
Ask HN: Why technology is not hot about solving real life problems? - jelliclesfarm
I get it that autonomous cars are super cool, but it solves the problem of a human being not wanting to drive.<p>Autonomous solutions for farm vehicles is far more important and necessary and urgent, but how come driverless cars are more important than the problem of growing food?<p>I am really struggling with understanding some of the responses&#x2F;reactions to my queries for farm robots. It all comes down to $$. Some firms won&#x27;t even give me a quote. They simply tell me to wait till autonomous vehicles becomes mainstream and robotics tech would become more accessible(I don&#x27;t necessarily agree with this). I don&#x27;t get it. It&#x27;s food! Everyone needs it. Like..literally..every single person needs to eat. Not everyone needs to own a driverless car.<p>I guess I understand the reasoning why farmers are less important than those who can afford 100k cars that drive themselves, but I can&#x27;t grasp the logic or rationality behind it.<p>I have some funds but everyone wants to know how much I can spend without giving me a quote. That makes no sense to me. If I were in a farmers market and a customer walks by my stall..and wants to know how much the tomatoes cost, I don&#x27;t ask them how much they have in their wallet..I tell them how much it costs and they buy if they can..yea?<p>But let me tell you, this doesn&#x27;t happen when a farmer approaches an engineering company to design a farm bot.<p>What am I doing wrong?
======
dangrossman
There's a huge variety of automated machinery used in agriculture already.
Tilling, sowing, and harvesting grains can be done by robots. Cows can be fed
and milked by robots. A "roomba for weeds" sweeps the fields scanning every
plant and spraying herbicides only on the weeds, leaving the veggies
untouched. Self-driving tractors have been driving themselves up and down
fields for over a decade.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Driverless_tractor](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Driverless_tractor)

[http://smartmachines.bluerivert.com/](http://smartmachines.bluerivert.com/)

[http://www.precisionplanting.com/#products/](http://www.precisionplanting.com/#products/)

[https://shop.deepfield-robotics.com/en/deepfield-
connect.htm...](https://shop.deepfield-robotics.com/en/deepfield-connect.html)

[http://www.sweeper-robot.eu/](http://www.sweeper-robot.eu/)

[https://www.lely.com/the-barn/milking/](https://www.lely.com/the-
barn/milking/)

[https://www.lely.com/the-barn/feeding/vector/](https://www.lely.com/the-
barn/feeding/vector/)

I don't believe it's true that everyone's working on self-driving cars to the
exclusion of applications of robotics to farming... I also don't believe
buying a $120,000 robot is similar to buying a tomato at a farmer's market.

~~~
jelliclesfarm
It's not that common. I don't know even one farmer who uses autonomous
tractors. Like literally..

Except..Right now, blue river tech's thinning machine in salinas but that's
kinda hitched to a tractor, iirc.

And here is why..1. They are hundreds of thousands of dollars and it is not
accessible to smaller farmers. 2. Current tech is more useful for commodity
farmers and not the kind of farmers who bring your tomatoes or kale to the
kitchen. 3. Corporate farms that cultivate a couple of thousand acres will
have more use for it. Small farmers like me won't do it. 4. Even large farmers
will be suspicious ..because as a farmer ..if something malfunctions(large
machinery and threat of malfunction is a package deal)and it is a few tonnes
heavy and your entire harvest over a thousand acres is dependent on machinery
you didn't tool or fashion with your own hands, you tend not to sink in a lot
of money in it. 5. It beggars belief that they won't come up with smaller
robots for the field that is affordable. Because it dilutes risk. Most
importanly, we need it. One can harvest a couple of hundred acres of sugar
beets with a small crew and machines within a short period of time but when
it's time to pick tomatoes, it has to be done by hand only..only with back
breaking labour..perishables must be picked right ON that day.

This is important to us. Labour issues are not going to get any better. It was
never in a good spot in the first place anyways.

~~~
curuinor
You can see why technology advances less fast in these matters from this
attitude. It's borne of experience, true, but real machines are less
profitable in every way, so people do the capitalist thing and follow the
profit margin. Google has a margin, after paying obscene salaries to its
engineers, of over 40%. Sales cycles are 10-1000x faster, except for larger
companies who negotiate - but the larger companies have lots more money.

Agriculture is the oldest and most essential part of civilization. However,
that means we know the most about it, and therefore it is among the most
unprofitable parts of it.

~~~
jelliclesfarm
When you take a snapshot of 'agricultural knowledge' in 100 BC and 100
AD..1800s and 1900s and post 2000s...it's easy to see that it's pretty
dynamic. Everything from soil to weather pattern to water to labour
availability to market changes. I have a kubota tractor that is about 15 years
old. Since then, so many things have changed. Why am I still using tech from
15 years ago? Obviously agriculture techniques and methods ought to change
too. It needs to be dynamic because agriculture in my grandfather's time is
not the agriculture of today.

Even though everyone needs food..it's very necesscity has created an
expectation that it is a human right to be fed. No one expects starvation
deaths these days and if one hears about it, it is shocking. But it used to
happen all the time.

A weird supply/demand equation has emerged. Instead of value going up for a
universal necessity, it's value has gone down because it is seemingly more
productive. But it is not. What we don't see is the invisible costs extracted
to get to the point of making food so cheap that it has lost value.

It still blows my mind when people ask why food isn't free and abundant. I
want to ask if they realize that it is tech intensive, labour intensive,
environmentally expensive and cash enterprise. If food is cheap, someone is
certainly being exploited and something is most certainly being abused. And
somewhere someone is subsidizing it.

But with technology and robotics we have an opportunity to right the many
wrongs and to maybe erase some of the damages..and yet, there seems to be
little capitalistic will to do so...if capitalism doesn't accommodate the tech
necessities, what else will?

One solution is to make food expensive again. I would wager that it might even
contain the population explosion we might see..Italy and Japan are
experiencing negative birth rates. Mostly because of economic depression,
shrinking age and restricted resources. Maybe that will be the antidote to
child like capitalism.

------
CyberFonic
Custom engineering design and construction is very expensive because they
cannot amortize the costs over many units. If it was like tomatoes, that is
being produced by the thousands then you would be able to get a very specific
price. But one-off are very hard to cost, especially in the absence of
detailed design and specification.

You might be better off looking at what the established farm machinery
companies are doing, for example John Deere has an autonomous tractor. There
are also many companies who retrofit GPS and other automation to existing farm
machinery. I found thousands of different automated farm machines with a quick
Google search, so I don't know where you have been looking.

Another option is to contact the engineering faculty of a nearby university,
they might be interested in solving a real world problem if you can produce a
preliminary requirements specification.

~~~
jelliclesfarm
I hear what you are saying. But in my opinion..it's exactly the huge farm
machines that has created unsustainable conditions in agriculture. I think
there is a tipping point. When population was sparse, we were able to get away
with pulling a plough with buffaloes. As population exploded, we innovated by
creating heavy machinery but sacrificed soil integrity and had to rely on
pesticides and fertilizers etc. because of the volume, market value was also
affected. We sacrificed soil. At this point, population is out of control and
cultivable land is shrinking. Now we have to preserve land and change the way
we farm because we can't use earth moving machines and keep ripping earth to
feed people who are also taking up land for housing and land for industry. For
regenerative agriculture, land has to be preserved and we have to go back to
human scale farming but using smart techniques.

I figured that solution is in places who are facing the problem of shrinking
ag land. I think we take the swathes of land from sea to shining sea for
granted. Even assuming that soil has not become useless, there aren't enough
people farming and with population increasing, it's going to go away. Think
China..they are buying land in Africa to grow food for their people because
their aquifers are drying up. We are already only growing commodities like
corn, soy..and feeding them to hogs and chicken. Which is actually more
expensive in terms of water.

I have started looking at countries that are ahead of the curve..where we will
be in 100 years. Small countries, aging and shrinking population..yet less
land.

There are a few nice robotic base chassis units on alibaba. Then I am going to
start cold calling universities in places like Philippines, Vietnam, India etc
because if anyone needs small/autonomous, it's going to be rice growing
farmers. Maybe bring it back here for collaboration with univ here for the
automation part.

Ag universities in the states are married to what works. Anything that hasn't
been tried and tested is not taught and is frowned upon. I get it. I guess
that's how academia works. I have spoken to some retired professors and
current head of depts in ag colleges in the states and everyone says it can be
done..but it's not worth it. One of them laughed at me.

Of course..why try something new when you can suckle at the teat of almost
instant credit and subsidies. A farmer I know and work with has been diagnosed
with valley fever. It's prevalent in Central Valley. It's a fungal infection
where spores lodge in lungs during certain seasons...it comes from the soil
and farmers and their children are the sickest and are often covered by barest
minimum insurance if any..that's a cost of farming too. But no one sees it.
Not even farmers. I am not a generational farmer and it amazes me that they
keep going at it. And fewer kids are picking up the profession of farming. New
generation grew up caressing smart phone screens to swipe..not driving heavy
farm machinery or knowing how to fix its mechanical innards. No way they will
do what their fathers and grandfathers did..

I remember the rotary phone. And how the wires snake up from phone to wall.
Smart phones are mobile and fit palm of the hand. John Deeres and heavy farm
equipment are the rotary phones of farming. If we keep basing design on them,
we will never figure the next best design.

I do like the idea of universities. Thanks. I will mix it up a bit and try
outside first. I don't believe it will happen in the states.

~~~
CyberFonic
I really enjoyed reading your well presented review of the present situation.
In a philosophical sense, you seem to share many observations in common with
Dimitry Orlov and Howard Kunstler.

The biggest stumbling block to your vision is that very few people want to
work in agriculture. It is too hard, dirty, unglamorous, uncool. The highly
educated youth want to work in flash offices on the latest smartphone app.
Then you have the big agribusiness who own the political system and exploit it
to their own ends. As you have noted the situation is dire in first-world
countries. These countries have moved from an agrarian economy to to
capitalistic one. Ecology be damned if it gets in the way of greater profits.

In countries such as Vietnam, Thailand, Cambodia, etc - man power is not an
issue. A sufficiently large proportion of the population still work on the
land. Due to their low capital resources even cheap robotics are infeasible.

China is a special case. Whilst they have a massive population, a very large
proportion of their country is of low agricultural potential. But they, like
Japan in the 1980s, are gravitating to the cities - it is a prestige thing for
many. When they are looking to Africa, it isn't just the land they are eyeing,
they are looking at the large potential low cost workforce already there.
Basically re-inventing the colonial ambitions of the British, Dutch and
Germans in the previous century.

~~~
jelliclesfarm
I am familiar with Kunstler and peak oil although I haven't delved too deep
into those topics. Many of my permaculture farmer friends are fans of
Kunstler.

For a while, I tried to farm without fossil fuels and it was tough!! I even
considered aquaponics and hydroponics. While it can part of food production,
it is too dependent on plastics and non biodegradable and is fossil fuel
dependent. It is highly unstable to be trusted with growing food entirely.

The extent to which we are reliant on fossil fuels is rather mind numbingly
shocking. And the markets and distributions are all so inefficient that maybe
it does make more sense to bring our food from South America. But the flip
side of it is a loss of food security and food sovereignty. What happens
during a natural disaster here or from where we import..what happens if
markets crash or if there is a war. Local food production is super crucial. As
a nation, Americans have no clue where their food comes from or the true cost
of it.

That's why I want my autonomous farm bots to be small in size, have mobility,
to be able to swarm any sized farm, be modular and hopefully run on solar and
be learning AI systems some day.

Food is really really expensive to produce. Really really really high non-
renewable input spending..irreversible damage causing..very inefficient and
leaky costs. This madness can be stopped by just acknowledging the costs. That
would automatically lead to efficient means of resolving this invisible
looming crisis.

What is stopping us is the low cost of food..and the assurance that the rest
of the world won't let another human being starve to death. Should we raise
cost of food? How can this be justified with any kind of conscience? Altho
many in developed countries have no qualms about the habitat and lives and
environmental damage caused in third world countries from where cheap food
comes from...when rain forests are destroyed to grow soy and quinoa or fad of
the week, we are so far removed from any awareness to be even accused of
exploiting the vulnerables of the global economy. It's ignorance and not
intentional malice. But it is likely that when we eat..chocolate or quinoa
porridge or soy protein in smoothie, someone somewhere is being exploited.

So how to work around this..can't raise prices for food. We can try some
things like: 1. Decentralized local hubs of urban agriculture with commodity
farming in certain rural areas. 2. Eliminate ag subsidies entirely. 3. All
farming on corporate scale should be non-profit as food is a basic human right
and no one should be able to profit off it. 4. A certain percentage of land
should be allocated to agriculture. I think crowded cities and shrinking
resources would bring forth the reality of our planet's limitations. 5.
Agricultural land cannot be sold to non citizens. 6. Incentivize
sustainablity/self sufficiency. 7. Incentivize small families and incentivize
even more those who do not procreate. 8. Make it illegal to waste food(as they
did recently in France) 9. Redefine distribution with local coops and farm
guilds. 10. Tax imported food to be more expensive than locally grown. 11.
Every town or county has land set aside as non transferable allotments like in
the U.K.

Imagine if we are cut off from oil supply..imagine if infrastructure breaks
down..if dollar loses its value ..what would we do? Ok. I am being a little
extreme here but consider it a thought experiment. What do we do? Where are
our seeds? You can't save seeds if it's GMO. Without seed sovereignty, there
is no food. If the only way farmers can get rid of weeds is to drive in 1000/
of lbs of equipment running on fossil fuels. Or rely on chemical weed killers.
Or have an army of low paid farm workers pulling weeds, we might as well eat
weeds. Where is our water going to come from? Regenerative agriculture is
super drought tolerant. Urban edges should be the first line of defense and be
the perimeter within which there is everything for self sufficient human
habitats.

AI that can learn from environmental inputs can be a great way to predict
weather or droughts to create crop plans. We are already late. I am not saying
that we should prepare for the zombie apocalypse(well..), but we need to get
smart and real about our food.

I am just a little insect in this whole picture and I only want to pitch in
with innovating self sufficient clean energy and smart food production system.
I just don't know how to go about pitching it to the right ears. In a few
weeks, the next growing season in California will begin..the rhythms of
farming will start again...I was hoping to maybe change at least one little
process this season, but maybe next year. Thanks for hearing me out. Any input
on disrupting or innovating food production to make it more smart is
appreciated. It will give me something to think about all summer long as I
weed my little field.

------
coralreef
Autonomous cars solve transportation problems. Autonomous cars improve safety
and saves lives. Drivers don't get tired, and drunk people don't control them.
Autonomous cars increases accessibility and reduces the cost of
transportation; a fleet of them can patrol the city 24/7, servicing people who
would otherwise be ripped off by taxis/uber or stranded because local
transportation means stop late at night (subways, buses, trains).

~~~
jelliclesfarm
But it's human labour in the hot sun that brings food to our table. Isn't it
important to figure how to move beyond manual labour when we have tech
available for creating something we need for our sustenance?

We can survive without cars..self driving or not..but not without food. Which
deserves a tech revolution? It's not a competition..why not both?

Even if we don't have to 'break our backs' ourselves..in say..America and our
vegetables come from Mexico or Guatemala or Honduras or wherever its cheap so
it's plentiful for us..people are still working hard in those countries?
Shouldn't this be an universally urgent issue to resolve? People die of hunger
in poor countries. We send $ or clothes or someone sends aid etc..but if they
are able to find a way to eat..to exploit and preserve and regenerate natural
resources, they don't need any help at all, no? I would like to think that
tech has a reach beyond borders and solves problems that are crippling. I
don't think I am wrong in that expectation.

------
inimino
The problem is that the car market is bigger, and massive investment there
hasn't yet produced a viable product. A farm robot would have added challenges
and is a much smaller market. Anybody that can design robots that can do what
you want at this time would not be sitting on the technology and anybody doing
new R&D here is going to go for the massive, easier market before the smaller,
more difficult market.

~~~
jelliclesfarm
It's not that difficult. Everything is open source these days. I can licence
the tech. I find it worthwhile to put my own money into it. But I am baffled
by the stone wall I face because no matter how earnestly I make my case..even
if I pay for it, it's peanuts compared to the driverless cars or even let's
say..the toy robot market..

I wanted to buy one from EU but they can't sell in US because radio
frequencies used don't conform to US norms.

~~~
inimino
Maybe it's more advanced than I thought. Maybe you can get a farmers coop to
invest in it, if it is almost commercializable?

~~~
jelliclesfarm
It's specialized and I want a paradigm shift in how we grow food..not refine
existing design.

I am not even looking for investment to get the design down. I feel like I am
stuck explaining to engineers because it feels like we are talking different
languages.

When I show a sketch that I want to be drawn technically, they immediately go
back to an existing tractor or a vehicle..and we are back to a 2000lb
behemoth.

I can't work my way around the engineer's tendency to keep tinkering. Example:
I asked a dear friend for help..now..I have known him for 20 years and I am
pretty sure he can read my mind at this point. And we spoke for 5 hours..I kid
you not..5 hours! And I left to take a personal call and within 20 minutes, he
was excited to show me that it can now also chop wood with an elegant tweak
and refining design.

I almost wept. It was brilliant, yes. It worked, yes. But it is not what I
needed. Sometimes simple is enough. I couldn't rein in that horse in the
engineers' mind anymore. I am in awe of such cerebral dexterity but I want
cunning nimbleness of smaller machines.

Also..I am beginning to think it's a gendered issue. Maybe I am wrong. Or not.
Every male engineer that I have spoken to wants big machines that can
multitask in the field. But I want choices and smaller machines..I want to be
able to mix and match with lots of options. Each task is specialized. One big
machine with brute force is not going to cut it. I can't translate that
philosophy into a language engineers can understand. It's very frustrating.

~~~
inimino
I'm no expert in this area but I thought the main issue with agricultural
robots is not about form factors but the practical problem that they aren't
"smart" enough yet for basic tasks, like weeding, you need machine vision,
planning, manual dexterity, locomotion, a lot of tough software components
that either don't exist or aren't good enough as COTS solutions, so it sounds
like a years-long research project. But things move fast, it could be further
along than I think.

~~~
jelliclesfarm
Dexterity is definitely a problem. It goes beyond tasks in the field..even
past harvesting, how do we grade them, wash them..pack them. So far only
greens can be packaged robotically. I think earthbound farms have a robotic
packing system for lettuce/spring mix. However another company tried packing
peppers in a clamshell and just the intuitive way human packers will slide,
squish, rotator and pack peppers was such a big deal because that's not
something you figure with sensors or or grippers or vision system or
algorithms. Because nature doesn't produce replicas of standardized sizes of
sweet peppers.

What is required is to change the shape or size of the clamshell to suit robot
pepper packers. That's a shift. Many such shifts in design are required.

I think that's a long long way away. For myself (and there are so many
different tasks that can automated in farming), I have picked just seven field
tasks that are repetitive manual tasks in small acreage farms that are in the
area of soil prep, seeding and weeding.

Small farms don't enjoy economies of scale that large commodity farms do..how
you grow corn is entirely different from how eggplants are grown. Everything
we have automated and standardized in vegetable farming is compromised from
the natural way to grow things.

There is a minimum acreage that justifies existing automation wrt costs. It's
economies of scale. How do you grow 15 acres of eggplants with machines? If
you can't deploy an army of hand weeders: 1. You can spray
pesticides(cost=toxic) 2. You can select hybrid seeds that are resistant to
certain diseases(cost=eliminates or drastically reduces bio diversity) 3. You
can just export it(cost=loss of food security and sovereignty)

only small farms can produce vegetables. Mega farms produce commodities.

Building a tractor sized bot with sensors, vision system, gps, lidar is
massively expensive. Too much data to aggregate. Just not viable. Not worth
it. An acre of eggplants will yield about $6000 worth of eggplants. What is
the point of spending million plus on an autonomous tractor? But.. A $30k
machine that swarms an acre of two/day..even just to check when it's ready to
pick, do a bit of weeding, monitor water and soil..do automatic seeding and
transplanting...spray compost tea or spread compost is totally worth it. The
key is that it does it by itself. Which means that when I am tweaking my
website and selling tomatoes from my stand and chatting with my customers, my
Eggplant bot is doing all the work. By itself.

I can watch from my screen. And if malfunction occurs, I would maybe lose one
or two rows of eggplants. As long as the rest of the swarm functions, work
gets done. But when the sole autonomous tractor breaks down, everything is
lost.

That's 2k/Year per acre. Wages: One single employee would cost..at minimum
wage..$15 x 40hrs/week x 4 weeks/month x 8 months = $19200. You'd need more
than 2 workers to tend to 15 acres of vegetable farm. Even if the robot has a
working life of 2 years, it's worth it.

Plus: human labour is better used elsewhere. It's kinder to human beings. 3.
Machines learn and collect data. 4. Better health for soil, air and human
beings. 5. Bots can work more than 8 hours a day and for more than 40
hours/week. They can work in the dark, cold and heat. They work efficiently.
We save on $ on water, fertilizer etc that would otherwise be wasted on non-
precision ag methods.

How is the costs on farm bots NOT being justified?

Building a 300lb human scale robot that does human tasks is relatively easy.
Deploying a swarm of robots over 100 acres is relatively easier than sending
one mega tonne tractor to do the work over 100 acres.

I think there might be some tasks that can never be replicated by machines.
But it is viable if they are small machines. Industry is working on large
machines because they are trying to model it like self driving cars. Designs
come from existing farm Machine designs without innovating. Because farming by
itself doesn't seem to deserve tech disruption. Which..again..baffles me.

And you are absolutely right. Getting something to do something as simple as
weeding would be a 2 year project for me if I engage and exploit and stand on
the shoulders of giants. Remember that you can only field test once a year.
Because soil changes with seasons. Weather changes every day. Which is why
advances in this field must have started 5 years ago. Why it's stalling now
and is compared with self driving vehicles is a mystery to me. The two are
nothing alike. For starters..farm bot needs to go on a straight line..no
opposing traffic..high torque low speed..low power. Trying to overlap the
challenges of an autonomous car on something that is so much simpler in scope
and trying to match them re costs doesn't make sense to me. The biggest
pitfall imo is that they are trying to make massive tractor sized bots..that's
the biggest stumbling block. Even if they come up with something miraculous
like that, no one is going to be able to afford it. Frankly, I think it's
daft.

Let me attempt an example:

I was weeding a row of violas a few days ago. Over fall/winter, it had grown
super weedy. It takes me 90 mts to weed a 100 ft long row that is about 3 ft
wide. There are three rows of violas and are staggered. That's about 300
violas plants and covered with all manners of weeds. This is what I do if I
were an intelligent farm weeder:

1\. I detect violas and weeds.

2\. I gather Viola plant.

3\. I search for the roots of the weeds.

4\. I pull the weeds out.

5\. I check for slugs or pests on violas.

6\. I check soil.

7\. I fluff soil.

8\. I tamp the soil down.

9 repeat around next viola plant. Do it again 299 times.

This is what a robotic weeding crawler should do. It has a picture of viola
plant. It slices the tops of the roots of everything that it can't recognize
as violas of Viola leaves. Or A robotic rodent can be let loose in a row of
violas and it will 'chomp' down everything that it doesn't recognize as a
viola plant.

A tractor can never weed a row of 50 rows of violas. I would look to nature.
In nature, gophers and bunnies and small critters destroy the plants. Machine
solutions for farms should be based in nature.

I want a robot rodent to eat my weeds. I will let loose a dozen of them over
50 rows. They will be done in 2-3 hours.

I don't want a million dollar self driving fancy tractor mounted AI system to
kill the weeds between a row of violas. It will not and can never do the job.

When you work soil, it pushes back. Every square feet of earth has resistance
that works against you. Thats why farm machines weigh zillion tonnes. But a
human being weighing 150lbs takes a hoe to a row and does it by hand without
compacting soil. But he has to do it for hours and hours. It's slave labour.

Sometimes less is more. And in farming, this is certainly true. Nature should
be an inspiration for farm bots. Not machines.

Do you still think farm robots have to be expensive and complicated? It's very
helpful to me to hear other perspectives because it means someone who isn't
entrenched in the kind of work I do sees it with a diff set of eyes. Many
thanks and Regards.

~~~
inimino
When I had a vegetable garden, I had similar ideas. Tiny bots swarming over a
field seems much more likely to replace human field labor than giant AI
combines. Free robotic labor would eventually change farming totally.

I don't really know at this point why this hasn't happened yet, either because
of technical challenges or just a lack of investment because it's not aligned
with the way big agribusiness operates. I'm sure there are still huge
technical challenges. I'm not sure whether or not there's a viable product
there yet, like a weeder recognizing viola plants. Nature had millions of
years head start designing the rodent, we can't copy those things yet. But
maybe there are some things on your list that can be done with current
technology though. If not, it probably won't be long.

I'm located in China right now and have some contacts in robotics, I don't
know if I can help or not, but my email's in my profile.

~~~
jelliclesfarm
When we run out of land. And eventually oil..and there is no more rural
land...all the giant farm machinery will be useless. When there are no more
trained farmers because noone is doing it anyways because it's not a viable or
$$ earning job, there needs to be a repository of knowledge about food
production. I don't know if weeding violas would be necessary then but it
wouldn't hurt to have AI keep a record of what violas look like..substitute
violas with chard or Eggplant. It's about what to pick and what to leave
behind.

For example..to recognize tomatoes ready for picking, colour sensors wouldn't
work..there are so many diff colours to tomato and sometimes variegated
shades. How would you know which tomato the bots got to pick? Certainly not by
colour. Somethings like red apples and strawberries turn fully red when they
are ripe..but not others.

There are firmness sensors..some sensors are so sensitive that when it grabs a
fruit it can measure the minute 'give' when it ungrabs it..there are brix
sensors. Altho I haven't seen them. I only know brix sensors from wine
industry where you can pretty much measure sweetness of the liquid. But I have
heard there are Brix sensors that can measure level of sugars without hurting
soft fruits so only the sweetest fruit is picked and the unripe is left behind
without being touched or squeezed by a robotic gripper.

I agree..simpler animals have had millions of years headstart with their
design..but it's perfected to do their job. Ask any gardener about gophers(or
see caddy shack) and they'd tell you that we haven't evolved to defeat them
yet! The simple virus is the most elegant and beautiful and most advanced
organism because it keeps mutating and we can't defeat it. So there is
something to be said for nature(which is why it makes me nervous when it keeps
disappearing due to human ignorance and apathy and arrogance)

I will certainly touch base with you. Thanks for the discussion.

------
tgragnato
IMHO it all boils down to economic interest of some strong powers: in EU
they're not cheap, but cheaper ... I would like to say a lot about this, but I
am gonna redirect you to some documentaries: \-
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Food,_Inc](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Food,_Inc).
\-
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_World_According_to_Monsant...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_World_According_to_Monsanto)

~~~
jelliclesfarm
Thanks. They are good documentaries. I haven't seen world acc to Monsanto yet.
Bayer is set to merge with Monsanto soon. Things are about to get
'interesting'.

Companies that had to do with production of zyklon b gas and agent orange
involved with our medicines and our food. Life and death ..two sides of the
same coin..taking turns. Trippy.

------
RUG3Y
One reason may be that the tech industry exists mainly in metro areas and is
city-focused. These people live in the city and deal with city problems on a
daily basis.

Also, farming is just not sexy.

~~~
jelliclesfarm
I think you are right. Farming doesn't get a lot of people excited. I can see
that now.

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HammadB
I'd be curious to know what you want said robot to do

~~~
jelliclesfarm
Weeding. For starters. That's where we use most manual labour. Followed by
harvesting.

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bsvalley
Long story short - larger market, more money to be made in the consumer's
market. Blame investors not innovators.

------
dorfuss
Do you remember that Major Major's father made a good living by not growing
more alfalfa than anyone else in the county?

But let's put things in order:

I think your assumptions are wrong. First I would deal with the automated
driving, then with the farming business.

Automated cars are not only for people who don't enjoy driving their car
towards the setting sun and enjoying freedom. Literally everything you can
buy, eat and enjoy in life relies on transport. I would guess that none of the
consumer goods you purchase are produced where you live - maybe with the
exception of a bakery, restaurant and your local Starbucks. Automated trucks
are simply a huge thing. You will be able to drive them non stop, distribute
the traffic more reasonably etc. Passanger transport is another thing, no less
important. A lot of white collar workers have to visit their clients in person
and spend many hours driving. Their talents and competences are not used
properly. If they don't have to focus on the road, there could be a huge boost
in their productivity. Even if they would just be able to relax more during
the business travells by watching films.

Self driving cars are not just a matter of leisure, but of significant
reduction of cost of transport that everything relies on.

And why do we automate in the first place? - to free human energy. Sitting in
a car and driving thousands of kilometers is just dumb. Necessary, but dumb
and tremendously repetitive. Once the machines can do it, the man can focus on
specialised tasks that only humans can do. I believe that is the major task of
CS in general - to free human potential.

I have nothing to do with farming, but I believe your diagnosis is mistaken.
Food production has been automated so heavily, that a single farmer is able to
produce an incredible amount of food (it means farmers invested a lot in their
current technology). Moreover, as indicated in the beginning, US gov. and
other governments in Europe PAY farmers for NOT growing food. And food
production is often not very profitable and has to be heavily subsidized.
Farmers operate on very very narrow profit margins and therefore investment
has to be able to cut (already low) production costs. Robots are sophisticated
machines and the maintenance cost is high. On the other hand manual labour on
farms is very cheap. I believe that the benefits of automatisations in the
farming industry are still not good enough to balance the cost.

Moreover, there is virtually no shortage of food, especially in the west. The
last big starvation (not caused by politics) in Europe was a matter of the end
of 19th century. While transport is an ever growing business - we want more
stuff, faster, delivered from further away, food producers are rather more
concerned about governments keeping the subsidies and import tariffs to
supress supply.

Considering all of the above - food production is not such a big problem, and
its share in the economy is very very small.

Having said that, of course there is a potential market for even more machines
and automation, but I am not surprised that the farmers are not interested in
it at the moment.

~~~
jelliclesfarm
Alfalfa..a cautionary tale and perversion of farming when sustainability is
lost.

It is a mainly a story about California. The golden state that supplies over
1/3 of all vegetables in the USA..and about 2/3 of nuts and citrus. A state
that has been ravaged by drought and yet grows thirsty crops like citrus,
almonds and alfalfa.

In the 1970s, a farmer from the Midwest started exporting cubed hay to Japan.
To this day, japan is one of the largest importers of alfalfa hay from the
United States. The Middle East and esp UAE imports hay too. But the biggest
importer of hay from the USA is China.

In the early 2000s, there was no hay exports from California. But it was the
high season in Silicon Valley with iPhones and cheap plastic toys coming into
our ports in giant shipping containers. Instead of sending them back
empty..someone thought it was a good idea to sell hay to china. It made sense
from a logistics pov because shipping hay would be win win for china as well
as the USA.

Around this time in the early 2000s, china was barely importing 2% of our hay
exports. Fast forward 15 years, china is the largest importer of alfalfa hay
and takes almost 30% of the market share(if not more).

This happened because of the increasing prosperity in china and there was a
spike in demand for milk. While dairy was once a luxury, now the prosperous
middle class wanted milk for themselves and their families. But when they
started dairy industry, they found that china was also losing arable land and
there was no grazing land for the cattle. The aquifers were drying up and
whatever water available was polluted with industrial wastes. Importing from
USA was a good idea as alfalfa was high in protein and the best feed for milch
cows.

How did this affect us? Imperial valley in California grows a lot of alfalfa
for hay..you can do multiple cuttings in a year and fill all those empty
containers returning to China. It was so profitable and the logistics made so
much sense that it was cheaper to send hay to china than to the dairy central
of California, Tulare.

Now American dairy farmers are competing with china for American alfafa. The
pricing becomes competitive and the dairy farmers were going under because
there was no way to make money on milk. Dairy industry is another out of
control rodeo show but that's another story.

And then the drought happened. Alfalfa being a thirsty crop took a lot of
water because it was more profitable to grow hay than food. But with little
price wiggle room, we were selling alfalfa to china and exporting it to other
countries cheaper than it costs because we were not taking into account of the
cost of water. DURING a DROUGHT! How fucked up is that? It became a popular
wry thing to say that our cheapest export was our water. We were selling water
in containers to others while we were being asked to cut down our water usage
and water rates was raised.

To make this all even more interesting, farmers were letting fields go fallow
during the drought because water was too expensive. Citrus and almonds were
becoming so expensive and they were our main exports. Many farmers lost
everything and started selling pieces of their land. For which there were few
buyers because there was no water!

And yet..why do we have this delusion that food is 'cheap and plentiful'.
Because our food comes from South American countries..our quinoa..our gmo soy
comes from destruction of rain forests and the break down of indigenous people
from other places that are poor.

Our mega farms grow commodity crops like corn and exports what we do use for
our hogs. Pound for pound, pork or meat is more expensive wrt water than
vegetables. And here is the perversion, our biggest buyer of corn is Mexico. A
country with a rich and diverse cultural and food history of corn..heirloom,
native corn..has to buy gmo corn from USA while their own corn strains are
disappearing. Their farmers grow tomatoes and chives for us because it's
cheaper.

And round and round we go..a tangled web we weave...it's so messed up..I can
pick up from here and tell you a 'dairy story' or a 'quinoa story' or a 'soy
story'. It never ends and it doesn't have to be complicated.

Water needs to be treated as the precious resource there is..in a hundred
years, countries might as well go to war over water not oil..and secondly,
sustainability is key. Local food production is key. Govt needs to be reined
in..they are taking away control of farmers over what they do best..they are
making them into beggars and debtors. Lesser the govt interferes with our
lives..and our food..it's better.

Nothing is sustainable..from the population of china ..to California exports
to imports from Latin America.

And yet we imagine that all is well..food is plentiful and cheap..and food
production is not something to worry about. I worry about it. A lot.

