FarmBot: an Open Source Automated Farming Machine 133
New submitter ErnieKey writes: Farming has been stuck in a bit of a rut, when compared to other industries. Businesses across the globe have been innovating for decades, while farming has been using techniques that have been handed down from centuries ago. The FarmBot Foundation is creating a machine, similar to that of a CNC mill and/or 3D printer, which is capable of being run by sophisticated software and equipped with any tools you can imagine, including seed injectors, plows, burners, robotic arms (for harvesting), cutters, shredders, tillers, discers, watering nozzles, sensors and more. The goal? To increase food production by automating as much of it as possible.
not true at all (Score:5, Insightful)
Businesses across the globe have been innovating for decades, while farming has been using techniques that have been handed down from centuries ago.
That's not true at all. Maybe in some hobby farms, but at a large scale (which is where most food actually comes from), farming in 2014 is nothing like farming in 1914. Modern agribusiness is highly automated, which is why the proportion of the U.S. population engaged in farm work has declined from about 30% to about 2%, while food production has increased.
Start with bad assumptions (Score:4, Insightful)
Get bad results.
Agriculture has been advancing as fast as any other technology field.
Here are some recent developments: http://www.popularmechanics.co... [popularmechanics.com]
and GPS is becoming important to farm competitiveness: https://www.bae.ncsu.edu/topic... [ncsu.edu]
None of this depending on massive fixed installations, so it can be used cost effectively over thousands of acres of fields.
Re:not true at all (Score:2, Insightful)
You can actually tighten that gap up even more. Farming today is nothing like farming was in the 1980's. I left the farm in 1983 and knew every piece of equipment, top to bottom. Last year I was asked to move a tractor to a different part of the yard and I couldn't figure out how to start it, much less drive it, without being shown. We didn't have GPS guided tractors or combines. We didn't even have monitoring systems in the "brand-new, high tech" hog feeding barn. The closest thing to automation we had was hitting the feed auger "on" switch and not having to worry about shutting it off when the feeders were full.
Chemical use is way down overall. Yields are way up. And the physical effort required to do the work is much less. Have farmers moved to using a single machine to do every task? No, but doing so would be dumb. If your main tractor breaks down you can still run the combine. If your disc needs repair, you can still plow or use the tillage unit. Putting it all in one machine would mean you are down when any one thing breaks. One or two people can farm 1000's of acres where it used to require a farmer, his wife, 3 sons, 2-4 hired men and a few daughters to manage a 240 acre farm.
Of course I'm from Iowa. Ethiopia (as a stand-in for 3rd world nations) is likely a different story.
Re:not true at all (Score:4, Insightful)
And thus this is likely yet another solution without a problem.
No, I think the desire here is for it to be Open Source. Current agricultural tools are proprietary, where you pay a ton of money for the special GPS receiver, arrays of sensors, a database of moisture, fertilizer, and yield readings, continuously variable spray systems, auto-steering systems, and everything else.
The current systems are brilliant: they can reduce fertilizer usage by 60% or more by applying the proper amount of fertilizer on the areas that need it. This reduces cost, excess chemicals, and greatly reduces polluting runoff. They also measure how much water the crops need, and adjust irrigation accordingly. And in a greenhouse, they can even measure and control the light.
But all of that is not all that difficult to solve, apart from the hardware. Makers are getting pretty good at producing open source hardware for a lot of smaller things; and there is a desire to get open source solutions in the hands of the developing nations.
So I think there's a lot of problem out there that this could yet solve.