

NilMostChill
7 replies
14h36m

That assumes that rain falling on leaves serves no purpose.

stale2002
5 replies
14h11m

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.

NilMostChill
2 replies
12h57m

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.

lukas099
1 replies
5h4m

That's assuming that we are somehow outside of nature

No it isn’t. You know what they meant, you are just one-upping them on a technicality in a way that doesn’t advance the discussion at all.

NilMostChill
0 replies
4h45m

No it isn’t.

Yes, it is.

You know what they meant.

I have clearly stated what i think they meant.

They specifically said "disadvantages compared to us." that heavily implies ( if not outright declares ) an us vs them.

It seems you have a different interpretation, I'd be interested to hear what that is if you don't mind ?

you are just one-upping them on a technicality in a way that doesn’t advance the discussion at all.

If you don't see how what i said was related to the discussion then we probably aren't going to agree on what constitutes a technicality.

twojacobtwo
0 replies
13h37m

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.

quaintdev
0 replies
13h15m

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.

lukas099
0 replies
4h55m

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.

username135
0 replies
4h43m

That assumes that we are better at doing things than nature is. I dont know if im sold on that.

tonyarkles
4 replies
5h53m

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.

amoshebb
1 replies
3h0m

I’ve heard of this for frost prevention, but never rain. Do you know of a specific vineyard doing this?

freedomben
0 replies
1h18m

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.

0_____0
0 replies
3h23m

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.

Grimblewald
4 replies
13h19m

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.

RobotToaster
3 replies
8h56m

Why would you water your plants with surfactants/soap?

Genuine question, does it help the plants in some way?

waldothedog
0 replies
1h22m

I believe this is common for large scale irrigation and ferti-gation as it breaks surface tension and helps the water flow

ajuc
0 replies
1h14m

It's a common traditional fix to aphids infestation.

HPsquared
0 replies
8h11m

Reduced surface tension will soak into the soil better and improve capillary flow to the roots.

notatoad
2 replies
12h2m

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.

gen220
1 replies
5h6m

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.

lukas099
0 replies
4h54m

It doesn’t have to be either/or. Plants can both compete and cooperate with each other in different ways.

kylebenzle
0 replies
13h44m

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!

brikym
0 replies
12h24m

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.

ajuc
0 replies
1h16m

Depends on the plant. There's little rain in the lowest layer of a forest for example. Or in a desert.

semicolon_storm
8 replies
14h26m

Water on the leaves isn’t bad if you’re watering in the morning where it’ll soon evaporate in the sunlight.

tuatoru
6 replies
12h56m

I was told that water beads on leaf surfaces act as lenses, creating burnt spots on the leaves. So water at night.

rvense
2 replies
11h6m

I was told to water at night because it doesn't make much sense to pour water on the ground only for it to evaporate before it goes where it's needed.

weweweoo
0 replies
9h46m

Well, that obviously depends from how sunny and warm it is.

lukas099
0 replies
4h50m

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)

mapt
2 replies
11h41m

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.

tzot
1 replies
6h52m

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.

cbsmith
0 replies
11h23m

The evaporation is the thing you want to avoid.

mapt
4 replies
11h38m

Probably?

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.

cbsmith
3 replies
11h25m

Drip irrigation is kind of a thing out here in the desert...

bboygravity
2 replies
7h17m

And then there is burried drip irrigation...

goeiedaggoeie
0 replies
5h48m

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)

freedomben
0 replies
1h23m

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.

rmason
3 replies
11h23m

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.

https://www.dripworks.com/drip-irrigation

goeiedaggoeie
2 replies
5h49m

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.

6gvONxR4sf7o
1 replies
1h16m

Are moisture sensors any good? I always read about how useless they are, but maybe that’s just a certain type? What would you recommend?

throwup238
0 replies
23m

Moisture sensors that measure conductivity are pretty useless unless frequently recalibrated but time domain reflectometry sensors are much better and more accurate.

I use the VH400 from Vegetronix: https://www.vegetronix.com/Products/VH400/

thatcat
2 replies
10h32m

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.

thatcat
0 replies
13m

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-...

ein0p
2 replies
11h20m

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.

tastyfreeze
0 replies
5h25m

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.

portpecos
0 replies
2h24m

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.

6gvONxR4sf7o
2 replies
14h26m

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.

aydyn
1 replies
13h38m

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.

kylebenzle
0 replies
13h28m

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.

znpy
1 replies
4h19m

you don't spray water on leaves as shown in the video

That’s pretty much what happens when plants get “watered” naturally though… I’m thinking about rain of course

whynotmaybe
0 replies
3h49m

From my understanding gathered from grandparents, problems occur when watering under the sun because droplets act like magnifier and burn the leaves.

Watering the soil means you don't need to care about the sun.

wood_spirit
1 replies
5h25m

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.

jmdots
0 replies
2h40m

So it’s like a giant 2L bottle on its side with the ends cut off and no label? Was the soil inside fully or was this a covering? Very cool

alisson
1 replies
5h20m

I heard watering the leaves is a technique to avoid frost damage in some regions

mkranjec
0 replies
31m

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.

loftsy
0 replies
8h48m

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.

jejeyyy77
0 replies
3h50m

rain?

ionwake
0 replies
9h4m

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.

apexalpha
34 replies
5h57m

This looks fun but not really useful.

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.

James_K
20 replies
5h35m

Each person owning their own farm is orders of magnitude less efficient that one large farm serving many people.

redeux
4 replies
5h17m

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.

krisoft
1 replies
5h7m

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?

sgu999
0 replies
4h16m

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...

airstrike
1 replies
5h6m

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.

redeux
0 replies
2h48m

“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.

pydry
2 replies
5h19m

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.

Tastier and more nutritious too.

bagels
1 replies
4h27m

Farmers get their inputs much cheaper than I do, especially water. Water is essentially free compared to residential rates at about 100x cheaper.

pydry
0 replies
2h26m

I dont think water forms a large % of the cost of fresh veg - certainly not relative to logistics and spoilage.

pebm
2 replies
5h18m

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.

mikepurvis
0 replies
5h9m

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.

OscarCunningham
0 replies
4h30m

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.

riiii
0 replies
5h3m

So what? I don't let efficiency control my life or hobbies.

mlyle
0 replies
4h57m

There are obviously economies of scale in agriculture.

But there are also a whole lot of benefits to producing food yourself: resilience, diversity of food crops, taste.

Also, people often enjoy the process, which effectively lowers the economic cost of doing it yourself.

lukas099
0 replies
5h26m

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.

locococo
0 replies
5h24m

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.

hengheng
0 replies
4h46m

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.

asdf6969
0 replies
2h46m

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.

apexalpha
0 replies
5h22m

Yes but most people already own a plot of land that is not in use for anything except growing grass.

AtlasBarfed
0 replies
5h25m

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.

AngryData
0 replies
2h29m

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.

lukas099
2 replies
5h25m

I would love a drone or robot that selectively kills invasive weeds and leaves native ones.

airstrike
1 replies
5h12m

Preferably with the use of a high-powered laser

mlyle
0 replies
4h56m

Sounds like a good way to burn down your yard but leave the weed alive .:p

asdf6969
2 replies
2h49m

In 20 years most people won’t be able to afford a yard

__MatrixMan__
1 replies
2h8m

In that case, who cares what the bank says about whose yard is whose? Find a patch of ground and grow your food there.

We only uphold property rights because enough of us see a benefit in doing so. If that changes, so can we.

Waterluvian
2 replies
5h49m

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.

redeux
1 replies
5h12m

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.

Waterluvian
0 replies
5h11m

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.

quijoteuniv
1 replies
5h12m

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 !

lancesells
0 replies
4h16m

For the complexity and materials in this project coupled with the fairly small coverage I think the best way to start is to garden by hand.

It makes more sense in a laboratory environment but this just seems like overkill for a regular person.

riiii
0 replies
5h1m

As an open source project it's tremendously useful. This is a start of new era in human history.

WillAdams
0 replies
5h42m

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:

https://ogardengroup.com/

is perhaps a bit more marketable (though they missed out by not sizing it to fit next to a refrigerator).

myprotegeai
24 replies
16h11m

How many Farmbots would I need to feed 2 adults and 2 children year round? What challenges might I run into?

Edit: Found a link to yield analysis https://farm.bot/pages/yield It appears the answer is however many Farmbots cover 549 square meters

_heimdall
10 replies
15h47m

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.

Loughla
7 replies
15h23m

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.

_heimdall
4 replies
15h0m

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.

zamfi
3 replies
14h34m

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?

_heimdall
2 replies
14h22m

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.

hattmall
1 replies
13h58m

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.

_heimdall
0 replies
13h46m

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.

stevekemp
0 replies
8h52m

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.

nathancahill
0 replies
6h39m

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.

SoftTalker
1 replies
14h59m

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.

_heimdall
0 replies
14h11m

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.

NilMostChill
6 replies
14h31m

This page has a section titled "Cups, Not Calories".

It hurts my soul that anybody producing a table such as that is using something as vague as a "cup" in their calculations.

nilsherzig
4 replies
13h38m

I think "cup" is one of these American units, it's about 236ml

NilMostChill
3 replies
12h50m

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cup_(unit).

American legal cup ? metric cup ? Canadian cup ? or one of the other ones.

Even if you narrow it to just the roughly the US you still have 4 + metric , so 5 different options.

and that doesn't even account for people just using the cup they have to hand.

It's not a rant at you, it's frustration with non-specific, arbitrary units.

jannyfer
1 replies
9h42m

WAIT.

US cups and metric cups are different?

NilMostChill
0 replies
4h43m

Technically yes and that confusion is exactly my point.

collinmanderson
0 replies
4h54m

Cups are 236.6 ml. 8 fluid ounces.

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))”

TheDong
0 replies
10h2m

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).

serf
1 replies
15h55m

so 31 farmbots at 3m x 6m?

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.

delichon
0 replies
15h2m

Seems like to scale well the gantry needs to be able to travel between grow boxes, like on a continuous track.

jamilton
0 replies
15h46m

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.

j_timberlake
0 replies
13h54m

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.

defrost
0 replies
14h58m

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.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AqqOQdDBUwQ

https://www.sydney.edu.au/engineering/news-and-events/news/2...

https://www.agricultural-robotics.com/news/connectivity-in-a...

James_K
0 replies
5h21m

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.

constantcrying
15 replies
9h27m

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.

naasking
12 replies
9h19m

If you don't like gardening, you obviously wouldn't be interested in having a robot do it for you

Why? Do people who don't like gardening not like gardens or fresh produce? I just don't see how you reached this conclusion.

constantcrying
7 replies
9h0m

I gave a list of reasons for why people might light to do gardening. In that list zero of the points benefit from having a robot do it for you.

Why do you just ask the most banal questions instead of reading my post and responding to the argument I made?

Do people who don't like gardening not like gardens or fresh produce? I just don't see how you reached this conclusion.

Yes, if you don't ready post you don't know how I reached that conclusion.

If you just like fresh produce go to a farmers market.

naasking
6 replies
8h46m

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.

constantcrying
5 replies
7h49m

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?

naasking
4 replies
7h44m

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.

constantcrying
3 replies
7h36m

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?

naasking
1 replies
7h15m

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.

rob
0 replies
5h22m

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!

bluGill
0 replies
5h58m

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.

devjab
1 replies
2h0m

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.

naasking
0 replies
1h55m

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".

James_K
1 replies
5h27m

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.

naasking
0 replies
1h59m

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?

__MatrixMan__
0 replies
2h1m

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.

SpaghettiX
0 replies
5h23m

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.

__MatrixMan__
10 replies
16h36m

It's written in Elixir.

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.

e1gen-v
5 replies
16h29m

Can you elaborate? I’m intrigued.

__MatrixMan__
2 replies
15h26m

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.

---

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 :)

DevOfNull
1 replies
12h50m

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.

tonyarkles
0 replies
5h38m

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.

mikepurvis
1 replies
16h15m

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.

SoftTalker
0 replies
16h5m

And multihost is included out of the box, you don't really need to do anything special.

greenie_beans
1 replies
3h24m

what is "BEAM"?

detaro
0 replies
3h17m

The Erlang VM. (i.e. BEAM is to Erlang what the JVM is to Java)

torlok
8 replies
9h59m

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.

Maxion
3 replies
9h36m

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.

This thing definitely does not provide value.

prattatx
2 replies
6h4m

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.

torlok
0 replies
4h26m

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.

Vegenoid
0 replies
4h9m

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.

schleck8
1 replies
7h35m

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.
torlok
0 replies
4h35m

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.

imtringued
0 replies
3h0m

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.

nickhodge
8 replies
15h49m

But why?

brigadier132
6 replies
15h42m

why not?

owlninja
4 replies
15h29m

To each their own, but small gardens like this are about the journey, not the destination.

nvy
0 replies
15h25m

Building a garden robot and eating robo-spinach sounds like a super dank journey to me

nozzlegear
0 replies
14h31m

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.

mvidal01
0 replies
2h11m

I couldn’t agree more.

brigadier132
0 replies
15h13m

You just stated two contradictory things :).

To each their own

I agree. Some people might just want to be in control of where there food comes from.

but small gardens like this are about the journey, not the destination

Again, to each their own. Also, coding a robot to automate gardening is a journey as well.

Caius-Cosades
0 replies
6h45m

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.

djbusby
0 replies
15h48m

Bots are cool. Farming is cool. Cool^2

mherrmann
7 replies
10h12m

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.

torlok
2 replies
10h5m

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.

mherrmann
1 replies
7h16m

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.

torlok
0 replies
4h17m

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.

CapstanRoller
2 replies
8h23m

Having watched Clarkson's Farm, I can't help but feel that farming is extremely antiquated.

That's like saying you watched The Bachelor and now have Opinions about marriage.

mherrmann
1 replies
7h18m

You're telling me I have no clue. I don't disagree. But what would be much more interesting is for you to address the points I made.

CapstanRoller
0 replies
5h46m

You didn't really make any points worth addressing.

If you want to drink Soylent, go ahead. But even the predominant ingredient, soy, comes from agriculture.

rob
0 replies
5h18m

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.

antoniojtorres
7 replies
11h50m

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.

snickmy
3 replies
8h42m

Do you have any link to more sophisticated solutions ? genuine ask

deutz_allis
0 replies
6h0m

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.

Loughla
0 replies
6h36m

Legitimately look into custom farming practices. The level of automation, data, and general technology in use in farming today is amazing.

CapstanRoller
0 replies
8h33m

www.deere.com

defrost
1 replies
11h42m

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".

rahkiin
0 replies
6h57m

My partner likes gardening. I like robots. This might work for us.

That’s a narrow audience though..

Maxion
0 replies
9h35m

It could be useful in some research, allowing precise control of e.g. watering and automated photography of the plants. But that's about it.

abdullahkhalids
6 replies
14h2m

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.

taneq
1 replies
13h21m

So that you’re not rolling around on the soil and compacting it, or squashing seedlings?

wokwokwok
0 replies
9h32m

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.

maxglute
0 replies
10h58m

robotics has advanced quite a bit in that time.

Yeah I remember seeing this years ago, and feeling like it was the future. Now it barely feels like a robot.

defrost
0 replies
13h52m

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.

__MatrixMan__
0 replies
10h59m

Gantries can go places that tractors can't, like up and down the side of a building.

James_K
0 replies
5h18m

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.

driverdan
4 replies
3h36m

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.

pcarolan
1 replies
3h27m

Do you have a good resource for getting a system started? Particularly outdoors / backyard scale?

driverdan
0 replies
48m

There is a lot of good content on YouTube. The top search results tend to be decent. Indoor vs outdoor tend to be mostly the same minus the lights.

jejeyyy77
1 replies
3h2m

what are benefits of soil vs hydroponics?

atrus
0 replies
2h48m

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.

Brosper
4 replies
8h9m

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.

quijoteuniv
2 replies
8h4m

I do not understand why so much negativity against an open source project. And anyway game changing seldom comes within the same industry.

James_K
1 replies
5h13m

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.

quijoteuniv
0 replies
1h49m

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.

schleck8
0 replies
7h34m

It's not targeted at farmers clearly. The page literally says the xl version is for a family of four

taylorfinley
3 replies
15h22m

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?

garbagewoman
1 replies
11h57m

Whats your point, that its not durable enough? Based on what? It doesn’t have a shovel attachment either as far as i can tell

thatcat
0 replies
10h15m

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.

torlok
0 replies
9h38m

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.

donw
3 replies
16h27m

For some values of "open source": the datasets used for information about the plants and such are unavailable as of the last time I checked.

nvy
1 replies
15h24m

You can probably get anything you need from practicalplants

donw
0 replies
12h30m

That looks useful, thanks!

willguest
2 replies
8h5m

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

henearkr
0 replies
6h7m

Why do you tie emissions to steel contents.

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.

NotGMan
0 replies
6h22m

Why always this obsession with emissions?

People don't want poisoned food from pesticides etc... primarly.

ragebol
2 replies
10h46m

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.

Simpler mechanically as well I suppose

daemonologist
1 replies
10h10m

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.

ragebol
0 replies
4h10m

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.

owenpalmer
2 replies
13h48m

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.

[0] https://farm.bot/pages/yield

torlok
0 replies
9h50m

That's all the vegetables for your entire family, mostly automated.

This thing only drills the seeds and waters the plants.

_kb
0 replies
13h6m

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.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Center-pivot_irrigation

0cf8612b2e1e
2 replies
15h54m

Cool project, but $2800 for the basic kit is a lot to stomach given how many things can go wrong with robotics.

kyriakos
1 replies
13h55m

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.

ansible
0 replies
9h44m

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.

weweweoo
1 replies
9h39m

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.

john_minsk
0 replies
9h32m

Interesting. A while ago I heard about a project to use laser with AI to grow salmon and protect from parasites[1]

Would it be a terrible idea to destroy weeds with laser shots? Or crops don't provide enough margin for such advance tech?

1. https://www.stingray.no/delousing-with-laser/?lang=en

klntsky
1 replies
6h22m

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

luckylion
0 replies
5h30m

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.

cl42
1 replies
1h19m

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.

lucideer
0 replies
1h1m

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.

alsodumb
1 replies
3h14m

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.

kumarvvr
0 replies
2h15m

I thought you could use this as a springboard to improve and customize further, then put back those improvements into the open source project.

wmoxam
0 replies
16h22m

More like gardenbot

wiradikusuma
0 replies
13h53m

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?

vertis
0 replies
10h48m

Snippets from my partners reactions:

"Aimed at prosumers...uh...more nerdsumers"

"Oh I just saw the price, $4000 to avoid an hours work"

theo1996
0 replies
4h55m

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.

rammer
0 replies
8h38m

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.

nmeofthestate
0 replies
6h20m

The promo video - Industrial Farming Bad, Take Back Control, epic movie trailer soundtrack - is a real hoot, given the product it's selling.

matthewiiiv
0 replies
9h31m

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...

madmask
0 replies
6h9m

Looks like a thing that takes away the pleasure from gardening/small scale farming.

kingkawn
0 replies
5h33m

it is so so easy to grow that much of a garden, this is a complete waste

jimnotgym
0 replies
7h28m

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.

j_m_b
0 replies
5h7m

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!

indus
0 replies
3h38m

Isn’t your headline deceptive? Open source farming bot and the next CTA is order now for $2700?

hkt
0 replies
8h46m

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.

hengheng
0 replies
4h21m

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?

gunalx
0 replies
7h28m

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.

greenie_beans
0 replies
3h33m

nah, part of the fun of gardening is interacting with plants

fareesh
0 replies
12h13m

Is there an open source robot repository somewhere a-la github?

f0e4c2f7
0 replies
15h54m

Would be interested to hear the experiences of someone who has used this.

d_burfoot
0 replies
4h43m

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.

chfritz
0 replies
14h25m

Very cool. Do you have a way to see the farm live (via video streaming) in the app or the web?

cactusplant7374
0 replies
6h10m

Does it kill weeds? Is watering the only thing it does?

aussieguy1234
0 replies
12h4m

I'd like to see a farming robot using the new SAM model from meta.

_Marak_
0 replies
12h13m

you can buy a soaker hose with a timer its like twenty bucks

Havoc
0 replies
4h7m

A single bed isn't exactly an ungodly amount of effort to do by hand.

Think there is more potential industrial scale. i.e. run the arm over half a mile rather than a couple of feet

GlenTheMachine
0 replies
4h17m

Farmer and roboticist here.

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.

ChrisMarshallNY
0 replies
16h50m

My brother told me about this, years ago.

It’s a very cool project.

CapstanRoller
0 replies
8h11m

How many actual farmers are involved with this project, or were at least consulted?

This thing looks like an out-of-touch nerd hobby project, not a real tool one would use in the real world of farming.

The "Commercial Production" link goes to a page mostly consisting of... art projects. https://farm.bot/pages/research

BigParm
0 replies
4h52m

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.