
The Farm Automation Breakthrough - tomerbd
https://www.forbes.com/sites/jimvinoski/2019/05/06/the-farm-automation-breakthrough-bringing-the-high-tech-west-coast-and-rural-rust-belt-together/
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Animats
Deere bought Blue River, which does this. Deere packages it as a wide
implement attached to a tractor. Cameras look down, recognize weeds, and zap
them with targeted weed killer. About four companies are already in this
space.

It's sold as "weeding as a service". If you need large-scale weeding, Pacific
Ag Rentals in Salinas, CA, will rent you a Robovator. That's made in Denmark,
and Pacific Ag Rentals beefed it up for serious use. It kills weeds by
chopping them out of the ground with computer-controlled knives. No chemicals,
so, "organic".

Making these things rugged enough to do the job is a problem. The R&D projects
tend to have flimsy mechanical engineering. You want to be able to pressure-
wash the thing. Dust-tight and water-tight are solved problems, but most
machine learning people have never dealt with that.

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dehrmann
> "organic"

I've been going to my local farmers' market for a while. It's interesting to
see what people use "organic" as a proxy for. For some, they want to support
small family farms. Others will settle for "no spray" produce that's not
certified organic. Some people are scared to death of GMOs, and that's one way
to avoid them. Organic eggs are also free-range (but it' still not as nice as
you'd picture), and there's minimal use of antibiotics during production.

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rmason
There are a lot of companies working on something similar. But I hate to
disappoint everyone thinking that this will mean the end of herbicides, it
will not.

But there are a lot of crops, vegetables mostly, that are hand weeded. It's
going to replace a lot of migrant labor. The main reason it won't replace
herbicides will be cost. I'm not even certain that it would make economic
sense right now for organically grown corn and soybeans.

There also may be problems with it in the Midwest. In California they turn on
the water when they need it. What happens if it rains for three weeks in
Illinois and the machine can't enter the field? Will it be able to remove
fifteen inch tall weeds as easily as those a quarter inch tall? How fast will
it operate under those conditions? If I have 2500 acres in that situation the
weeds might be five feet tall by the time the machine gets to the last fields.

But if someone makes a successful business of commercial weed removal then
like all tech the cost will come down over time, perhaps opening up the much
wider market.

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iguy
Absolutely we should expect them to solve easy/valuable problems first. Maybe
that's fancy organic vegetables in a greenhouse, which certainly sounds much
easier than 5-foot weeds growing in a thousand acres of deep mud!

But we farmed for a long time before inventing weedkiller. First by
recognising weeds & pulling them out. Later by plowing, which is really just
substituting mechanical work (from oxen) for human labor (and smarts). I don't
see a fundamental reason that robot-weeding couldn't ultimately replace most
chemicals & most plowing, but obviously not next year.

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frv103
This seems like kind of a fluff piece, I don’t see any details about the
actual technology. The whole article is about how proud the company is to be
partnering with midwestern farmers. Can anyone provide a link or more
information about how they are able to distinguish weed from crops, and by
what mechanical process the weeds are removed?

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rohan_shah
Will share links once I find them.

But the technology is: A library of weed images is used to check if the thing
visual to the camera is a weed. If it is, then pluck it or spray chemicals
(here: pluck).If not, move on.

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XMPPwocky
Isn't this creating huge selection pressure for weird-looking weeds?

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thatcat
I'm still waiting for the version of this that removes invasive crops from non
farm land. So DOT could unleash it on any road side, removing kudzu etc and
allowing natural plants to take back over. Or under power lines, only letting
trees with a max 10 - 15 ft height survive so further maintenance is reduced
in the long term.

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hirundo
This tech seems to have the potential to decentralize farming somewhat. The
same machine with a few attachments and software options could also cultivate,
plant, irrigate, debug (organically with frikin' laser beams), and harvest.
Since software is the most expensive part of the problem it could be turned
into a small retail device in not too many years. Buy a gardenbot like you now
buy a lawnmower. Add seeds, compost, power and water, let it loose in the
backyard and just wait for it to stack vegetables in a bin.

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war1025
Machinery is pretty expensive in its own right. Also tractors already have the
ability to pull multiple different implements behind them. The only thing
novel about this is that it's somewhat autonomous. Even that isn't terribly
novel since most large scale farming uses GPS guided steering at this point.
Ag is very very high-tech already.

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unimployed
The automated equipment is still so expensive hardly any of it is owned or
used by family farms. The thing was that 10+ years ago the automated equipment
was owned by very large ventures (large cooperatives and bigger) that shared
or sold service only, traveling the region with the equipment to sell that
service. Pretty sure that case has hardly changed. Travel the country and you
see that most farms don't have the latest equipment rolling or sitting on
their land.

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heyflyguy
There are some incredible maker-farmers involved in ROS. Not downplaying the
people and tech in this article but farmboys with no formal education are
building computers and microcontrollers run by ROS that strap onto 30 year old
farm equipment and make it autonomous.

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rdlecler1
Very rarely does that translate into meaningful venture capital funding and
make no mistake, it will take hundreds of millions of upfront investment.

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travisgriggs
How is this machine powered? I did not see a bank of solar panels. So are they
plugging it in at night? Fuel costs (electric or chemical) would, I think,
make this a hard sell against large spray boom operations.

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squish78
Is anyone else concerned that food production is being consolidated into the
hands of a few massive corporations? Somehow this is more troubling to me than
the energy, automobile, or computer industries

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crsv
Congrats to the marketing team at FarmWise for landing this Forbes piece.
There was nothing really interesting or useful in this article at all.

