
Help me explain farmer logic to tech folk - jelliclesfarm
I am trying to get a conversation going between technical people doing robotics and small farmers like me.<p>I am organizing small round table talks to get conversation going.<p>Here is one thing that I am struggling to explain. Many farm robots are designed for large commodity crop farms and it seems like there isn&#x27;t a lot of opportunity in small speciality food crop sector.<p>I think they are wrong. Why?<p>1. Small farms need more help. Large commodity farms are already mechanized.
2. Commodity farms are several thousands of acres but $ per acre is meager.opp is true for food producing small acreage farms.
3. Margins are thin in small acreage farms because of labour. If we close the gap, there is room for optimization. The opposite is true for large commodity farms.<p>And yet, I don&#x27;t understand why tech and Silicon Valley finds large commodity farms more viable than small food producing farms?<p>We have an area that has room for improvement and to increase profit margin.<p>The VC investment enthusiasm trend in large heavy autonomous systems seems counter intuitive to me.<p>You can always scale up in farming. You can&#x27;t miniaturize and halve&#x2F;reduce the cost of giguantic robotic systems by scaling DOWN.<p>I am struggling to get my point across. How can I put it across in concise manner and short sentences?
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allears
Perhaps you need to look at the tech company perspective. They have to make a
profit on the development of expensive hardware and software, and they may not
sell many units -- it's not exactly a mass market. So of course it makes sense
for them to go after deep-pocketed corporations, rather than small farmers.
Rather than expect developers to think like a small farmer, try framing your
pitch to developers in terms of how they can fund their development, and how
they can then scale up sales volume to justify their investment. Or, try
organizing the farmers to form some kind of entity that has numbers and money
behind it, to attract the attention of developers.

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jelliclesfarm
Ok. I hear you. I will work on it and try it again here.

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_dps
Actually this is a topic very near to my interests. You mention it in farming
(and that interests me, but the extent of my farming knowledge is growing a
small garden of tomato plants) ... but I think it's a more general trend that
technology tends to be developed with an eye toward massive scale, with small-
scale efficiency as an afterthought.

Could you give some examples of opportunities you see in developing technology
for farming at the small scale? In particular, examples where the technology
designed for the large scale farms wouldn't be appropriate?

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jelliclesfarm
1\. Large farms have already reached peak mechanization. 2\. Robotics is for
automation, not mechanization. 3\. For large farms, drone technology,
precision application of pesticides/herbicides/fertilizers are areas of
opportunity.

Smaller farms can never hope to achieve the economies of scale that the big
farms can easily grasp.

Smaller farms need modular solutions. The knowledge to grow diverse market
crops in a small acreage is an entirely diff skill set.

Small farms don't need 'intelligent' systems. We need automation to reduce
labour costs.

Robotic solutions for small farms may reduce our labour costs and we could
generate higher profits.

AI and robots for larger farms might make the operations more expensive and
not increase profit margins.

AI and robotic systems for large operations will be integrated with existing
big tractor companies. Maybe licensed.

Which opens another can of worms. Farmers will never own the proprietary
software or algorithms. Farmers generally don't like to use anything that they
can't understand.(already happening with John Deere and DMCA). This is mostly
because harvest/planting/feeding windows are seasonal and varied every year.
Because of perishable nature of our products, even a slight error in timing
will ruin that year's income. And you can't wait for someone to debug your
tractor or trust that it will be fixed.

One area where large farms are suited for both intelligent
systems(AI..suitable for large farms) and automated systems(robotics..suitable
for smaller acreage farms) are those working in vineyards. It's almost like a
warehouse environment and it's a premium product. It can handle it.

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hanniabu
I'm not the parent, but I believe you failed to answer their question. He
understands the issuend. He's looking for direction on a specific example for
what exactly you would like automated and why the solutions for large scale
farms wouldn't work in this scenerio.

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jelliclesfarm
I wrote several replies and deleted them all. I honestly don't know how to
answer.

Large farms grow commodity crops that are entirely diff from small farms
diverse crops. They are like two diff animals.

Example: there is a lettuce thinning robot in the market. It sprays
concentrated fertilizer at regular intervals in rows where seeds are direct
down.

In smaller farms we would plant greenhouse grown baby lettuce starts and not
direct sow. Too much wastage and labour to direct sow. Weed thinning bot is
overkill.

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rpeden
Based on your post and your messages, it looks like you're saying that robots
and automation could help small farms most by reducing labor costs.

So it sounds to me like the kind of automation that's needed will be very task
specific. You might find it easier to connect with the the folk by describing
some of the specific laborious tasks you'd like to automate. That will get
their tech brains thinking about specific solutions to your specific problems.

Perhaps start by picking 2-5 tasks that are repetitive and take up a lot of
your time or require you to hire lots of people. Some of them might end up
being quick wins that wouldn't be too hard/expensive to automate. Providing
the tech folks with a list to choose from will help them focus on the items
that they know they can solve in a reasonable amount of time.

~~~
jelliclesfarm
I have about seven repetitive manual tasks that would be easily accomplished
by automation.

I will refine it further and translate with maybe visual snippets. I was
thinking of maybe showing it as graphic novel strip because I feel like a lot
of times farmer's and engineers speak a diff 'mental' language. But taking a
ripper shank to compacted ground illustrated with a 'thwack' inside a serrated
thought bubble can explain more than if I explain in English. The knives and
rippers and v-shanks we sometimes use as implements is very difficult to
explain in words. A lot of times, farmers just tinker together stuff in their
shop to suit their particular soil condition or that year's weather challenge.

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johnwaynedoe
I think examples of jobs that have a high potential to be automated could
help. Just to get the creative ball rolling. Or just presenting specific
problems. The tech crowd loves to dive deep into an issue and try and fix it.
But I think part of the problem is, they don't have enough understanding or
knowledge to know what could be automated and where the opportunities are. For
example, I grew up in a rural community, but was not directly involved in
running a farm. I am interested in what you are saying, but I have trouble
thinking of what needs automated. I want to put my brain too it, I just don't
exactly know what I am putting it to. Hopefully that makes sense.

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jelliclesfarm
Yes, I hear you! Because I feel the same way when I sit down and try to
explain with words not the design of my robot but its function.

I think I tried with 5 people who fabricate custom machinery. The only ones
who understood what I was trying to say are those who have had some field
knowledge or some farm background.

No task can be completely automated without some kind of code making
decisions. That's why large automation machinery meant for commodity farms are
like blind farm labourers. They can't make decisions. Like pruning autonomous
tractors or something that mows down or discs 500 acres. But completely diff
and won't work when it comes to a bot harvesting strawberries.

Some do..if they have a vision system or has some kind of intelligence system
making decisions. And that's why it will be several millions of dollars.
Nothing is as efficient as a human making decisions in the field.

But our jobs can be made easier 1. if the data we need to make decisions is
easily available. 2. If there is less manual labour.

Smaller farms are great for robots. If there is disease in a 500 acre corn
field, how would you figure it out? But if it's 100 five acre blocks. And we
have a swarm of 10 bots that can handle five acres at a time, then they can
work as a swarm and also collect information to compare data with other
blocks.

My point is that if we create intelligent systems AND autonomous solutions for
small blocks/farms, they are scalable and can be replicated. And diff data
sets can be created.

But if something is created which functions only with a minimum lay of 500
acres, it's not only expensive but limited in its application. Also..it would
be easier to customize and build on top of existing applications because each
year farm conditions change and small farms are more diverse.

I don't know if this kind of thinking is right or if it makes sense. But
that's my reasoning for why one needs small acreage robots rather than large
commodity crops farm bots.

Thank you! I would like to know if I am able to be articulate. I still can't
be precise and say in short sentences which seems to be a desirable thing for
tech people. But it's tough for me.

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sova
Approach it from the numbers: You need 1 big farm buying one $2 million dollar
unit, Or you need 100 small farms each buying one $20,000 unit.

If you can make a compelling case that there are many such $20,000 units (for
example) that could be researched and invested in, and you have some strong
ideas on devices and their network interplay, you could be onto something very
strong.

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jelliclesfarm
That's the cost of a small tractor already. It takes additional implements and
man hours to operate it. If a 20k base module can exist like ..say..an iPhone
and there is a library of tasks that can downloaded..like say a kindle book. I
think we can see cheap tech.

Let's say: clay soil + Swiss chard + zone 8A + September-December. We know
enough to come up with a crop plan. As it's a shared library, with time, we
can get whatever disease or pests come to that zone at that time of the year.
What nutrients need to be added. Soil probes in the base module can figure out
what's deficient and we can know what to supplement the existing soil
with..connected with gps, weather data and past years pests issues/crop plans,
you have a reasonably proficient farm assistant that can go into a mapped
field and recognize the chard row..and scan for bugs or do a soil probe every
6 weeks or check if it's ready for harvest and predict how much will be ready
for market every week etc. it's possible.

