
Japanese firm to open world’s first robot-run farm - evo_9
http://www.theguardian.com/environment/2016/feb/01/japanese-firm-to-open-worlds-first-robot-run-farm
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nostromo
> The robots will do everything from re-planting young seedlings to watering,
> trimming and harvesting crops.

Has the author been to a farm in the past 20 years? Most crops today are not
planted by hand, or watered by hand, or harvested by hand. (Harvesting is
still the most labor intensive part of farming for a few fruits, but
automation isn't far off.)

I think the most interesting part of this farm is not the automation, but the
water saving, the reduction in pesticides, and the decision to use grow lights
indoors instead of sunlight.

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ValleyOfTheMtns
>and the decision to use grow lights indoors instead of sunlight

This is the part of indoor automated farming I don't get. You have this free,
abundant source of energy needed to grow plants, and you don't use it... why?
Seems like a massive inefficiency. Indoors is fine to protect the crops and
control the environment, but why not above ground with a clear roof to let
sunlight in?

~~~
orthecreedence
Oddly enough, and this is completely anecdotal, I've had much better luck
growing outdoor plants than indoor plants. If an indoor plant gets some kind
of pest (spider mites, aphids, etc) then you pretty much have to sit around
spraying it and its peers with oils or alcohol day after day until you're
confident the infestation is gone.

With outdoor plants, there are so many natural predators to pests that things
tend to form a balance. In addition to that, yes, there is the world's most
abundant (and inexhaustible) energy source just sitting there waiting to be
used.

So I'd be really interested to know the benefits of indoor growing as well
(besides the obvious reasons with regards to not wanting DEA aircraft spotting
your crops).

~~~
lovemenot
Fujitsu runs a similar farm. For them, one of the advantages was that because
they were growing in a disused clean room, formerly a fab, they could control
air quality such that bacteria were negligible. This led to produce which
could sit on shelves much longer without spoiling. Fujitsu charged a premium
since retailers typically lose a portion of their lettuce value to spoilage or
discounting.

[http://www.theregister.co.uk/2014/05/22/fujitsu_grows_lettuc...](http://www.theregister.co.uk/2014/05/22/fujitsu_grows_lettuce_in_chip_factory/)

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narrator
I'm a bit puzzled that the reaction on the Guardian to this development is
primarily one of fear that robots are taking our jobs. Isn't anyone excited
about how all this production and efficiency is going to make food extremely
cheap?

~~~
samstave
Who has that reaction??

I'm amazed that the drive to Japan's robotic future is human population
centric driven:

The average age of their farmers is 65.9, young people don't want to be
farmers, their population is in decline for many reasons...

Robot farming is critical to their bio and economic survival.

That fact alone is mind blowing to me. And awesome.

~~~
mc32
Some young people do want to become farmers, just not enough to replace the
ones aging out.

Some of the things they have brought about is the acceptance of "ugly" fruit
and vegetables. It's not a big market but it's one that exists because young
farmers ate pushing the market in this direction despite a fetish for perfect
looking fruit and vegetables.

There is even a small movement to get young women into farming:
[http://modernfarmer.com/2014/03/yamagata-girls-
farm/](http://modernfarmer.com/2014/03/yamagata-girls-farm/)

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IkmoIkmo
What is always left unsaid in the article: they're farming lettuce, a food
that has 59 calories per head and is 95% water.

One can hardly call that farming in the sense of the word people expect when
hearing about robot-run farms. This thing doesn't really produce meaningful
food, it produces fluff in a salad, i.e. when you eat half a lettuce on any
given day, you'd get about 1% of your calories that day from lettuce.

Further, the robotisation isn't really meaningfully new, either. Controlling
lighting conditions for food? Old news. Moving around plants with machinery?
Old news. It doesn't get much fancier than that. For example this factory-farm
still requires you to plant the seeds yourself, no giant innovations here.

Is it cool? Absolutely, and it's fun to explore. But I'm not seeing the thesis
on a new way of farming that I'm hoping to see. The economics and
sustainability of traditional farming, when done well, seems overwhelmingly
better, and the practicalities of producing real food in meaningful
quantities, economically and sustainably, in an automised facility, is far
away and quite different from this project.

Lastly, as most Guardian articles on tech, completely devoid of
technical/economic details. What's the lettuce going to cost? Who knows.

~~~
toomuchtodo
> What is always left unsaid in the article: they're farming lettuce, a food
> that has 59 calories per head and is 95% water.

Which crop would you be more interested in seeing farmed robotically? Pick one
and I'll go get you a link to the machinery that does so.

~~~
iamcurious
Don't feel any obligation, but as long as you are offering, I would be
interested in rice farmed with artificial light.

~~~
toomuchtodo
Bookmarked to come back to when I'm done working for the day.

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mmanfrin
Having a tiny rasp pi controlled greenhouse in my backyard is something that
really interests me. Can put little chain-driven slides above grow areas to
shuffle around 'arms' that can plant/pick/prune/water; garden through code.

~~~
dwiel
Have you seen farmbot? It is almost exactly as you describe.

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droro
Artificially-lit indoor farming is neato and will be a great technology to
bring into space, but makes almost no sense on earth. Basically, it requires
expensive infrastructure and way too much electricity
([https://gigaom.com/2015/12/29/indoor-farming-good-for-
cannab...](https://gigaom.com/2015/12/29/indoor-farming-good-for-cannabis-not-
so-good-for-food/)). Maybe robotically-farmed greenhouses won't have this
problem.

~~~
thescriptkiddie
If the electricity for the grow lights is produced locally via solar power, it
is actually more efficient than using sunlight directly (provided LED grow
lights are used). This is because the grow lights provide only the narrow
bands of wavelengths that plants absorb most efficiently. Only about 45% of
visible sunlight is usable by plants, compared to around 95% for
photovoltaics, which more than makes up for conversion losses. You also get
the ability to stack the plants vertically, and the lack of windows makes for
lower heat loss in the winter.

~~~
vectorjohn
I don't know if that actually works in practice. Aren't photovoltaics
(commercially feasible ones) like 20% efficient? Sure, its 20% of a bigger
spectrum, and plants aren't perfectly efficient either, but I don't know if
the math quite works as well as you make it sound.

The other benefits are awesome though. And our fusion future will make the
photovoltaics issue moot anyway :)

~~~
lhopki01
Plants are around 2% efficient.

~~~
vectorjohn
Ok, so they're going to be 2% efficient at using that 20% that was gathered by
PV cells. So it still seems like using 2% of all the light would be more
efficient than using 2% of a fifth of the light.

I suspect that by 2% efficient, that means they use 2% of the energy of all
light. Since they don't use green at all, going through the PV and then
generating artificial light of the frequencies they need does seem to improve
things. But probably not by so much as to make up for the 20% efficiency of
PV.

~~~
lhopki01
Every plant has a slightly different need but generally speaking you can grow
plants very efficiently if you use the entire red spectrum and 10-20% of the
blue spectrum. That allows for significant energy savings.

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pierre
The company behind this farm have a nice website with a lot of specification /
technical detail for their farm [1].

They claim that this farm will produce 10M lettuces per year on 3500m2. They
are also looking for partmers to franchise their technology, inside and
outside of japan.

[1] [http://spread.co.jp/en/technology/](http://spread.co.jp/en/technology/)

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belltyler
I read this "robot-fun farm" and was very intrigued, haha.

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make3
I'm probably talking out of my hat here, but it feels like Japan opening up to
immigration more would probably be a more efficient help to this particular
problem

~~~
aksquestions
They prefer to build robots and retain their homogenous culture than import
and nurture a slave class.

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samstave
This is awesome!

We were just talking about this on HN the other day. I want to build a fully
robotic (automated) talapia fish farm on alameda island if anyone wants to
join me?

~~~
ph0rque
Have you heard of aquaponics? You can raise both fish and grow plants in an
ecosystem.

~~~
samstave
Yes - this is precisely what I want to do

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dkarapetyan
Now this is innovation.

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searine
Neat, particularly for urban applications, but it'll never be as cost
effective as actual field planted crops.

The future of robotic farms is in the fields, not in the factory.

