I have a garden. It uses a drip line that's buried in the ground. It's $10 worth of tubing from Lowes with a few holes where plants go. It's on a $15 timer that waters automatically once a day. I do, however, have to take a few minutes to put seeds in the ground.
That said, I would be throwing money at the monitor right now if this thing was smart enough to identify weeds and remove them. (Maybe that's in the plans? They have a part for weeding shown.)
But I love all these new ideas around farming. The most interesting is hydroponics considering how much more resourceful it is with water (sometimes using 90% less water per equal amount of harvest).
Edit: for those asking, all I used was half inch black tubing (the kind they use for automated sprinkler systems), drilled small holes every 12 inches, buried it, hooked it up to a spigot with a timer, and that's it.
If I don't dust tomatoes or cover broccoli/etc I will lose almost everything.
Something that skimmed/raked the surface lightly at regular intervals between rows to frustrate slugs and disrupt weeds would probably help me, but not sure how it could reliably account for varying plant types, sagging leaves, wayward tomato vines, etc.
The energy costs for indoor climate / light regulation can quickly become outrageous compared to super market veggie prices. Therefore, I think this type of tech is for rare exotic plant, maybe historical even.
Imagine buying a piece of tech for growing historical coffee plants in your basement where you set the climate control to Kenia or Hawaii (buy the soil addon?) and which guarantees (as in `likely it will yield') you 2kg of your own personal coffee harvest per plant. This stuff has urban hipster $$$ written all over it.
Also, I seem to have a pest problem as well, I think rabbits, as all the leaves on my bean stalks have seemingly been chewed off.
Most timers are either battery-operated, or have to be wound once a day. To me, that sucks, and I don't want to have to route power to the garden system. With the slow drippers, I can leave this for weeks without issue.
Weeding is entirely unnecessary and often does more harm than good. Plant a cover crop and leave it be. Gardening can already be as simple as 3 tasks: plant, harvest, spread compost. It is just that people are very set in their ways and don't ever think to explore better ways of doing things.
Because I read about it (I asume you mean permaculture), tried it out - and dismissed most of it.
Permaculture is indeed great as a concept, but is in no way as easy as people tell you it is. Most of what people tell you about is close to scam (even if it is wishfull thinking)
Plus its scalable - just extend the raised bed if you have space and it allows manual intervention because it can be moved out of the way easily.
For watering yes I agree its complete overkill.
https://www.amazon.com/gp/aw/d/B00E1HXYQA/ref=mp_s_a_1_1?qid...
https://www.amazon.com/gp/aw/d/B00K0TKJCU/ref=mp_s_a_1_2?qid...
https://www.amazon.com/gp/aw/d/B006LYHG42/ref=mp_s_a_1_1?qid...
The key thing here is the possibility to monitor each individual plant and react to changes in its development or environment (in contrast to modern industrial agriculture, were things are done with huge monster tractors).
I'm sure it can/will be improved to serve more functions - like removing weeds and collecting pests without the need for herbicides or pesticides and so on.
Eventually, these will all become software problems which the global programmer community will be more than glad to tackle.
The most important thing about FarmBot and similar tech, though, is the potential to de-centralize agriculture again and make small-scale, local agriculture possible, without needing to employ human labor. Not only would this create a new market for high-tech agricultural tools and software and make growing your own food easy (even in the city !), it is a very welcome solution to the many environmental problems that large-scale industrial agriculture generates today.
So I'm very optimistic and happy about this tech and I wish you guys all the luck.
It's called precision farming, and it's done today, with "huge monster tractors".
Seriously folks, modern agriculture is an advanced multibillion dollar business which left the 19th century 200 years ago.
Can't see much precision there.
With precision you could do small fields with trees and bushes (with fruits) in between and need no pesticides ... all in all, a farm could then be also a nice place just to walk around and enjoy nature. Like some bio-farms are allready today, the problem is just, that the human labour needed to do it is huge - with robots it might be possible to go all bio - and still feed everyone!
http://www.amazon.com/Plastic-600ft-Embossed-Growerss-Soluti...
Course it would help if the garden was on a slight incline with holes punched in the frame boards on one end to deal with draining off the occasional two inch rain.
'In contrast to modern agriculture, where things are done with huge monster tractors' - You might be interested in what http://www.bluerivert.com/ are doing. They are essentially attending to every plant individually in smaller cropping areas.
Once you actually get to a large area, I.e 1000ha fields, it doesn't make sense to attend to every plant individually throughout the season. We do however have technology to plant each seed down to mm precision, and apply nutrients based on zones created within fields.
Also, does it make sense to duplicate all the infrastructure required for one of these, over every single paddock on a farm, when we could have a single, essentially autonomous, machine crop and manage the entire area itself?
not really. You'd run at least one machine per planting line, so you'd be covering a lot of area at once. Plus, these could operate 24 hours a day, which is a real help along side the human workers.
This is how I see it. http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2014/07/140717-japan...
Trying not to be overly cynical here, but how is this worth the cost? It appears that it simply plants, waters, and detects/removes weeds. In a 1,250sq.ft. garden, we invest less than 2 hours per week on these tasks.
How would this be scalable? How do you spell scalable?
How would this justify its cost?
How does it withstand being outside all year, year round?
How does it not just destroy your crops when they grow tall?
How could this possibly improve on current farming methods (outside of removing chemical weed-killers maybe)?
I understand it's in its infancy, but I'm genuinely having a hard time with this.
Extend the x and y axis?
> How would this justify its cost?
Presumably by saving costs elsewhere? Labor, chemical inputs. Not saying it's there yet though, but why should it be?
> How does it withstand being outside all year, year round?
A cursory glance at the specs indicates that they've considered waterproofing at least. I imagine "the elements" will prove even more challenging than expected, but it's not like this wasn't considered.
> How does it not just destroy your crops when they grow tall?
The y axis is up pretty tall, and the manipulator is pretty narrow to get down in between plants. Clearly it is not advisable to grow crops that are taller than will fit in the machine.
> How could this possibly improve on current farming methods
Automation? We don't expect Burger King robots to improve on culinary techniques. I feel this is mostly interesting for repeatable research uses, but as basic manual labor savings it's interesting as well.
(I am in no way affiliated with this project... just seems easy to see the potential, and odd to treat a prototype as if it needs to make a business case right out of the gate)
I'm a 4th generation farmer in my spare time. The variables required in agriculture are just too many for something like this, is my opinion. I get it, farming isn't immune from technology, but this just seems like over-engineering a problem.
However, I suspect a device like this will scale well cost wise with longer rails, thus larger versions working in a elongated greenhouse would probably significant efficiency. Additionally, you will need a device like this if you want to do vertical hydroponic farming, as the efficiency of people drops precipitously as soon as they can no longer easily reach the plants they're working with.
Now, vertical hydroponics, that's one I hadn't considered. That may be a good point. I lack any experience with those systems, though, so I hesitate to comment.
You would spend more machine/human time scanning and driving, more money in fuel, and more energy in general than if you were to just plant, spray, and irrigate.
I don't know that I've been this excited about a piece of machinery before. This product has the potential to completely change the way we obtain and consume food. I understand it's very niche at the moment. And the price tag will likely be huge for the first run. But this is a great first step and I'll try to pre-order a kit.
That's seems like an unbelievably large statement to make. Can you explain what you mean by all this excitement?
If the price point gets low enough, if construction is easy enough, and if enough people latch onto the movement this could be a game changer. Even if 10% of a family's food comes from Farmbot, that's 10% of food that doesn't need to be shipped across country for their consumption.
This is essentially a 3D printer for food.
It's capable of at best making the production of a few weeks worth of food somewhat easier. It's cool and all, but this particular 'bot is far from revolutionary.
I own a small farm myself. If the price point were low enough, I could easily set up acres of this technology and map out my crops using my computer. It could keep track of when crops needed to be harvested, when I needed to weed, how much I need to plant of one thing for a season. And then eventually could do those things for me.
How? It is completely useless for farming, which is where over 99% of our food comes from. So even if it completely changed gardening, it would have almost no impact at all on the way we obtain and consume food. And all it does is plant seeds, that doesn't change gardening at all.
Make no mistake, this is where agriculture is heading and the people behind this are obviously clever and innovative. I just don't think this is a very compelling product (outside of the "A robot planted my veges" kudos)......yet.
Making dinner in the kitchen? Hit "Salad" on the app and have your farmbot harvest the ingredients for a 300g garden salad....
Lots of cool applications and I got prepared for "buying mode" when I watched the video. But three deep breaths reminded me that this wasn't going to return the value to my life that it had initially cost...yet
(And yes, that is our entry on Hackaday!)
But, and don't Vote me down, considering current events, how long until we see a "Weedbot"?
However, probably a better solution for something like weed would be this: http://openag.media.mit.edu/
TBH if someone would just build me a robot that has 20 km range, can deal with crawling up hills and can identify coloured shapes and "pick" them (pneumatic suction would probably do it), We could put a few tens of thousand blueberry/coffee pickers out of business.
FarmBot will not put anyone out of business. The Japanese Aeroponic farms have a better chance of being the future of production.
PS I downvoted you for the negativity.
I'm asking b/c I'm curious about business models that build heavily on open source.
Last time this was posted on Hacker News three years ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6451350
