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.
That's unfortunate that you feel this way. Quite frequently the ones I see succeed aren't the best at their tech either (be it their focused field or general tech). Tech VCs gravitate towards tech people. Surely that is obvious and you shouldn't give up after only consulting them. Let them solve things the only way they know how, and maybe you can find someone else to take a different approach with your ideas. Or maybe not. You shouldn't feel so slighted/jaded by it though. We all feel our ideas, be they ones proven in other scenarios or not, are workable.
Thank you.I am just collecting information and data and general trends now. And I am noting down what fails and what has succeeded. I feel like this might take longer but I am not failing on my dime. Perhaps that’s a good thing because I would have never thought about IoT or blockchain 4 years ago, but now I see how it can be implemented under the umbrella of Agtech. We need an ecosystem of sorts. And we need to be able to scale up as well as down. And we need solutions for 30 years down the line. One thing I find striking is that tech coming out is solving problems of today. But what good is that? I want to be able to predict how land availability and lack of water or climate change or labour shortage will affect me in the future so I can get ahead with a method that will eventually merge with the future painlessly. But I have also met some very helpful people in the industry who are more than happy to share or at least hear me out. There is enormous value in having people from other disciplines and others who are not farmers to be sounding board. I also know that including us has some value. By ‘us’, I mean smallholder farm operators and the farm workers. In big industrialized farms, it’s already mechanized and it’s just one step away from automation. They pain point is availability of labour.(and to a certain extent, regulation in California..dont know about other states) But in smaller farms, we are talking the difference between breaking even and loss. Especially if we are organic because we don’t spray and can’t have huge machinery. And labour is our biggest cost. Not availability of labour, but the cost of labour. Small scale farm bots are needed. They can scale. Massive autonomous tractors meant to 1000 acres of corn and soy is useless to us. I feel a kinship with the Lilliputian scale of indoor farming. I get it. I am also inspired by it. But outside, we got sunshine. And it’s free. Nothing is cheaper than free!
The former is for small
acreage outdoor farms(biggest cost is labour when available) vs the latter which is for indoor farms with artificial light(can be automated. Light,energy are their biggest cost).
I don't doubt it, but it still doesn't quite answer my question. (The answer may seem obvious to an industry insider but likely to anyone else).
If labor costs, for any comparably-sized farm, dwarf artificial light [1] costs, then it would be a form of "penny wise, pound foolish" to opt for free light if it means incurring the labor cost. This is true, even if each is the biggest single cost in each scenario.
[1] Even that needn't be 100% artificial, since windows and skylights exist, though, again, my ignorance as an outsider may preclude me from realizing something that might be obvious to an insider, like this option not moving the needle on cost.
I am not sure I understand. Let me rephrase your question to me as I understand it now:
On one hand, there is a regular farm with farm labour and natural sun light. A traditional calendar picture farm. A tractor, some workers, rows of crops, red barn etc.
On the other hand, there is an automated indoor farm with artificial lights.
Are these the two scenarios that are being compared?
I agree that indoor farming will likely seem more profitable even though lighting costs money.
2. While indoor farming is being tinkered around with..someone still has to keep supplying lettuce to the Walmarts and Whole Foods and Safeway’s and Kroger’s and restaurants and consumers.
3. Right now, the advantage of outdoor lettuce farming is legacy. California lettuce companies have been doing it for so long that they have perfected it to an art form.
But regulations are strangling and water is disappearing. Soon labour too. And it’s getging expensive.
They do the best they can. They give medical, 15-27/hour including benefits, breaks, overtime and some even provide housing. But it’s not going to be sustainable because the public still wants cheap food.
Even if indoor systems are automated, the jury is still out there if it would be profitable. Also..indoor plant specialists would want 60-120k. The Joses and Eduardos and Marias employed in the field demand much less.
Make of this what you may...I am just throwing light on current ground reality. I have NO solutions or recommendations. These are bigger problems.
I do know that food security is important. Local food supply is crucial for this. Food should be reasonably priced for everyone. Farming should be financially viable and sustainable for young farmers to keep doing what they do best.
My solution is small farm robotics. Outdoors. Because I am not an indoor farmer. I only read about it. Perhaps there are other ways to deal with it but I am not equipped to comment more. I understand large scale production but I haven’t worked in it. Everyone is an employee in a corporate farm. I am a farm owner and a farm worker in my farm. So it’s worlds apart.
That Dutch hydroponic system is nice. It has many of the features of cost-effective mechanization. The system is mostly water tanks in huge greenhouses, with automated handling equipment around the edges. Plants are handled in trays much larger than humans can handle, so fewer units have to be handled. There's not a lot of wasted motion; the cycle taken by the growing pallets is about as short as it could be. Looks like a profitable business.
But is it a business worth purusing for humanity. Have you ever tasted hydroponics lettuce ? It's so inferior in taste and the sensations it gives in your mouth. It may have all nutrients, but if nutrients is the point, then let's eat soylent green.
There's a lot of whining from the "traditional organic" farming industry about this.[1] They got disrupted by hydroponic technology.
Here's a major "organic" tomato operation in California.[2] It's indoors. The growing medium is coconut husks with computer controlled drip irrigation. It's more similar to a hydroponic operation than to an outdoor farm.
I disagree. California rules tomatoes outdoors...processing, heirloom and cherries. We have the perfect climate and soil for it. Hands down, outdoors is way more efficient and prodctive than anything with indoor tech.
That just means there's space for improvements to be made. There's research to be done on what makes plants tastier, and there's work to be done in applying such research.
But yes, being able to produce fresh food better, faster and in more controlled way is definitely worth pursuing for humanity.
A lot of food that we eat today evolved really fast after we started to care about their taste and only select the ones with the properties we want. We're talking about maximum 10k years of fast evolution for human taste, not millions of years.
>But yes, being able to produce fresh food better, faster and in more controlled way is definitely worth pursuing for humanity.
But it isn't better. And why is making worse food faster worth pursuing for humanity? All the available evidence seems to suggest that a rural agrarian lifestyle provides more happiness and fulfillment. It would seem that we should be pursuing how to move people into the country to grow their own food, not how to support the highest possible population of humans at the expense of those humans and everything else on the planet.
Have you considered that hydroponic vegetables will tend to have a much greater variance in quality than those produced in dirt due to the fact that so much control can be exerted by the grower?
Given the history of agriculture and the tendency to select for large watery produce, it seems like what you've experienced is the result of a profit optimization rather than an anecdotal example of hydroponics limitation in regards to producing quality vegetables.
A difficult thing to do with evaluating startups is clearly seeing where they can go vs where they are now. Consider Amazon: they were a bookseller because Jeff Bezos wanted to start an ecommerce company and books were a good starting place, but their trajectory and path grew to be so much more.
Similarly, there's a bunch of robot startups that aren't really _about_ the thing they're trying to do right now, so much as they want to make general purpose robots that can handle all sorts of tasks.
In this case they landed on farming, but there have been other seemingly dumb robot applications. For example: check out this massively expensive robot arm (that could easily kill a worker) that has been used instead of just putting the conveyor belt directly into the conveyor belt oven.
That company isn't interested in Pizzas or restaurants per se (if they were they'd make something more like a frozen pizza factory) they're just using it as a proving ground.
There is real innovation happening in the farming space but it looks like the video you posted or these automatic milking robots or something else that really helps out.
It isn't. It doesn't really seem to even require an industrial robot arm (though that definitely buys reliability). It seems well within capabilities of DIY robotics.
(Side note: building a pizza-making robot is one small dream of mine.)
Why do you think they don't have farmers as advisors/consultants already? While inefficient now, perhaps they could have a few hundred machines running around once they scale up. And it looks like they have a variety of "premium" produce versus just the cabbages in your link.
Your website offers food from a "little farm". Wouldn't tech companies prefer to partner with experienced large scale commercial growers? In addition, you seem to take things (that aren't even criticisms) overly emotionally/personally, which would probably not be ideal in a cofounder.
Tech companies are not replacing management. Tech companies are replacing boots on the ground labourers and farm workers like me with bots.
My website is a placeholder. I don’t have time to update things on social media amidst farmwork. I might during winter when cover crops are in.
Large scale commercial growers can be partners, but are you saying small scale farmers don’t deserve the benefits of robotic technology and stuff that would help us make more profit without repetitive manual labour? This is exactly the sentiment that I sensed with tech people in Silicon Valley. That there is no value to saving heirloom varieties or using conservation techniques to protect soil and environment. Our small scale gives us room to grow varieties and food of the different people from all over. Fertilizers leach. Tillage destroys soil structure. Massive soil disruption gets rid of soil microbiome. Large scale commercial producers are important but local food is important too. That’s my opinion anyways.
You are way off Mark when you say I take things overly emotional /personal. But I am not going to challenge you. It’s your opinion and you are entitled to it. Have a nice day.
You seem like a passionate co-founder to me jelli and I can see the value in what you're saying. Maybe SV can see it too, but they can't see the way to take that value and use it to extract a high ROI right now.
I honestly only want to be a co founder to someone who is creating the tech we need to guide and highlight and test their products. I am not going to pretend to be a technical person or a engineer or the one who makes the whole thing profitable, but I can take the farm’s side and speak from the POV of plants and soil...I understand my domain. I can tell them if their vision system with AI is worth thousands and thousands of dollars is really needed. Just because something awesome is possible doesn’t mean that we need it.
Sometimes all you need is a blind garden gnome as a helper. If I can tell the gnome to walk 3 steps, stop, use a two inch circle hoe once up and once down, it doesn’t matter if he is blind IF I set up planting and spacing before hand that is suitable for the blind garden gnome. Yes, it’s awesome to have a rover with lidar and sensors and vision system and AI for phenotyping and uploading the ID of every weed in the field to the cloud. But do we need it?
And I thought about it long and hard as to why all this is even there in the design. It became apparent very quickly. Data. They are collecting data with all the IoT devices piggy backing on the machine.
They tell us that we need this data. They tell us that this data will bring us more profits. They tell us that we have to pay for this data collection.
But my field data that is 2-3 times more valuable than the kale I sell(and that I pay for because most of these are subscription services) belongs to me. But the IoT devices and the farm bots that collect it are not even ours. The farmers don’t own it, they don’t have right to repair and they can’t extarct data. And trust me, there is A LOT of data that can be collected from our fields that we don’t even need. But we own it. And I want to commoditise it for the farmer. Why should we buy retail and sell wholesale and take all the risk, but not reap the benefits?
That’s why John Deere wants to deny farmers right to repair citing DMCA. That’s why hardware tech is going to commodity crops that are traded in the exchange. That’s where the real ROI is for VCs. I am not an idiot. I get it, but why should part of profits from my activity not come back to me?
With produce and non commodity crops, the value is trying to capture the ROI through blockchain and data from that. But again farmers are at the bottom of the supply chain and value is spread to all the people in between and we get none of it because we are the first ring in the supply chain. It never flows back. If I sell Romain wholesale, I can get 39cents from buyer. It sells for 1.59-2.50 a head as it adds up on the supply chain, but that 0.5-one cent I pay per romaine for technology to extract data is included as costs for the 39c I receive, but it becomes 5-10 cents up the value chain and it plumps up everytime it goes up.
But people who work in supply chain tech and robotics and drones have access to SV and VCs. Farmers don’t. Large commercial farms that operate with offices and lobbying muscle and are members of organizations that represent them have access to SV and VCs, but small farmers who work the farms they own can..in no way..access these people who are investors.
The small acreage farmer is basically nuts. They farm because they have a passion for it. Soil health is more important than pesticides and fertilizer to boost productivity. Many aren’t buoyed by higher profits but its their very nature that gets them out of the game after 4-5 years average because you can’t suppirt yourself with this kind of variable, broke today-chicken dinner tomorrow income. But we have value and we can create value. We need to make money to continue doing what we do...when they say that the average farmer is 58 and young people don’t want to farm..well..why would they if they are not seen and valued?
I didn’t know how this became such a long reply. Thanks for reading.
My website is a placeholder for my farm. Its not a place for tech or farm bot topics there as it’s a place for my customers and farm friends. It’s my username dot com.
You're looking for funding in the wrong place. You should be in California's Central Valley. Sure, there's not the flood of startup capital you'll find in the Bay and you'll probably need to bootstrap initially. But you will be taken seriously and you'll be in daily contact with your customers while you iterate on your product. Then you can show the VC's in the valley real traction and a tangible market.
I hear you. But I am not trying to replace labour in BigAg. I am trying to replace labour with machines in smaller farms that can’t afford hired labour. In most parts of the world, their food comes from 2-3 hectares. That’s the average size.
Also. I doubt if there is any infrastructure or support in central California. UC Davis might have some ways to collaborate with small farms but in my limited and personal experience, I find that they prefer to work with their own..alumni and school network. I am an immigrant and didn’t obtain my education here. I get it, but I don’t have to like how the system works.
That’s why YC selection process bummed me big time. I have a reasonable network that I built since I started farming four years ago. But it WAS hard and it’s never enough because I don’t ‘belong’ here or the networked university system.
Lest it seems like I am whining, I want to say that I am just being realistic. I also know when to cut loose from a sinking dream. I guess I will keep trying but I am not emotionally or passionately invested anymore. My time is precious and I can’t waste it trying to impress people who see things differently.
I am still a good writer. I will write instead. I am hoping that it will fulfill me. But sometimes..from time to time, I got to roll my eyes when I see wheels that will never roll being reinvented with so much $$$!
With the OP, I don’t have a dog in this fight as it’s Indoor Ag, but I have learned a lot about automation and data collection by understanding indoor systems and philosophy. Iron Ox is like Amazon’s Kiva or Fetch Bots. I don’t get it.
It's happening. Here are some automated weeding systems in use in central California.[1] "All these machines use a camera to detect the crop, a computer to make decisions on which plants to keep/remove, and then activate a kill mechanism." Most of these things are implements towed behind a tractor, not robots. These implements seem to be built up from a row of detector/computer/actuator modules, so if a module fails in the field, you should be able to unbolt it and bolt in a spare, then take the broken one in for repair. Electronics for a module is probably cell phone level.
So far, they're not as flexible about weed/plant detection as they could be. But there will probably be a training system where you go out with a cell phone pointed down at the field, swiping left for weeds and right for plants, until the machine learning system is trained.
There's a lot that can be done, and is being done, by hooking up inexpensive vision systems to actuators on agricultural implements. Here's a nice example - a cultivator which is stirring the soil around each plant while not touching the plants.[2]
The main problem with automated vegetable harvesting is not that it can't be done, but that for some crops the infrequently used machinery isn't cost effective compared to hiring large numbers of people for short periods.
If this is something you are passionate about, perhaps a non-profit structure is something to look at. It may be easier to get grant funding than VC funding. Although not as sexy as YC, Fresno (CA's 5th largest city) does have some supporting infrastructure for tech like the Bitwise Hive and Fresno State.
Thanks, I will look into it. I was also thinking of looking into CDFA grants this winter during farm downtime. But many federal grants require university participation and I didn’t go to school in the US. This somewhat restricts how I can gain access many of these grants and opportunities even though I am a citizen. It’s just time consuming even though I am sure it’s possible.
I am working on aviation and robotics for a project and I've been looking to talk to someone in farming to get some insights on how this product might be used in agriculture. Do you think we can talk? What might be a good way to direct message you? Thanks!
Here living on the hackerfarm allowed me to discuss with people who have farming insights before even starting my project. I have participated in community farming and gardening before sketching a thing or writing a piece of code.
Manipulation of plants in a clean room is easy, it is also remote from any real world application (outside space or maybe arctic farming). You should at least aim at greenhouses tech.
Maybe consider inspiring farmers as a goal? Like, Elon's initial plan of a greenhouse on Mars.
Also, the market concepts of innovator, early adopter, early majority, late majority, laggard came from potato farmers, showing that some of them are innovators, just like every other group. Target them.
That’s what I do now. I have a once monthly techie meet farmer roundtable. So far it has been very tough to get farmers interested. Some like the romanticized notion of ‘farm life’ without realizing that it still runs on fossil fuels and cutting edge mechanical tech. I have been able to get a few of them interested no doubt. Few, but it was worth searching for them.
There has to be a ‘farm stack’...because it’s a lot of things. When I see a weed thinning machine start up bought for 300 something million, I am awed that just one simple function that isn’t even that essential with proper management is so expensive. This was Blue River Tech bought by John Deere. And what did John Deere do? They shut down lettuce thinning and took it to cotton which is a commodity crop and is one of the crops that uses pesticide sprays a lot. A good notion but it’s not food.
Which brings everyone back to square one and more $$$ going into something that has already been invented but retired.
And even if companies like John Deere own these tech, they control it tightly. I wonder how many lawyers are in their payroll. Farmers in California just lost the right to repair tractors with software in them. DMCA (https://www.forbes.com/sites/jasonbloomberg/2017/04/30/john-... )
Can you imagine if one of those giant autonomous machines breaks down? Having smaller bots that swarm and take care of small acreages is less risky. Mitigated crop loss. It serves both small farmers and large farmers. Most ‘large farms’ are really corporate farms that outsource growing instructions and protocols to smaller farms and buys their produce. They contract farmers to grow what goes under their label after packing. Packers are not often growers. Distributors are not always packers. And then there are brokers, wholesalers and retailers. The supply chain is long!! The lettuce is at least a week old before you can buy it! Small local farm operators can get food via a smaller supply chain. I also want farming to be climate change proof and ‘future proof’. It’s easier to pivot smaller systems than larger massive ones.
I am making quick points but there is a lot of nuance depending on location, geography and kind of crops grown. This is why Agtech needs farmers and growers as partners. We know all the gory details and gnarly bits about our specialities.
Take pests like bugs. It differs not just from crop to crop but also differs with soil type, geography, season and sometimes we don’t even know why or how. It’s not possible to standardize this intelligence. So a weeding machine meant for the lettuce fields of Salinas, CA may not work elsewhere. It will become unbearably expensive to work out a system for a common farm marketplace. But it’s easy when we have a general purpose platform and process with minor changes depending on circumstance that can be cloud based and open source based on local farmers input. For this it has to be small and cheap.
And most importantly farmers need to trust tech. VCs have chosen to create for a few massive consolidated large scale farms(not selling to them,btw but leasing) instead of making it possible for everyone to farm.
It’s like the smart phone. If Apple made a $30000 gold plated phone, few might buy it but when they make cheaper ones with plastic cases, everyone can have one. And Apple makes $ from services and apps and what not. Plus they will be repeat buyers.
I struggle to explain this to finance folk and tech folk who now think they are bosom buddies with the VC folk now that they got a couple rounds of funding. There are real pain points that are not being addressed. In the field, I can already see future pain points. 30 years from now..if there is no fossil fuel..if climate change occurs..if soil changes..if water disappears..whatever. But no one who can make it happen is listening.
i'm coming at this from the tech side but with an appreciation for the small scale farmers who have done this for generations. my family was all farmers and here i am now. i'd love to understand your vision if you're willing to chat. my email is in my profile.
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.
> The make-work bias is best illustrated by a story, perhaps apocryphal, of an economist who visits China under Mao Zedong. He sees hundreds of workers building a dam with shovels. He asks: “Why don’t they use a mechanical digger?” “That would put people out of work,” replies the foreman. “Oh,” says the economist, “I thought you were making a dam. If it’s jobs you want, take away their shovels and give them spoons.”
~ The Economist, Vol. 383, p.42
1. Why would it frustrate you? I do the job in the field everyday. I am frustrated that my back and knees hurt. That I have to work in the sun and can’t find enough markets.
2. There is already a lot of technology in what you eat. Mechanization in factory style farms, cold supply chain, blockchain for lettuce at Walmart..the stock system..the inventory..everything. Not to mention that your food chain is owned by agri fertilizers and pesticide companies..and gmo seed. Bayer owns Monsanto now. The company that used slave labor in nazi concentration camps bought out the company that made agent orange. And that’s who is making your food and medicine.
3. I am also frustrated that farming methods aka hard work meant to feed a lot less people is now expected to feed close to 10 billion by 2050. On less land.
Who would have thought, it's actually real: https://www.ibm.com/blockchain/solutions/food-trust. It seems to be based on Hyperledger Fabric, which apparently does not require proof-of-work. That's amazing, and thanks for mentioning it. This is the first non-disastrous blockchain project in active use that I've ever heard of.
Blockchain is very exciting. I can see how it can help with traceability and food safety. It can record when pallets were loaded or the date when it was sowed, harvested etc, but it’s also possible to generate this after ..hypothetically..I buy strawberries from Costco and pass off on my own. Of course, won’t work when Costco is more expensive than wholesale. But I am just saying that blockchain is not entirely about ensuring trust/transparency here. Involvement of IBM also likely means that it’s not decentralized. Produce is a physical good and not a digital transaction.
It’s overkill for lettuce sold to Walmart, but I can see why Walmart wants to try it. I am curious to see how we can implement and use blockchain appropriately in the supply and value chain of food. Walmart mandating lettuce blockchain and patterning with IBM is a good start, but honestly at this level, it can also be done with just well managed database systems. But I am all for it! I am excited to see where this will lead.
I also can...intuitively only because I can’t articulate it or prove it.. see this as ‘laying down of the road’ before the town is built. Exciting.
> 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.
I'd much rather we eliminate the need for jobs so people don't need to work anymore. Working sucks. I think I work at a great place. I still wouldn't do it if I didn't get paid.
I work even if I don't have to. It's about using one's potential, if nothing else. In the grand scheme of things, I'm grateful for all the progress other people worked on to achieve before me and which I'm benefiting from, and I wish to do my part and leave the world a bit better for others too.
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?
> What frustrates me is the tendency to use technology to replace humans beings.
It's a huge cost center, and the amount of labor required to operate a farm is considerably less than what it has been in the past. It seems like the major bottleneck is harvesting, packaging and shipping the majority of your product to market, it's a natural place to look for gains.
The moneymakers are the landholders anyways.
> Then you don't know how to solve the shortcut in jobs.
Most harvesting work is done on a "piece work" system. These aren't jobs that have any future in them because there are absolutely no skills required and no reason for an employer to develop them and they're highly seasonal.
> Couldn't we just slow down tech a little bit and let people do some good old hard work to keep getting their cut?
There may be cases where this is true, but when the labor is literally "just pulling food out of the ground and putting it in a box" I don't think the use of technology is an inherent problem.
We did, and we keep having it, because the problem still remains - people need to work to earn a living. We'll stop having this conversation when we'll solve that problem.
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.
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.
I agree. Lighting has made great strides. Everything can now be controlled to the needed wavelength, it’s actually amazing to see how far we have come. It’s very satisfying.
Fruit picking is very tough. I feel that canopy management and spacing and everything else has to be standardized for the machines. Apple picking has a number of autonomous options now. They even have been able to figure out sorting and packing. The problem though is soft fruits. Like strawberries and raspberries and blackberries. Really difficult. Growing them indoors makes it really easier, but it’s the grip and their bruising tendency that is the problem.
Cabbage has been mechanized. It’s a beautiful thing to watch. There is no need to make it autonomous because the labour needed isn’t picking and bending and working in the sun..they can be in the shade in the deck as the machine brings the cabbage to them and they can inspect and pack them. It’s easier but still repetitive manual labour. But not brutal like those working in the field to harvest. Cabbage, lettuce, asparagus, sugar cane, sugar beets, corn and soy, of course..grains like Millets and barley etc are all easy. If there is one thing to crack it’s plants that have continuous and multiple harvests. Like eggplants or peppers or tomatoes(heirlooms and cherries. Sauce tomatoes and those for processing are already automated).
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.
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.
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.
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.”
> Europe is far ahead because they don’t have cheap labour.
Eh, that's a tad bit generalized. German farmers still employ a lot of cheap eastern European seasonal workers, around 160.000 per year [0], especially for asparagus harvest.
Tho, due to the economic progress in Eastern Europe it's been more difficult for German farmers to find enough cheap hands.
Interesting. Is this the white asparagus harvest? I know that it’s a finicky and delicate crop. Asparagus harvest has been automated, if I remember right. The Dutch has come up with this.. http://www.fruitnet.com/fpj/article/171946/dutch-start-up-in... but there are also other duct taped autonomous solutions I have heard of..
Yes, the white asparagus is very popular in Germany, but the strawberry and potato harvests are also affected.
This has been going on since 2010, back then it was still around 330.000 seasonal workers [0].
Automation has been one factor, but a lot of farmers would rather keep employing cheap seasonal labor, as they used to, instead of buying and maintaining expensive machinery all year around.
Afaik potatoes still need manual sorting in the end.
There's also the fact that mechanization is expensive, while the eastern European labor used to be extremely cheap and Germany doesn't have growing season all year around.
So, many German farmers temporarily hire cheap labor, instead of investing in expensive machinery that just costs money outside of the growing season.
I understand the Dutch are doing a good job but it’s all indoors. Spain and Portugal has the right climate for other crops grown outdoors.
The Dutch have been working on saline water crops and so far they have done a great job with potatoes. Also working on carrots, beets, cauliflower,kale etc all grown in salt water. Non GMO. They are testing in Kenya, bangaladesh, Vietnam and places where salt in soil makes it impossible to farm. I want to say I am really impressed with Dutch Ag.
I also understand EU got a lot of produce from Africa but placed restrictions about it being non GMO. Now that China has taken over management of Africa and spending on infrastructure (their belt and road initiative) so they can outsource farming to feed their billion plus population. In the US, they bought Smithfield foods to start exporting pork to China and they also own a lot of farmland in the USA, the pork operation because regulations are lax in North Carolina rather than in China. (Open air lagoons with pig poop...disastrous with ). But I digress. Different topic. I am trying to get back to my initial thought which is that..local food is food security. We live in a globalized world where we can and do ship food all around the world, but a fundamental self sufficiency to feed the local population is a food security issue and I would say..even national security. But this has also gone horribly wrong with stockpiling(corn and grain subsidies in the states leading to surplus leading to HCFS, ethanol and then animal feed..) and to entirely handicapping certain industries(like our dairy sector that is highly subsidied ..bottled water is cheaper than milk. Dairy farms can’t make it anymore). It’s a balance.
I am afraid I might have digressed..thanks for reading!
Dutch being so great at indoors doesn't surprise me the least. They've had plenty of reason to perfect that considering their history of Cannabis legalization.
> Open air lagoons with pig poop...disastrous with
Wasn't there recently some tornado/flood going through a US farm area spreading the literal "shit", out of these lagoons, everywhere?
> I am afraid I might have digressed..thanks for reading!
Heh, I think not digressing is sometimes impossible, especially on such topics like farming and food production, which are often rather wide-ranging if not all-encompassing.
Agriculture is the basis of our modern human civilization, at some point or another, it's all leading back there.
https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-news/why-is-c... : this is the link reporting on the pig poop open air lagoons and the sorry state of North Carolina where Smithfield food is located. It was purchased by Chinese company. Incidentally, this article is dated March 2018. Way before the hurricane disaster. Sitting in my California bubble, I find it unbelievable that this is happening in North Carolina. It was a horrifying read and I learnt many things. If jobs are the reason environment is to be sacrificed, perhaps here is a good reason to implement UBI.
Im fascinated by this machine. Do you have any more info about who makes it so i can read more about it? Im particularly interested in the business end of it, how do the leaves get removed from the plant? Is there some kind of mechanical cutting force applied?
What is GP? I must confess that I am not sure if it’s directed at me.
But if I am going to assume it’s one of the links I posted:
Italy and Netherlands makes some really great automation for tractors re harvesting produce. They still have to be driven by humans but it’s only a matter of time before it’s fully automated. If you name the crop, I might be able to get the name of the company.
Root crops is likely Netherlands. If it’s greens, brassicas/cold crops, Italy has some great brands. On a slightly different note, I like German company Kult Kress too for precision weeding.
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.
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.
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.
In glasshouses a reasonably wide variety of crops can be grown hydroponically including tomatoes, cucumbers, eggplant, lettuce, cannabis, peppers. This Nat Geo article [1] has some interesting data/analysis on greenhouse growing in the Netherlands. The Netherlands are the leaders in high-tech greenhouse growing. Approx 0.2-0.33 of the world's high-tech greenhouses are located there. The biggest costs are financing/depreciation, labour and energy. The balance of these three costs changes significantly depending on your geographical location.
I am the founder of a startup [2] based in the Netherlands and backed by Founder's Fund focussed on scaling high-tech greenhouse growing as a method of crop production. I have both a technical background in Reinforcement Learning and have spent time training as a tomato grower. Happy to answer any questions anyone may have at dave@optimal.ag.
You can probably grow just about anything, but things with a long growing cycle, big root systems, heavy plants prone to falling over if not well-anchored, etc., are more work. So, fruit trees are a challenge, for example. They end up needing pretty involved scaffolding; I'd imagine that would be a particular challenge to implement with a robot.
Right off the bat they compare the production output of their robot interior farm with a comparable exterior farm "5 times the size" - which is another, more subtle, form of BS - how does it compare with a standard "meat powered" indoor farm? Production from hydro/hybrid is higher than traditional outside soil only.
>> "What we found is that the two biggest costs in the indoor farm are labor and electricity"
this may be true but it doesn't mean the costs of outdoor farming are lower, plus the added cost of land (good farm land is expensive to own or rent)
"plus the added cost of land (good farm land is expensive to own or rent)"
Urban land is much more expensive per unit. not only that, but you have the Capital expense of the machinery and buildings, plus the operational expense of heating, lighting, ventilation, and fungus control.
http://blog.zipgrow.com/indoor-hydroponic-farming-costs-prof... has a good overview of the costs. $110k for 500 square feet. excluding building. Then you have the opex for lighting which is $1100 a month. You'll need heating in winter, which will similar cost.
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.
"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.
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?
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.
You could...
detect pressure build up -> assume clogged
set pressure 0
open a solenoid connected to h2o2 with enough elevation to reach the clog
detect flow increase ->assume unclogged
close solenoid, set pressure 50 psi (or whatever)
This might best be done with a hydraulic circuit rather than electronic sensors, by the way. Ie. to detect pressure build up have a secondary line with slight resistance before the nozzle that when pressurized triggers other hydraulic elements which cut pressure, etc.
Woah, very neat setup. That looks more like a vertical NFT setup than aeroponics though. Is there a fine nutrient mist that I can't see? or is it simply pumped to the top then drips down the edge?
Yes, the structures are vertical NFTs. The method is borrowed from aeroponics. In our lab test, we wanted to source things locally, reduce CAPEX/OPEX to the lowest we can and have the best ROI possible. We realized that instead of spending additional motor horsepower and thus more electricity, we can reduce it by pumping up once and then dripping them from the top. The mist/spray method also clogs quite often and is more cumbersome to clean. Our next step with both Flats and "A" systems will use something similar -- perhaps a "flood and drip". We have also realized the benefit of the "Dutch Bucket" system for growing more common food/plants.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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...).
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.
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.
They're almost talking about a fundamentally different type of farming. If your just plowing, growing a several crops and using fertilizers and pesticides, your highly dependent on things like price of fertilizer, price of seeds, price of diesel, price of pesticides. Now the hard goods manufactures are killing the secondary market for farm implements and building implements that can't be owner serviced, which makes the farmer even more dependent on price to service those equipment from the dealer only. All of these easily surmountable in a big operation, but stacked against the farmer next door.
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.
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).
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.
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.
food per dollar is one interesting measurement, but products like yoghurt are not fungible, no matter how much we would like to treat them that way in industrial agriculture.
So the real question isn't can someone produce yoghurt cheaper than this person (they can) but is the product they produce worth the $12 for enough people to make a go of it.
Yeah, I agree that it's not a great metric and you can aim for a more expensive market but one thing I was pointing out is that the market for significantly more expensive food that this sort of farming would entail is really hard to break in to and also once you break in it also isn't hugely profitable (the guy compared it to the restaurant industry, which is a famously bad investment for inexperienced people). Anyway this is just one conversation I had with one guy to take it with a grain of salt.
I grew up on a farm, so I have a pretty good idea of what goes on. Not sure why I'm being down voted, do people always assume that folks post about things they have no experience with?
Sure it was boring as a kid, but I got a lot of hands on training fixing machines and working with plants and animals. It was also much safer than the last 25 years that I've lived in Oakland.
I think you got downvoted because your statement about safety of the farm vs Oakland is off topic and irrelevant to to parent post's statement about the economic inefficiency of small farms.
Thanks, the downvote that I was referring to was the original post which was being down voted. That post was meant to be linked to that post not the above. My bad.
I can see that I'm touching on a heated topic (Rural vs. Urban living) that people feel strongly about.
My original point is that there appears to be people willing to work on farms, but not the types of farms that build culture and invite communities to be a part of. So we are left with migrant workers which in this day in age are probably largely illegal.
I would assume that this is an untouched labor force and economic niche that is being underutilized.
It can work, but the part that is missing from most people's thoughts is the amount of self-sufficiency you need outside of farming to live such a life style. You certainly aren't going to make a lot of money doing such a thing, but you will make some if you pick the right crops. However to be able to afford everything you need you will need additional tools and skills. You won't be able to afford getting your house roofed or your tractor repaired by somebody else, you will be roofing your own shit, fixing your own tractor, you are going to want to be canning or preserving a lot of your own foods, you might need to switch to wood heat and cut your own fire wood or otherwise have a MUCH smaller house, fix and maintain your own tools and equipment, ect.
If you can do all that, it is a good sustainable life, but if the most you can do is grow some garden crops and shit, you will not be able to afford the service costs of everything else you need to survive. You won't be able to sell some tomatoes and afford all the same services as before, especially out int he country where land is cheap. It takes a lot of fuel to get in and out of the areas where land is cheap enough to do any of that also.
There's something so weird about seeing HN readers saying "I'd love to live on a subsistence farm" when there's so many people in the world struggling to survive on the food they farm themselves.
HN readers are mostly imagining growing botique organic heirloom vegetables and that sort of thing- high end, high margins, very possibly as a hobby farm. Nobody here writing about how they want to work on a farm is imagining monocropping ten thousand acres of corn or living hand to mouth subsistence farming. IMO.
*In San Francisco. My friend lives exactly the lift GP describes, but in the Hudson River Valley, in a beautiful Victorian house (with roommates). He's also incredibly jacked now. It's totally possible.
The people I know are averaging $100k/acre a year doing intensive farming and CSA, which doesn't seem bad to me. Examples would be Jean Martin Fortier style farming techniques.
People you know of, not people you know. If you knew him, you would know he doesn't actually farm, his money comes from selling overpriced lettuce to expensive restaurants. And that the entire market in Montreal is saturated just from his operation. A single person can make a living that way in each market of a few million people. That does not provide a path for 99.99% of the people who would like to get into farming. We can have about 10 people doing that in all of Canada. There's a lot more than 10 people who would like to be farmers, and most of them would like to actually be farmers not lettuce salesmen.
The ag industry doesn't care about what some people would like to do for a living, they care about making money. That's why they shut out small operations deliberately rather than supporting them. As an example, the big pork producers own all the pork processing plants. They set the rules, and the rules require very uniform hogs. So small farms who grow heritage pork breeds on natural diets instead of growing the single commercial pork breed on a corn+soy diet can't get their hogs slaughtered and processed. Everything in agriculture has been massively consolidated into a small number of huge corporations who exert tremendous influence in trying to make it even more consolidated. Small farms have to market directly to consumers and jump through lots of hoops to work around legal barriers lobbied for by huge agricorps. We end up spending more time as food salesmen than as farmers, which is far less enjoyable.
Seems like wheel-reinvention. There are already many companies providing machinery for large-scale optimized horticultural operations. I used to work with this one:
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.
I asked the founders of one of these agri-robot startups at demo day and they said that leafy greens are just the easiest to automate and so they will start there. What makes it easy is that they can be grown in a greenhouse rather than outdoors, and the main task that needs to be automated is moving plants from a smaller to a larger container, not the mechanics of picking a fruit off a plant.
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.
Leafy greens are low hanging goals because 1. Quick turn around (45-60 days) 2. Easy to create hybrids suitable for whatever environment 3. Single harvest(as opposed to tomatoes where there is flowers, ripe and unripe and over ripe fruit amongst canopy all the time).4. We are not trying to make it flower or fruit which makes nutrients easier. 5. Low energy. Doesn’t need a lot of light or heat.
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.
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... ... 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.
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.
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.
I don't think it's ad revenue -- they say on that page that "Visitors are allowed 3 free articles per month (without a subscription), and private browsing prevents us from counting how many stories you've read. We hope you understand, and consider subscribing for unlimited online access."
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?
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"...
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.
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.
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.
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?
I am not so sure either why a complex robotic arm with 5-6 DOF is necessary. It seems more suited for manufacturing in general, for handling components of varying size and complexity, or areas with limited space issues. Or the need for more modular-based processes
But farms generally have lots of land / space availability. The pipeline for growing, farming, and transporting crops is fairly predictable, minus unexpected events like hurricanes/tornados/rainfall, diseases, pests, spoilage, etc
With farming, everything to my understanding is mostly predictable for crop size. Farms generally specialize in one type of crop if I'm not mistaken, especially if its hydrophonics /inhouse like in the dutch farm video mentioned in this thread.
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 (Permaculture is a form of applied ecology.)
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.
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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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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)?
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!
> "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.
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.
most Americans don't want to do back-breaking manual labor for a living
Nobody from any country wants to do back-breaking manual labor for a living.
But the whole "jobs Americans won't do" is nothing more than a political slogan/talking point.
The reality is that Americans will do any job, provided they are fairly compensated.
More than once, it's been in the news that a factory/food processing plant/etc... has been busted for having illegal workers, paying its workers below minimum wage, or both. A week later, the factory has to hire legal workers and Americans for the previously under-paid jobs, and there's a line around the block of people willing to now work for a fair rate of pay.
"More than once, it's been in the news that a factory/food processing plant/etc... has been busted for having illegal workers, paying its workers below minimum wage, or both. A week later, the factory has to hire legal workers and Americans for the previously under-paid jobs, and there's a line around the block of people willing to now work for a fair rate of pay."
I've never heard that, could you provide a couple of concrete examples?
Wish I could, but I get most of my news from traditional media.
I remember there was a meat packing plant in Colorado a few years ago. I tried Google News, but it's apparently incapable of showing anything but the most recent stories.
> The reality is that Americans will do any job, provided they are fairly compensated.
To the extent this is true, I think it's tautological.
At some point, much of American labor was manual. People's notion of a fair wage for that was not high, and the work was accepted as normal. But now there are a lot of people who work in offices, and much manual labor is now way easier than agricultural work. There's also a broad (but not universal) societal expectation that people shouldn't have to destroy their bodies at work. So I think the perceived "fair" compensation for this has risen dramatically. And I think the number of people willing to spend 14 hours a day, 6 days a week [1] doing that work at any price is much smaller than before.
And honestly, I think that's great. We should find ways to turn every job that people don't want to do over to robots.
Yep, the “shortage of employees” meme comes from the same propaganda sources as the “jobs Americans just wont do” one. If you offer above-market wage, and the labor pool is not artificially constrained (like for doctors), then you will get a line of applicants out the door. This is true for any job.
Those views are only in tension as long as labor is a significant fraction of the cost of farm output. But the most labor-intensive part the supply chain (per pound of apples) is picking it. This source [1] gives 1000-2000 lb/hour as a typical output rate. At $50/hour, that would only account for ~5 cents/lb.
Even if you had policies that firehose-flooded the labor market, that still only saves you a trivial amount on the price of farm output. (I'm guessing most of the cost of apples comes from the price of the land and capital.)
It just doesn't look like there's this huge tradeoff we're facing that could justify massively increasing the labor supply.
A better explanation would be that, if everyone else uses unauthorized[2] labor, then you have to do it yourself to keep up.
>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.
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.
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.
Telesurgery is a bit of a myth. It's been done a few dozen times.
It doesn't make that much sense economically. It's actually cheaper to fly a surgeon or a patient around for the few occasions when it really needs to be done.
Most surgery still isn't done with Da Vinci robots or whatever. Surgeons with their hands can do many more things. That's not to say those robots are not amazing, it's just that they don't do everything.
The military is the one area where it might make sense, but have a close look. They don't do it either. Instead the US military has an amazing extraction system where someone injured in battle in the middle east can be at Rammstein within hours.
I assume the tech isn't there, but mechanical turk for manual labour sounds like a fun concept, in a black mirror sort of way. Can't wait for Uber to try to solve its self driving cars with this.
Farm labor is a tiny fraction of the cost of retail food. It's not material and there is no dilemma.
It is extremely material to the narrow profit margins of farms, so you see a race to the bottom with importing slave labor, terrible practices, etc.
But enforcing labor standards and minimum wages wouldn't add much to the average American's food bill, even assuming farms couldn't avoid some of the hit by using less or more productive labor.
> a) most Americans don't want to do back-breaking manual labor for a living
No. Most american don't want to do back-breaking manual labor for peanuts. As maerF0x0 said, raise the wages and watch how many americans love back-breaking manual labor. It's strange how the tar oil fields in south dakota are able to attract workers from all over the country.
> and b) most Americans also want food to be cheap.
IMO there are plenty to do the work. There are not enough people who are sufficiently incentivized to do the work at the wages that farming pays. This is in comparison to other choices people have be it easier work or higher paying.
I think it’s worth pointing out. We see the same ‘we can’t find people to hire’ point being made by tech companies trying to find developers. The solution is the same for both: pay more. If you’re going to use shorthand it make it accurate. Just say ‘we can’t/don’t want to pay for the workers we need’.
> most Americans don't want to do back-breaking manual labor for a living, and b) most Americans also want food to be cheap.
Combine these and you're right. Most Americans don't want to do back-breaking labor for a pittance. Grocery checkers (union) make $18.50/hour. Bus drivers (union) make $29/hour. Journeyman (union) electricians make $50/hour.
Try paying more than $15/hour for farm labor and you'll have more applicants than you know what to do with.
> most Americans don't want to do back-breaking manual labor for a living
If it was just some cultural thing, then we'd have more than enough immigrants to correct for most Americans not wanting to do it. The problem is that there exists no cultural group that wants these jobs, native born or otherwise, at the pay and benefits offered. People switch to better jobs as soon as they find one.
> Americans also want food to be cheap
I assume everyone would prefer if everything is cheap? This is a problem that effects any business.
It's not as much about the fact that people don't want to do the work, it's about the quality of life said work allows. These cheap farm laborers need housing food schools medicine transportation goals a life.
What robots do is reduce all that ripple effect of societal load on all the other aspects of sustaining the labor force and their human needs.
Focusing on simply labor and it's price for the task at hand is stupidly myopic.
And reveals the greater impact autonomous robotic labor will really have.
Let's assume California's Central valley in 50 years time is vast swaths of robotic farms.
All other human infrastructure in these places die. Restaurants, stores, schools, housing, police fire etc fall back to early 1900s levels (or some smaller density level of the past)
That goes without saying. Anyone who thinks about it for even the least amount of time understands that you can get more labor if you pay a lot for it. "There is not enough labor to go around," means, "There is not enough labor to go around at prices such that we could competitively produce our goods and retain a desirable amount of profit," in essentially one hundred percent of cases. Your objection doesn't take anything away from the thesis that automation may be a way to become more competitive by cutting labor costs.
I actually agree that automation is a great way to become profitable. I would suggest your modified statement (not enough labor at profitable prices) is true for every extinct industry. We probably could have produced an extra $1B of hand produced typewriters this year, but no one wants to make them by hand for $1 an hour and no one wants to buy them.
Saying there is $3B of produce that could have been produced, ignores the fact that it would have been produced at a loss (after labor costs sufficient to incentivize workers) and there may not of even been a market for the over supply.
If there is an actual unmet market need the price curve will move upward meaning employers can pay workers more to fulfill the unmet need. To me this looks like a lack of a market for $3B of produce...
I don't really understand your reply. "A lack of a market for $3B of produce" is also equivalent to saying, "A lack of market for $3B of produce at the prices required to make production profitable." The claim about automation allowing the meeting of that need simply means that the speaker believes automation will reduce prices enough to make targeting this need profitable.
This 58 number has been debunked repeatedly. There is very little incentive to transfer ownership to your children while you still have your faculties. When you are too old or infirm to farm at all you sell it to your kid or they get power of attorney and take it.
The average age of the oldest member of farming families is 58.
I also wonder how they define a farmer. Is a Mexican laborer who arrives in the spring and works through harvest time a farmer? Or is it only the people who own the farm?
>When you are too old or infirm to farm at all you sell it to your kid or they get power of attorney and take it.
When my grandfather retired from farming, he simply leased the land to the guy who owned the adjacent farm. After my grandfather passed away ownership transferred to my grandmother until her death at 101. The same lease arrangement continued for a nearly thirty years. What was the age of the farmers of those farms?
That's kind of the parent poster's point - if a father and son are both working on a farm, they're both farmers, but the father is "principal farm operator"; the father's age is not representative of the age of those working there.
Kinda getting into the weeds here (a case for Roundup?) but I gently disagree. Son may qualify as the Principal Farm Operator. It depends.
For better or worse "Principal Farm Operator" is defined term (please see https://www.ers.usda.gov/topics/farm-economy/farm-household-...) and just to make things more confusing the moniker is self-applied. In a perfect world the principal would be the most important or the most active Operator in a multiple Operator farm but perfection is going to elude us w/r/t the USDA.
Edited to note the upvote for your reasonable demeanor while disagreeing. An example I strive to follow.
Nothing to do with the USDA. You share a business with your parent, they're going to keep writing their name on things until you have a very uncomfortable conversation where you point out to them that really it's your business now and they work here.
Unless there is some sort of blowup, or an ER visit, you're not going to be in any kind of hurry to see the look on your mom/dad's face when they realize you're right. Or how angry they get if they refuse to see reason.
> 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.
If you keep making teen-aged labor more and more impractical, then you're going to have problems. A lot of the really labor intensive work in farming requires almost no skill, just a whole bunch of hands and bodies. The cycles of farming naturally have highs and lows; when it's time to plant or time to reap, it's all hands on deck to get it done before time and weather runs out, and the rest of the season you need considerably less labor.
I think they still take two weeks off school in the middle of the fall in Aroostook County, Maine, so the potato farmers can get their harvest in.
Most of the schools there voted to stop it because it was stupidly poor value. Incredibly few kids were needed to actually work the fields. Potatoes have not been a labor intensive crop since the sixties.
Yeah why did Alexander even toss in that bit about average farmer age and in the next sentence point out that there's not enough generic labor to go around at the price the average 58 year old farmer is willing to pay? Well-called BS it is.
It's funny. They can't find enough labour and I, as a farmer, can't find enough ground to expand my operation to utilize the full capacity of my labour and equipment. Seems like the obvious solution is to downsize their operation and let someone else fill the void. In my experience, people interested in farming would rather own their own business than work for someone else.
If farm workers were making $100 an hour and there was billions to be earned nation wide, we'd see "Farmer" be a valid H1B Visa job. More income means more taxes and the government, businesses involved and workers (foreign ones if US ones are too lazy) are all incentivized to make this production happen.
You are correct in that experienced pickers are amazing to behold..really amazing productivity. But at $100/hour you'd soon find plenty of Americans ready to get that experienced and efficient.
At one point, most of human labor was agricultural, your ancestors surely included. Today in the US, it's now less than 2% of the population. Some of those farm hands probably will become coders. And there are plenty of other good things for them to do.
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.
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.
Strictly from a nutritional perspective, fruits and green vegetables are better than grains, beans, and tubers. But the cost of farming them is [currently] higher. It is likely that automated farms capable of growing anything would produce the highest-value produce first, and the nutritional value of cheaper foods would increase.
Your fast food burger would replace iceberg with leaf lettuce, then the pale flavorless commodity tomatoes with deep red juicy ones. Then maybe the bun will be made with some cauliflower meal in it. The price you pay for the burger will mainly be for the labor, facilities, and transportation, and the mean quality of ingredients will rise, rather than the price going down.
If you make meals at home, you will likely have more options for pre-cut foods, and more distributor-packaged, fixed-weight bags with recognizable brand names on them. Rather than one whole head of cauliflower at a time from who-knows-where, you will get a 2# bag of pre-cut fork-sized cauliflower florets in a microwave-ready steamer bag from Edible Head Farms, with full nutrition panel, a recipe, and a heartwarming story about their plucky farming robots on the back. The market already knows you are willing to spend $X on cauliflower, and captures that same amount with lower production costs and a heap of value-adds like pre-processing, brand, convenience, and maybe flavor, if there's still room. The grocery store is already operating on 1% margins, and can't afford to take a hit on giving the same amount of shelf space to cheaper cauliflower. Your lettuce will come in stacked, equal-sized leaves for sandwiches, and in bagged, fork-sized bites for salads.
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.