
New autonomous farm wants to produce food without human workers - jonbaer
https://www.technologyreview.com/s/612230/new-autonomous-farm-wants-to-produce-food-without-human-workers/
======
jelliclesfarm
[https://youtu.be/V1PcgtWAEnU](https://youtu.be/V1PcgtWAEnU) : already been
done. Americans are far behind the Dutch. What frustrates me is that everyone
is making their version of the wheel in their corner instead of collaborating.

Right now, VC money should go to other things like AI, supply chain integrated
into production, blockchain etc.

And they must have farmers as partners. Farmers completely distrust tech
because we are not included. I gave up trying. It’s like we speak different
languages but when tech is trying to create produce for MY domain,isn’t my
participation and input necessary?

I am particularly bummed because I applied to YC twice and it always comes
back to finding a tech partner. My tech is farming. I know stuff your
roboticist or engineer can’t dream of because we live that nightmare of crop
failure or machines failing all the time.

At this point, I think I am going to write stories like sci fi or fantasy and
maybe someone will realize my vision(or not..who knows..maybe it’s not the
right fit, but I will never know) after I am gone. I really enjoy coming up
with theoretical solutions because at this point, that’s all I can do.

I would have discouraged Iron Ox from that idea. Who transplants one at a time
when technology exists to do thousands at a time? Why? I can’t even wrap my
mind around this.

~~~
marcofloriano
What frustrates me is the tendency to use technology to replace humans beings.
Then you don't know how to solve the shortcut in jobs. Couldn't we just slow
down tech a little bit and let people do some good old hard work to keep
getting their cut? Frustrating.

~~~
NegativeLatency
We could tax the wealthy and spend more on education, universal basic income,
etc

There’s not enough political will though.

~~~
tomcam
How much more should the wealthy be taxed? Who decides who is wealthy? For
example, you are probably massively wealthier than many hundreds of millions
of people in the world. How much should you be giving? How much would that
contribute to your lofty goals?

~~~
boomboomsubban
When we get to a point of automated food production, these goals aren't that
lofty.

------
jelliclesfarm
[https://youtu.be/xxAaKpRMOTw](https://youtu.be/xxAaKpRMOTw) : this is outdoor
baby spring mix operation in California. I know whose this is...the grower,
packer and distributor..they have perfected it to an art form. When I see
social media photos of a young person leaning over a baby plant grown
hydroponically with a pair of baby scissors, I have to wonder if they have a
clue about the scale and economies of growing outdoors by the established
growers.

Having said that, my position has always been that lettuce(and strawberries)
should be moved indoors because they are ground huggers. Lettuce has been easy
to automate indoors but strawberries have continuous fruit production and a
canopy and keeps on going for a longer season. So it has proved to be meow
difficult. Also needs a lot of targeted lighting because it has to fruit and
flower.

Automation is a beautiful thing. It comes from a keen study of the repetitive
movements that goes into the task at hand. But machines can never replace
humans everywhere and for every crop, but it can certainly make farming
better.

When I attended TechCrunch this year, in one of the panels, (robotics
investment by VC) the moderator asked if replacing strawberry pickers with
‘roombas’ is unethical because the strawberry pickers won’t have jobs.

I was very upset and am pretty sure she hasn’t picked strawberries bent over
or even seen the workers do this for hours and being paid by the clamshells
and not by the hour. It is also this kind of thinking that is holding back
technology and innovation.

Let’s find them other jobs. Better jobs. Make education accessible. Who
knows..the strawberry picker could be a genius or a musician or just someone
who wants a simpler less back breaking job. Who are these tech people and
moderators and VCs go try and ‘save’ farmers and farm workers who desperately
need tech to help them.

Instead these are the kind of concerns I heard at TechCrunch. It was very
disheartening. I am not very hopeful. They are all throwing $$ down the drain
and america’s crutch is cheap labour. Europe is far ahead because they don’t
have cheap labour. Japan, Middle East and even down under, they are innovating
because their pain points are ageing population, water availability in deserts
and in Oz.nz, labour. China is making great strides and surpassing EU with
their farm tech innovation and especially with robotics.

We are being left behind because we are allowing something so essential as
food production, distribution to become fodder for politically correct faff
talk.

I was thinking to myself..that it makes no sense. If you break down some of
the concerns ‘tech folk’ who want to ‘help’ farming into words and meanings,
it was just dead words...killed by the sword of ignorance and hubris.
Unethical to replace strawberry pickers with robots? It was very painful to
hear that kind of talk.

~~~
AngryData
For lighting we have gotten some real gains in the last few years on full
spectrum high-efficiency diodes. There are easily and cheaply available diode
boards and spotlight CoB leds that will do 200 lumens per watt in white light.
I myself just bought 600 watts of Quantum Boards which have Samsung LM301B
diodes because it puts pretty much any older lights and diodes to shame in
both efficiency and in light spectrum. Most household LED socket lights are
only 100 lumens per watt but new diodes can get 200 lumens per watt for only
about $1 per watt and you need around 30-40 watts of these diodes per square
foot for fruiting and flowering plants, half of that for plants outside of a
production cycle.

With everything else I definitely agree. I think picking ripe fruits by hand
is what needs to be automated the most, everything else is already 95%
automated with basic farm equipment. Automating growing cabbages is about as
impressive as making a car drive in a straight line without a driver.
Seasonally handpicking fruits for pennies out in the sun, bent over 12+ hours
a day, is the real grueling work. I would rather be roofing houses than
handpicking strawberries or other handpicked soft fruits.

~~~
KaiserPro
As soon as farming startups start using lighting to improve yeild, then
they've already losing in the efficiency stakes.

Urban farming, the type proposed by most US based startups are already at a
massive disadvantage. Not only is the price of land much higher, but the
running and capital costs are far far greater, totally obliterating any hope
of profitability.

Take this current startup, they use a generalised robot arm, which would have
cost >$100k plus the software to do the visual registration. Event then its
moving one plant at a time...

Why are they not spending the time working on low tech plan holders, that
could be plucked and moved using cheap conveyor belt systems? even better a
tray, with known locations, that can be moved to a specialised plucking
machine, which can pluck an entire tray in one go.

There is no mention about pest management, its a massive monoculture, and one
or two fungal spore could wipe out that entire warehouse in a matter of weeks.

~~~
jelliclesfarm
I agree re how indoor farming starts with losing efficiency. But imagine if
this is Iceland or on a cruise ship. At a location where a natural disaster
has struck. Or in the Middle East. Or in the middle of a drought. Innovating
in ideal situations has its pros and cons. Pros...it can be done without
pressure of impending threat to growing. Cons...the tech may not be
transferable to places that really need them. Which other third world country
has uninterrupted power supply or internet connectivity for uploading to cloud
etc. but it’s a start before creating the eco system. This will be a long and
painful journey, it seems to me...

But you are also right. The equipment needs to operate in freezing cold or
dusty environments or humidity. Indoor growing inside hoophouses or
greenhouses and glasshouses are a lot more effective.

I agree. Pest issue is the Achilles Heel and weapon of wholesale complete
destruction of harvest. They are trying to combat it with more technology. I
want to say that I am really impressed by how Indoor Ag has evolved over the
years. It’s not perfect but way better than how it was ten years ago.

~~~
KaiserPro
The only valid place for this is a cruise ship. Everything else has either
been done already, or stuff needs to be shipped in.

Hydroponics in the middle of a drought is a disaster, it sucks huge amount of
clean water. Yes, if you are careful you can use it to clean water, but again,
its at the risk of importing fungus/pests.

Most agriculture doesn't need high tech solutions, it needs simple ones. The
biggest threat facing most farmers in the developing world are drought and
pests. Drought can be managed by creating small simple dams that slow the
passage of water to the sea. (lots of india for example used to do this.)

The future of agritech is small, simple and cheap. The Netherlands has this
other type of stuff nailed.

In the developing world, land and labour are cheap, asking a farmer to buy
into this style tech is like asking us to buy a small Caribbean island,
impossible. The only people that can do this are the rich, who are normally
the ones causing the droughts and destruction in the first place.

~~~
jelliclesfarm
I don’t even know what to say when you claim that “The only people that can do
this are the rich who are normally the ones causing droughts and destruction
in the first place.”

------
abalone
We need to talk more about the energy consumption of these farms. They are
marketing themselves with "green" branding but.. they are indoors and use
artificial light. One study found hydroponics use 7X more energy:

"At this point in time, hydroponic farming of lettuce cannot be deemed a more
sustainable alternative to conventional lettuce farming techniques, but it
provides promising concepts that could lead to more sustainable food
production."[1]

And yes conventional agriculture has other negative impacts (water, transport,
land), but I'm not hearing much about energy use from these startups.

[1]
[https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4483736/](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4483736/)

~~~
freeflight
> One study found hydroponics use 7X more energy

Hydroponics also create a lot of wastewater, its a fact rarely mentioned but
when the goal is sustainability then created waste should also be accounted
for.

Aquaponic systems don't have that issue because they copy a natural ecosystem
on a small scale. Imho that's where the future of human food production needs
to go.

~~~
jelliclesfarm
I agree that aquaponics is ‘cleaner’ than hydroponics but now we are into fish
farming and not just growing plants as food. It’s certainly the more organic
option.

There is a company that is trying to use organic/natural hydroponic nutrient
inputs than just what’s been used all along. It will take some time(and
testing) to adapt.

------
jpm_sd
Isn't hydroponic farming already pretty low on labor costs? (compared to
capital & maintenance costs)

Edit: apparently not. The Engadget article is a bit better. "What we found is
that the two biggest costs in the indoor farm are labor and electricity"

[https://www.engadget.com/2018/10/03/future-indoor-
agricultur...](https://www.engadget.com/2018/10/03/future-indoor-agriculture-
vertical-farms-robots/)

That tray-lifting machine looks expensive.

Are plants other than lettuces suitable for hydroponic farming?

~~~
bufferoverflow
Airponics is even better, but requires high pressure pumps. You can grow
pretty much anything, as long as you feed the right nutrients and control the
temperature and the pH.

~~~
Brajeshwar
"Aeroponics" is indeed a good option but it does not need the "high" pressure
pumps. We can pump with very low powered pumps. We, actually, formulate our
own nutrients. We are about to start testing our automatic IoT solution to mix
nutrients, measure the temperature pH and EC. Right now, we do the testing
manually and we can slide the EC by a factor of 0.1 easily.

For those interested here is a video of our lab. Our structures are vertical
for our research. However, our commercial (big) deployments will be flat or an
"A" system. Right now, we are leveraging the abundance of sunlight in the
tropics (India). We can produce 10x the traditional farming without any
stacking but at a fraction of the cost of other hydroponics/Aeroponics setup.

Photos
[https://photos.app.goo.gl/XytrQYsQ0UaSKozV2](https://photos.app.goo.gl/XytrQYsQ0UaSKozV2)
Locavore Demo Tour
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U2CRI61_DlQ](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U2CRI61_DlQ)

~~~
oh_sigh
Awesome work! I'm experimenting with a custom built, mostly-computer-
controlled aeroponic myself, but it is way more on the hobby scale than this
work you are doing.

One question - do you have any kind of automatic way to clear clogs in the
sprayer heads?

~~~
Brajeshwar
As replied earlier, we tested and realized we can do much better by dripping
it from top instead of the mist. We will also be doing flood-n-flush kinda
method in the much bigger setup. Cleaning was one thing we learned the hard
way and so the reason for our modified method.

We will still be using mist spray method with other crops that has less dense
rooting, etc.

------
maerF0x0
This guy has been working on something of the same concept for a long time:
[https://automicrofarm.com/#about](https://automicrofarm.com/#about)

~~~
ph0rque
AutoMicroFarm founder here. Thanks for the shoutout! I talked to Iron Ox
founders (who went through YC, incidentally) a bit ago. They are focused on
the robotics systems for commercial green houses, while I am focused on ways
to grow food in your (residential) back yard.

~~~
deialtrous
I'm not sure I understand the market of your product. Is the intent to trick
people into gardening by making it seem "high tech" or trendy or something?
Are people actually willing to do more work to grow food if you make it sound
new/different? Most people don't garden the easy way, so it just seems like a
tough sell to get them to do it a harder way.

~~~
ph0rque
AutoMicroFarm's vision is to enable people with back yards to

1) grow the majority of their food in their back yard (asymptotically
converging to 100%), and

2) spend a minimum of time and effort in order to do so (asymptotically
converging to zero time and effort).

AutoMicroFarm will provide products and services to that effect.

I started out with aquaponics, thinking the end product would need to be high-
tech. But it turns out that good design (which the aquaponics industry has not
completely agreed upon yet) can obviate the need for high tech.

Aside from aquaponics, permaculture goes a long way towards maximizing yield
while minimizing time and effort needed on an ongoing basis. However, the time
and effort is often front-loaded when the design is installed.

Robotics, when ubiquitous and affordable, will transform agriculture, whether
on a commercial or a residential level. In the meantime, there are lots of
opportunities that I hope to capitalize on.

~~~
deialtrous
But the setup described on your website is more work than just an ordinary
garden. Maybe it is a regional thing, I don't know where your main market is,
but here in Canada even in low income rural areas the vast majority of people
absolutely refuse to grow a garden. They will spend $2000 on a plastic and
chinesium riding mower and then $30 of gas and 6 hours of time every week
mowing an acre or more of grass, but they won't spend 5 minutes and $2
planting a couple of tomato plants. Doesn't anyone who is willing to garden
already do it, and so not need to pay you for a way to do it that involves
more work? Are you moving more towards being a permaculture design consultant?

~~~
ph0rque
The setup on my website (which is a bit out of date, compared to what I
currently have) is not more work than an ordinary garden and an ordinary pond
put together, which would be a proper comparison.

Not everyone who is willing to garden, does so. I've worked with a couple
local clients who love the idea of gardening, but weren't sure how to start.

Permaculture design (on a back-yard level) is one of the services I offer,
although I don't call it that.

In the meantime, I am in the process of updating my website. It's taking
longer than I would like (day jobs: can't live with them, can't live without
them yet...).

You can read more on the current state of my own yard, and the types of
services and products I am offering, here:
[https://blog.automicrofarm.com/state-of-my-suburban-
homestea...](https://blog.automicrofarm.com/state-of-my-suburban-homestead-
fall-2018-edition-f6b68fdb17ce)

------
nanomonkey
I personally would love to work on a farm, but not the type you see today.
Monoculture and pesticide laden farming practices make for boring work with
little to no cultural value.

It seems to me that we would see more adoption of farm positions if we
provided smaller, integrated farm plots where folks that had their fill of
urban living, wanted to raise a family and be closer to nature could be apart
of a community. Sort of a replacement for the sterile suburbs where people go
to raise families, only with flexible family focused farm jobs.

I realize there are intentional communities that provide this, but I wonder if
the ag industry is missing out on an opportunity also.

~~~
tdb7893
I think the issue is that small farms aren't very efficient. My wife's father
owns a small farm in Iowa but has another job because it just doesn't make
enough money to afford even his pretty meagre lifestyle. Having been around
farms in small communities I think that people in cities have idealistic views
of what farm life is like.

~~~
nanomonkey
I think this depends on your definition of efficiency. For food production to
land use, small polyculture farm techniques have been proven to produce more
yield. If you're only interested in man hours to yield, then yes large scale
farming techniques are more efficient.

~~~
tdb7893
By efficiency I mean food per $. I met someone who runs a small organic dairy
farm and each small container of yogurt was 12$ and it's not like he was
making tons of money (and that was after years getting organic certified).

Edit: it was super cool to meet his cows but the market for 12$ yogurt is so
small that it would he hard to break into that market. He only got there
because his family has run a very natural dairy farm for decades (or at least
that's what he told me).

~~~
loceng
I wonder if we will learn to value food again, meaning what portion of our
earnings would be willing to pay, if say we all got healthy, very fresh,
organic, non-pesticide food that we know isn't contaminated - and if we factor
indirect costs of not eating the "safest" and healthiest food throughout our
lives? Maybe "$12" can be considered a "good deal" or reasonable. With
automation, cost of unit produced can reach "$0" \- so long as we pass all of
that value created to the consumer. We're going to see more and more layers
converted from jobs requiring manual labour, to not requiring it - like one
example soon to rapidly scale is Amazon Go stores.

~~~
ip26
Truth in labelling will help. Labels that stretch the truth to the limit make
us all cynics, and you wonder if this pricey organic chicken was really raised
any differently from the cheap chicken.

------
foofoo55
Seems like wheel-reinvention. There are already many companies providing
machinery for large-scale optimized horticultural operations. I used to work
with this one:

[https://www.visser.eu/](https://www.visser.eu/)

Notice the task-specific machines and the high plant volumes, such as
transplanting machines capable of handling 35,000 plants per hour.

------
danans
As hopeful as I am that we find a technological breakthrough that allows large
scale, highly energy efficient production of crops, I'm always struck by that
fact that these facilities seem to only produce leafy greens.

IINM, to make a dent in the larger agricultural system, these facilities will
have to produce high calorie and protein bearing crops, like grains, beans,
etc.

~~~
loceng
I wonder what the reason that leafy greens would be the "lowest hanging fruit"
to go after at first? I assume because they are rapidly growing and would
therefore yield a high crop yield, and things like baby spinach in grocery
stores always feels brutally expensive - so perhaps a good starting point in
terms of retail markup possible? Lightweight, high price point, etc.

~~~
beerlord
$/kg

~~~
danans
That makes sense. I suppose the argument for this tech is from a business and
product quality perspective, which I get.

It doesn't seem to have much to do with lowering the natural resources (water,
fossil fuels) spent per calorie of food produced at a large scale, though.

------
contingencies
This article is all over the place and then apparently quotes an academic out
of context. The real problem with indoor farming is not setup cost. For the
fundamentals:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ISAKc9gpGjw&feature=youtu.be...](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ISAKc9gpGjw&feature=youtu.be&t=13m26s)
... Bruce Bugbee, Utah State University Department of Plants, Soils and
Climate, has studied plant growth in controlled environments for most of his
career presents the results of his analysis of the environmental effects of
Vertical Farming/Indoor Agriculture (September 2015). With regards to the
machinery shown at the top of the article, it is standard industrial
automation equipment you can purchase off the shelf, apparently not even
hardened or substantially adjusted for outdoor use.

------
robbrit
Unrelated to the article (since I couldn't get to it), but it's interesting to
see that MIT Technology Review does not allow you to browse in Incognito mode.

~~~
nayuki
True, it blocks Chrome's incognito. But it doesn't block Firefox's private
browsing. Still, this is sketchy behavior from a publisher.

------
kibwen
Aside: try opening this tab in an incognito window. In Firefox it works fine,
but on Chrome you get "Hello, we noticed you're browsing in private or
incognito mode. To continue reading this article, please exit incognito mode
or log in." Not even complaining; it's their site and they're absolutely
allowed to restrict access to paying customers only, and I commend the
frankness with which they admit that they need ad revenue.

~~~
SilasX
Wait, I thought Incognito mode wasn't supposed to give telltale signs of being
Incognito, besides e.g. lack of cookies, which is indistinguishable from a new
user?

~~~
tomp
a quick Google search suggests that the Filesystem API is disabled in
incognito Chrome...

I never understood why APIs like this would ever be _disabled_. Why not just
have it return "blank" responses?! Same goes for e.g. iPhone "access to
contacts/location/etc"...

------
gdubs
As a technologist who’s gotten into farming (specifically permaculture and
agroforestry), I think it’s great that we’re exploring all avenues to keep up
with feeding the billions of people on the planet, but I think we’re also
giving up a lot of what makes us human the more we distance ourselves from the
land, and from food production.

------
syntaxing
From a technical side, I do not really understand why so many companies use
such a complex robotic arm with 5-6 DOF. Wouldn't a SCARA in this case be much
better? They're easier to program, simpler kinematics, cheaper, and more
robust.

~~~
khawkins
Actually higher degree of freedom arms with 6-7 DOF have simpler kinematics
and are easier to program, in general. This is especially the case if you're
using sensing and a lightly unstructured task.

An end effector pose has 6 DOF (3 translation, 3 rotation). A robot with fewer
than 6 DOF can't physically reach all poses in its task space, so if sensing
says go here, the kinematics will often say it can get close, but not exactly.

A robot with exactly 6 DOF can usually reach all poses in its task space, with
a catch. Typically there are only a discrete number of joint configurations
for a given pose (like 4 or 8). Thus, if you want to reach a certain pose but
all joint configurations are in collision then you are in trouble. Adding just
1 more DOF, making it a 7 DOF arm, ensures that the arm can generally reach
any pose with an infinite number of configurations, the last dimension used to
plan avoiding collision.

If you use motion planning and sensing for all of this, instead of something
like a teach pendant where you carefully set all of the desired poses
manually, then higher DOF is easier.

~~~
syntaxing
Are high DOF robot arms easier to program? Most of the ones I've seen are
usually done through human "mirroring" where the arm is moved in a generic
fashion (and fine tuned by surrounding sensors) by a user and recorded similar
to the pendant method you mentioned. I totally understand that a SCARA arm has
a lot less flexibility. But wouldnt a low DOF arm be beneficial for an
application like this, where the parts being grabbed and placed are in a
highly gridded configuration?

------
carapace
Our automation should be more biomimetic, rather than making our agriculture
more mechanical. For example, there's a fellow who shows how to integrate
small-scale alcohol fuel production into a Permaculture farm:
[http://alcoholcanbeagas.com/node/518](http://alcoholcanbeagas.com/node/518)
(Permaculture is a form of applied ecology.)

------
yurishimo
I wonder how they might deal with something like disease? Robots can easily
monitor nutrient levels in the soil, but I wonder if there is a way to monitor
the plant's health directly? Theoretically, the plants should be healthy given
the controlled environment, but I imagine something will go wrong eventually.

Cool concept nonetheless!

~~~
wpietri
There are good techniques for monitoring plant health in infrared. They're so
common that it's a decent home-hacking project:
[http://www.richardmudhar.com/blog/2015/07/using-near-ir-
to-l...](http://www.richardmudhar.com/blog/2015/07/using-near-ir-to-look-for-
photosynthesis-and-plant-health-with-ndvi/)

It's also something that is done from orbit. E.g.:
[https://www.esa.int/Our_Activities/Observing_the_Earth/Coper...](https://www.esa.int/Our_Activities/Observing_the_Earth/Copernicus/Sentinel-2/Plant_health)

~~~
jpm_sd
Never seen this before:

Error 1005

Access denied What happened? The owner of this website (www.richardmudhar.com)
has banned the autonomous system number (ASN) your IP address is in (7922)
from accessing this website.

~~~
korethr
Looking it up, ASN 7922 is Comcast. I guess he really doesn't like Comcast and
doesn't want Comcast (or their customers) from reaching his site?

------
iancmceachern
Check out our product in this space, Growstrip by growcomputer. We just
launched on Indigogo go here: [https://www.indiegogo.com/projects/the-
growstrip-by-grow-com...](https://www.indiegogo.com/projects/the-growstrip-by-
grow-computer#/)

------
mythrwy
I knew it, always these little salads.

That isn't food, it's a condiment.

Also pretty sure its a ton more efficient to grow these in a field, under the
sun. Want to make a cool robot? Make a field scale planting/harvesting robot
for this and that might have some application. This is just a gimmick.

------
wessorh
programming organic farmer here, we live in a 7 acre organic farm north of
Berkeley. The robots aren't going to win in agriculture, maybe you could do
with with pot; but not with lettuce. There is lots of stupid money in the
system and this is just one example.

------
mLuby
Sorry, fully automatic farms require villagers. :P
[https://minecraft.gamepedia.com/Tutorials/Crop_farming#Fully...](https://minecraft.gamepedia.com/Tutorials/Crop_farming#Fully_automatic_farming)

------
PostOnce
Can't wait for the mergers & acquisitions that leave one guy owning the
autonomous farm, autonomous delivery trucks, self-checkout-only supermarkets,
and bank that issues the card you use to pay for it. Also, he's your boss.

------
OliverJones
Hmmm. Planting and harvesting workers, and their machines (combines, etc),
move around to follow the seasons. A useful tech for these folks might be a
weather- and demand- aware Lyft-like system.

But they probably already have it.

------
kidsnow
There has to be a way to have a standard container of dirt, and have it move
around various "stations" on a set of tracks or rails, where it is tended to
at each station by robots.

------
wes-k
For personal gardens, there is a cool open source project called Farm Bot:
[https://farm.bot/](https://farm.bot/)

------
tw1010
What does this mean for subsistence agriculture? Is starting a self-sufficient
religion all of a sudden much cheaper and feasible (after the up-front robot
cost has been payed)?

------
hughes
In Asimov's giant underground cities, robots toiled on the exposed ground
above to produce food for the masses. Interesting step in that direction.

~~~
jelliclesfarm
This is one of my future farm scenarios (like Italo Calvino’s Invisible
Cities, I am going to come up with a hundred diff future ways to
farm!)..Asimov is awesome but I am also inspired by Kim Stanley Robinson’s
Mars trilogy. Anyways...underground cities with aqua/hydroponic farms and
orchards and livestock on the surface. Permaculture style farming!

------
mattberan
There's a place called Revol Greens in Medford, MN that is already doing semi-
autonomous growing and they are profitable, low error and delicious.

Check it out.

------
jhoechtl
I always wondered why we have ti pay for our basic needs given the degree of
automation we have achieved. Is this the beginning of the golden era?

------
blobbers
Once skynet takes over the headline will be: 'New autonomous farm wants to
produce fuel without human workers'

... fuel for the robots.

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moneil971
Real-life Farmville?

~~~
m000
More like the first step towards Autofac.
[https://www.imdb.com/title/tt6902176/?ref_=ttep_ep8](https://www.imdb.com/title/tt6902176/?ref_=ttep_ep8)

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maerF0x0
> "Over three billion dollars were lost in California alone [in 2017], because
> there's not enough people to actually do the operations in seeding or
> harvesting," Brandon Alexander, co-founder of Iron Ox Robotic Farms, told
> Engadget. "The average age of the farmer now is 58. And so one of the big
> issues just plaguing farming is that there's just not enough labor to go
> around. The problem is getting worse every year."[1]

I call BS. There is almost always enough labor at the correct price. That
means the juice wasn't worth the squeeze (or the employers are making bad
choices...) . If farm hands were making $100 an hour I'm sure you'd see a lot
more farm hands. Of course they'd also probably be losing money, so that's why
we dont see that.

[1]: [https://www.engadget.com/2018/10/03/future-indoor-
agricultur...](https://www.engadget.com/2018/10/03/future-indoor-agriculture-
vertical-farms-robots/)

Edit: this quote was actually from an engadget article linked elsewhere in
this post's comments

~~~
wpietri
That's not BS. That's you stating explicitly something people familiar with
the issues see as implicit.

Both CEOs and journalists, as well as most readers of MIT's Technology Review,
understand that you can get more labor by raising the price. The implicit
understanding is that a) most Americans don't want to do back-breaking manual
labor for a living, and b) most Americans also want food to be cheap. This is
an ongoing problem in agriculture and has been for decades.

~~~
cptaj
>Americans don't want to do back-breaking manual labor for a living

This makes me wonder...

Autonomy is the biggest hurdle for these technologies and manual labor is the
reason they are needed. Why aren't we meeting halfway and using remote
controlled robots instead of autonomous ones?

That way workers could do the job from anywhere in the world without having to
break a sweat and you'd only need a fraction of the investment to get it
running.

~~~
thrower123
Have you ever watched any streams of somebody trying to play Job Simulator or
other similar VR games? We have a long, long way to go with input tracking and
control to get anything close to human dexterity over telepresence.

~~~
howard941
I haven't but I take your point. How do surgeons operating remotely overcome
the problems?

~~~
Cerium
Robotic assisted surgery involves the surgeon using an expensive console in
the same room as the operation. As others have said, the systems require a
fair amount of training to become accustomed to. The training requirement is
offset by the additional capabilities that the robot brings that humans do not
possess. In particular robotic tools have a larger range of motion than
conventional minimally invasive instruments do.

------
w0mbat
> New autonomous farm wants to produce food without human workers

Good. I hate it when my food has human workers in it.

~~~
dang
Could you please stop posting unsubstantive comments to Hacker News?

~~~
w0mbat
I read the guidelines.
[https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html](https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html)
I see no ban on jokes.

------
cjbenedikt
Great. More unemployment creating tech. Oh, no, wait, all those farm hands can
become highly sophisticated coders of course.

~~~
mwill
Theoretically those jobs would be pushed into distribution, which the article
seems to hint at, large amount of small automated farms spread out, rather
than small amount of large farms concentrated, could mean more jobs on the
middle and tail end of the supply chain.

Tbh, I have my doubts it would play out like that, but it does seem they're
conscious of it, at the very least.

~~~
cylentwolf
When I thought about this, the next part of the chain to be automated will be
automated trucks. So then we need automated distribution from the trucks to
the stores. The stores already have self check out. So the whole food chain
for plants will not need a human involved.

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dwighttk
call me back when they are making money

~~~
dataisfun
Will do. Best number?

~~~
dwighttk
Any profit at all.

