
A New Chip Tells Farmers When to Water - ryan_j_naughton
http://modernfarmer.com/2014/06/inside-job-new-chip-tells-farmers-water/
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jqm
I actually did an internship on a grape farm in the early 90's. Getting a
degree in agonomy I was all hyped on modern technology and exited about
tensiometers. The 20 year old me wanted to install them, but was shut down by
the old Hispanic foreman during the meeting. He had been growing grapes for
30+ years. When I asked him how he decided when to water he said... simple.
See these weeds growing under the grapes? (it was a type of pigweed I believe)
When they start to droop it's time to water. Turns out, the grapes roots are
deeper and the vines much larger than the weed, so this was in fact a free
(and pretty accurate) tensiometer.

I love tech. And not to be a cynic, but I kind of doubt many serious "farmers"
read this magazine. The old foreman maybe converted me to a degree of
traditionalism. There doesn't need to be a tech solution for everything.
Sometimes simple time tested solutions are better.

EDIT: One more point. Suppose one was able to figure out an individual plant's
water needs. I don't know of any irrigation system that would let you meet it.
The block, patch, field, whatever gets watered all together. Unless you send
people to adjust individual emitters or something. And, if you are doing that
you have undoubtedly spent far more money than you will ever make back in
increased yields or water savings. This "modern farmer" magazine kind of
drives me nuts and I see it posted here on HN frequently.

EDIT2: I guess I'm at my commenting limit so I'll leave the reply here. I
agree with poster who says tech is necessary to feed more in the future. But
this chip, in a production setting, is a non-solution looking for a problem.
And there is way too much stuff like this that people think are
"breakthroughs".

People have trouble comprehending scale when it comes to agriculture. A tray
in a hydroponic gardens, even a roof full of hydroponic gardens... cool, but
it isn't going to ever provide a significant portion of the worlds food. And
it is way too expensive to set up and maintain for what it provides. Now...
for specialty applications and a few off-season vegetables it's fine. But many
thousands of acres and lots of water are required to produce the real bulk of
our food... i.e. grains. The aquaponics systems pictured in the links below
wouldn't even sufficiently feed the two guys in the picture. And... examining
the moisture usage of individual plants per watering cycle... great for
research or hobbyist or specialist crops, not practical day to day production
agriculture. That's my point.

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techpeace
Unfortunately, simple, time-tested solutions likely won't get food production
to the place it needs to be in 30 years.

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jqm
Not to be deliberately morbid but there is a time tested solution to not
enough food that re-appears again and again throughout human history. It's
called famine and has been a tremendous regulator of human overpopulation.

Maybe we can beat famine back forever. But I'm not counting on it. The whole
situation is actually pretty tenuous. You don't see a lot about it on the
news, but I understand the Horn of Africa has been experiencing massive famine
over the past several years and hundreds of thousands have died from lack of
nourishment. From an outside (rather than personal) perspective, this is just
part of the cycle. In the first world we have beat famine back over the past
century and the third world has enjoyed much of the benefit of this as they
import much of their grain staples. But, we have sucked the aquifers dry,
damned up most of the rivers and overallocation the water, are running short
of essential nutrients like phosphorous and the whole thing is oil based. So,
I am guessing in spite of massive efforts, the cycle of famine re-appears
around the world again. Maybe next time around we can make our
political/social systems a bit more efficient and forward looking which is, in
my opinion, the only way to eliminate famine forever. But I'm not necessarily
counting on that either.

~~~
jqm
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peak_phosphorus](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peak_phosphorus)

relatively speaking, does it matter if we run out in 100 years or 300 years?
the point is... we are on an unsustainable path in food production.

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qthrul
This reminded me of 2008: [http://www.businessweek.com/stories/2008-12-04/how-
to-make-t...](http://www.businessweek.com/stories/2008-12-04/how-to-make-the-
drought-in-the-south-pay)

[Spoiler alert] soil sensors + telemetry + spectrum = Internet of Things
[/Spoiler alert]

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jasonlaramburu
Interesting-- tensiometers have been used in soil for a few years now, but
never implanted into the plant. Tensiometers basically measure the pressure
change caused by plant roots soaking up water.

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Shivetya
so dumb question, would not some forms of spectral analysis or similar work?
This chip solution seems a bit too work intensive for most crops, would not
large fields be a bit much for installs?

for my dumb question I found this
[http://isda.ncsa.illinois.edu/Hyperspectral/hyperAgricultur....](http://isda.ncsa.illinois.edu/Hyperspectral/hyperAgricultur.html)

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jasonlaramburu
Spectral analysis (via drone, satellite, airplane etc) is good but won't give
you the resolution of 1 chip per plant. It does seem labor intensive to
implant every plant, but not impossible. Even large farmers trim and take
cuttings from individual plants.

~~~
sparkman55
You can get plenty of resolution off an airplane. I have seen aerial imagery
of sufficient resolution to do stand count analysis, which is basically
counting individual green shoots of corn in the spring.

As another poster mentioned, though, spectral analysis shows problems in the
leaves of the plant, where it is too late: if your plant is yellowing due to
lack of water or nutrients, you've already decreased the potential yield from
that plant. It's better to detect deficiencies in the ground.

