But spraying water on leaves is not only the way water naturally gets to plants, it's often the only practical way to water crops at scale. Center-pivot irrigation has dramatically increased the amount of and reliability of arable cropland, while being dramatically less sensitive to topography and preparation than flood irrigation.
The advice to "water the soil, not the leaves" is founded in manual watering regimes in very small-scale gardening, often with crops bred to optimize for unnaturally prolific growth at the cost of susceptibility to fungal diseases, but which are still immature, exposing the soil. Or with transplanted bushes and trees where you have full access to the entire mulch bed. And it's absolutely a superior method, in those instances... but it's not like it's a hard-and-fast rule.
We can extend the technique out to mid-size market gardens with modern drip-lines, at the cost of adding to the horrific amounts of plastic being constantly UV-weathered that we see in mid-size market gardens.
in a garden where plants do not have neighbours competing for space and water isn't scarce, there's no reason to water the leaves when you could just water the roots directly.
Automatically planting the seeds? I can take it or leave it.
But the really intensive work is pulling those extraordinarily hardy weeds and pest control.
The cost of this thing at nearly $3000 including taxes is just too high for effectively an automated watering system that is easily solved at HomeDepot and the GardenGrid.
That’s pretty much what happens when plants get “watered” naturally though… I’m thinking about rain of course
Watering the soil means you don't need to care about the sun.
All commercial growers in my latitude start by sprouting their plants indoors, using e.g. soil blocks. Very little is direct sown.
If you practice no-till, weeding isn't even that big of a task.
This thing definitely does not provide value.
One feature request is some form of animal and pest protection. Squirrels and cardinals eat a majority percentage of the veggies in my raised bed here in Austin. I think some bats eat the vegetables as well but that’s difficult to validate.
Looks like it does do weeding, kinda https://genesis.farm.bot/v1.7/assembly/tools
You have to correctly size and adjust every nozzle and need different sizes of pipe as you get further from the hose. It's more difficult than you would think.
A lot of the pieces fit together by friction alone and are a pain to put together. You have to use boiling water to soften the pipes in order to connect them without breaking them. It requires quite a bit of elbow grease.
EDIT: I think I must have responded to the wrong comment. Rereading my reply doesn't make sense in context...
This kind of thing seems to be happening more and more as people get more and more disconnected from the specific fundamental reasons why we do things.
This is like building and programming a home-building robot to build one house, and then just leaving it on site to redo the roof every 20 years.
I just can't imagine who would buy this. Gardening can be done very cheap and I believe that most people do it because they like spending time outside, working with their hands, being involved with the food they eat and saving a bit of money. Why would such a person want to have a robot which does away with that?
On an industrial scale this thing is of course totally useless.
Couldn't you say that about half the stuff posted here?
To me that's the "product" - an interesting engineering project targeted at people like us; a starting point for learning that can be taken further and those advancements potentially fed back into it, like all good open source projects.
As that kind of product, similar to a large chunk everything else built around RPi's and arduino's posted here (and... celebrated), it looks great to me and I don't get the hate. I was really excited to see it.
> Why would such a person want to have a robot which does away with that?
The same reason they want the many, often entirely pointless automations posted here daily, only this is not just fun, but also useful?
If this actually produces enough consumable food reliably (idk if it does, and be nice to see criticism along that angle), maybe also the cost could be justified?
IIRC it's ~$3K for the base model, seems it could pay for itself in a year or so if it could supply a years worth of fresh veges to a couple of people, depending on the local cost (which can vary a lot).
Why? Do people who don't like gardening not like gardens or fresh produce? I just don't see how you reached this conclusion.
I’ve removed a ton of weeds from between our tiles, I’ve removed exactly three from the raised bed. The watering takes like 30 seconds a few nights a week. The real trick is to plant something with a high output and no maintenance required like squash.
Why do you just ask the most banal questions instead of reading my post and responding to the argument I made?
>Do people who don't like gardening not like gardens or fresh produce? I just don't see how you reached this conclusion.
Yes, if you don't ready post you don't know how I reached that conclusion.
If you just like fresh produce go to a farmers market.
Hire an accoutant. Research where humans consume unusually lots of fresh produce, ensure it works with one bed for that produce, buy a warehouse (near where most Uber Eats users are), and set up a conveyor belt that will be expanded over time. Engineering friend would help with this. While waiting for first produce & collecting data, work on branding, buy fake accounts & hire group of third-country freelancers with Good English to do your marketing, make a media plan ("interview" plan), work on photography, and research Uber Eats, GrubHub, DoorDash matters (talk to them on phone, figure out the most cost-effective still good looking & functional packaging etc.), and reach out to popular cafes (especially popular chains) to get them use your below-profitably sold produce in exchange for attention (ghost restaurants may also be interested).
The profit comes either B2C or B2B (probably a fallback). You sell fresh, consistently high-quality local produce at low cost around the year, cheap because you have no employees and thus no salaries to pay.
Consider expanding out from your first warehouse as a franchise.
I can't really argue with most of the rest, however I can't help but laugh (and cry?) that the hustle obviously has to contain blatantly immoral tactics.
Other ag-academic research teams.
Maybe it has a niche. Millionaires who want to go on holiday but still like to grow plants. It seems more like a gimmick.
Maybe it's just a grass-is-greener thing but the more Kubernetes I have to stomach, the more interested I become in BEAM languages like Elixir.
Not like they're alternatives exactly, but I get the feeling that the BEAM way is to solve the ops problems in a way resembles how you solved your dev problems. More holistic, less ad hoc.
The BEAM is a virtual machine, I guess kinda like the JVM. So just like you can write Java or Kotlin or Clojure or a million other JVM languages, so too can you write Erlang or Elixir or Gleam (I like the look of Gleam)... And expect similar interoperability.
The BEAM has its roots in the telecom world. So while Sun Microsystems was doing the Java thing to make webservers or applets or whatever for the JVM, Ericcson was doing Erlang things to make things like long distance phone calls happen on the BEAM.
(I'm not a fan of Java, I just think it's a decent thing to compare with in this case)
The BEAM folks take a different approach to concurrency than is common elsewhere. BEAM processes are much more lightweight than OS processes, so while it might be insane to run a separate copy of your server for each user, it's less insane to run a separate BEAM process for each user.
BEAM processes interact through message passing. Of course most other processes do to, but only because the developer built it that way. With the BEAM it's built in, each process periodically checks its mailbox for a message which matches its criteria, and if there's no message, it sleeps until it is revisited by the scheduler. There's no async/await business. They're all single threaded and sequential. Instead, you achieve coordination by having many of them, some of which are in charge of starting/stopping/organizing others. (I guess they build structures out of these things called "supervision trees" but I don't precisely know what that is).
This has all grown up in a world where nodes are expected to be physically separate (like either end of a phone call) so you end up with a bit more fault tolerance than if each process is expected to be on the same machine.
In Kubernetes you've got this mountain of yaml which you craft to tell the container orchestrator how to treat your app. And then you've got your app itself which is probably not written in yaml. So I find it very jarring to switch between my dev hat and my ops hat.
And Kubernetes... That's Google's baby, right, so it makes sense that it doesn't feel the same as the underlying app. As a cloud provider, they need a rather high wall between the app and the infra. But I think it causes all kinds of problems. At least in my world, the apps are either in Python or Go, so when there's a problem someone will come along and solve it with yaml-glue to add an additional container which may or may not resemble the app which has the problem.
My brain struggles to hop from Python to Yaml to Go (and there's usually some bash in there too).
The BEAM, by contrast, expects processes to start and stop other processes. So your orchestration logic and your application logic are in the same language. You don't have to express your wishes in yaml and then navigate all of these superfluous layers (e.g. the container entrypoint script, port forwarding, in-cluster DNS, etc) to have your wish granted. That kind of communication is handled by the BEAM's inbuilt message passing system.
If I got to rebuild our stack from scratch I'd use Kubernetes as a cloud-provider-agnostic interface to get access to compute, but instead of expressing anything about the app in YAML, I'd handle all of that extra stuff (e.g. log scraping, metric aggregation, whatever hacky fix is needed today...), I'd handle it in the BEAM, right alongside my app.
People like to say "build security into the app" or "build observability into the app", but standard practice is to bolt on solutions that don't resemble the app at all. My (probably flawed) perspective is that if you scratch those itches within the BEAM, then you're going to end up with fewer superfluous layers of abstraction. Also fewer distinct niches that you now must find a specialist to fill when the old one quits. Also, you end up more in control of your app because since you more or less wrote the orchestrator, you're relying less on the cloud provider to be a reliable puppet master.
---
It's slow going, one class per semester, but I've been taking biology classes on the side. I sometimes think about making a break for it and trying to build something like farmbot but for driving a microscope, or a pipette, or maintaining the temperature/pH/etc in a bioreactor.
These are, for now, just dreams.
Sorry for the diatribe, but you did ask me to elaborate :)
I feel like it’s actual market may end up being pretty narrow, not that it isn’t it a cool idea, it is, but it just gave me that gut reaction that it falls squarely in the uncanny valley between industrial users and hobbyists.
I'm in a rural area and my first thought seeing this was "Good kit to play with for a growing teenager interested in agricultural automation" rather than "Serious industrial end use tooling".
That’s a narrow audience though..
Part of the draw is the potential for iterating on it, collecting whatever data might be collectable, adapting it to my environment or what I want to grow, etc. I've got a black thumb for vegetables anyway – that's why I grow flowers instead – so I really don't care if some or all them end up dying because the robot fails.
My hope would be that in 20 years everyone has a little bot that 24/7 runs a garden for you and provides every family with 80% of their vegetable need.
Imagine the amount of acreage we could return to nature / co2 sinking.
It makes more sense in a laboratory environment but this just seems like overkill for a regular person.
These robots will not help avoid famine, but they will help rich first world people be more cognizant of food and agriculture. Which in turn will help them make better choices with the food they buy. This can only work against calory-dense inudstrial food, which arguably is the larger problem than efficiency in large parts of the world.
But there are also a whole lot of benefits to producing food yourself: resilience, diversity of food crops, taste.
Also, people often enjoy the process, which effectively lowers the economic cost of doing it yourself.
If you factor in wastage and the expensive supply chain logistics for things that spoil quickly it's probably cheaper to grow them closer to the point of use, especially if you can keep down labor costs with automation.
Tastier and more nutritious too.
A combination of clean energy transportation/more local growing would help.
That said, I think making room for something like:
is perhaps a bit more marketable (though they missed out by not sizing it to fit next to a refrigerator).
We only uphold property rights because enough of us see a benefit in doing so. If that changes, so can we.
We keep trying to un-invent the division of labour.
Edited for unnecessary pre-coffee poor behaviour. Sorry.
Edit: Found a link to yield analysis https://farm.bot/pages/yield It appears the answer is however many Farmbots cover 549 square meters
Most people with any yard or outdoor space could get to the point of growing/raising a large portion of their own food without too much investment or work. A garden doesn't have to be manicured and ready for Instagram, it just needs to produce quality food. Meat and dairy would be the outlier lowering that % if you eat a lot of it, though chickens work well with a modest sized yard and finding a local dairy or farm for meat is still a big improvement on grocery store meat and dairy.
It has taken decades. And about 15 acres. And honestly I don't know how many hours. Tens and tens of thousands.
You can grow a small amount of your own food "without too much investment or work". To replace a substantial portion of your food with home grown takes a shit load of work and time.
A small farmbot covers 4.5 m^2 and costs $3,000, an XL covers 18 m^2 and costs $4,500.
I think 3-7 sq m makes sense as a practical range, maybe round up to 10 to have some wiggle room.
It's a lightweight gantry system for seeding, watering, and (chemical spray) weeding.
Handy for big seeding greenhouses and some leafy greens.
It's not going to significantly help with you apple, lemon, orange, fig, grapefruit and etc. trees.
It's not going to significantly help with your potatoes and other root vegetables.
It's not going to tend to and protect your lambs, goats, chickens, etc.
FWiW I do have one spry old chap born n 1935 who can do all that already, has a few decades of experience, and can feed an easy magnitude more than just four.
Fun project, needs a wee bit of work.
And, there are scaled up Farm bots for farms, not just for oversized regular garden beds.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AqqOQdDBUwQ
https://www.sydney.edu.au/engineering/news-and-events/news/2...
https://www.agricultural-robotics.com/news/connectivity-in-a...
It hurts my soul that anybody producing a table such as that is using something as vague as a "cup" in their calculations.
It hurts my soul that it's using a volumetric measurement for leafy food, like if you cut lettuce leaves into pieces, they have the same nutrients but take up way less space, so 3 cups of roughly cut lettuce leaves is different from 3 cups of finely chopped lettuce leaves, which is also different from 3 cups of uncut lettuce leaves. Just give it to us in mass or calories please (like grams or fractions of an oil barrel's mass, or fraction of a barrel of oil's calories and nutrients).
a bit steep still, plus the maintenance nightmare of keeping 31 machines working..
it's a fun farm to envisage though.
p.s. I don't think that this gantry has very harsh stiffness requirements; I guess one could scale the thing to a larger size reasonably easy -- akin to a configurable MPCNC machine.
Would be less intrusive and thus easier to work alongside a human if it was a polar system, with a single pole in the middle/corner, like a tower crane.
Simpler mechanically as well I suppose
A lot of advances since then.
Open Source Farming Robot - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27628101 - June 2021 (227 comments)
FarmBot Genesis XL - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19002022 - Jan 2019 (1 comment)
They started this project a decade ago. But robotics has advanced quite a bit in that time. Surely, today it is much more viable to have four wheeled robots watering, weeding etc at the same precision this product can. Then why build a gantry.
> Then why build a gantry.
Part of at scale agriculture is growing seedlings (fruit trees, etc), conducting ANOVA trials (small plots to test many seed varieties).
There's a good chunk of "big agriculture" taking place in warehouse sized greenhouses with roller topped tables, big sliding trays, tightly packed young plants, overhead gantries for cameras | sprays | lifting hooks, etc.
This is a lightweight garden bed gantry .. but there is a place for big gantries in agriculture.
Yeah I remember seeing this years ago, and feeling like it was the future. Now it barely feels like a robot.
Having a roomba like (yes, obviously different to the standard look of a robot vacuum cleaner; but a small autonomous robot; eg a watering can on tank treads, or a bb8 rolling ball) bot with a docking station out of the weather seems enormously more sustainable and scalable.
This system is electricity-based, whereas traditional agriculture is fuel-intensive.
Even fertilizer production is fuel-intensive, and this system avoids using any.
Multiply by the time scale you want the system to last, and you get your emissions savings.
Steel contents is a one-off emissions investment.
Now if you want to compare this system to an other electricity-based, renewable energy only, agriculture, say with electric trucks etc, that'd be interesting.
People don't want poisoned food from pesticides etc... primarly.
Hydro gives you a significant amount of control. Exact amount and wavelength of light, exact timing and amount of nutrients, exact temperature, humidity, co2, wind, etc. All with significantly higher costs. There's a reason that those "hydroponics in a skyscraper" basically grow lettuce, because it's the same growing profile as weed, which is a high profit crop.
Really the only thing I would trust and want to automate is watering when I'm away, and that can be done much cheaper. The most burdensome part right now in my greenhouse is actually keeping the large plants in check, prevent them from growing too much by taking away right leaves/branches. The robot probably wouldn't do too much to help with that. Weeds are a problem outside, but that's way too large of an area to cover with this kind of robots.
Would it be a terrible idea to destroy weeds with laser shots? Or crops don't provide enough margin for such advance tech?
For an optimized garden to feed a family, you need 549 square meters[0], which is a circle with a diameter of 26.4 meters (86.7 ft). That's all the vegetables for your entire family, mostly automated.
That's a future I would love to see, even though it's way less efficient than industrial farming.
This thing only drills the seeds and waters the plants.
As a farmer, this looks like it would be massively expensive per acre and massively wasteful of environmental resources. I currently farm 5,000 acres including 400 irrigated acres for $300,000 per year. I grow enough food to feed thousands of people a year.
You would need 200 of these systems to farm one acre. I could not find a list price on the website, but based on my knowledge of CNC machine pricing, each machine probably costs in the neighborhood of $10,000. So this machine would cost $2,000,000 per acre to farm. Insanity.
Government bureaucrats want you to starve to death, so I am sure money will go to this and be taken from ordinary farmers.
The system also appears to be an environmental disaster... Enormous amounts of heavily machined aluminum, stainless steel, and plastic to do tiny bits of work already done far more efficiently in other ways.
This thing looks like an out-of-touch nerd hobby project, not a real tool one would use in the real world of farming.
The "Commercial Production" link goes to a page mostly consisting of... art projects. https://farm.bot/pages/research
I live in a german town at the edge of a large city, the grocery stores are evenly distributed among this town, max 15 minutes by foot or 5 by bike. I love my bike and use it all the time. On a nice day, there will be 20 bikes and 60 cars at the store. On a rainy day there will be 2 bikes and 80 cars at the store.
"Only americans take the car to the store" is a myth that you shouldn't spread.
I think you're misinterpreting the criticisms. It's not "this particular product is a bad implementation compared to other one-size-fits-all tech-solutionism products", but rather "a one-size-fits-all tech-solutionism approach to this problem space doesn't make any sense"
This is a very typical tech-industry "everything looks like a nail" type issue: going into an area you don't understand with a solution to problems that don't exist.
A small subset of problems here:
1. A robot should automate things you do often/regularly - developing complex machinery do to one-off seasonal steps steps like seeding & pulling is immensely wasteful - that's going to raise the cost of the product a lot just in order to automate tasks you rarely do.
2. It doesn't do those tasks well: the pulling examples are contrived & the failure rates look high.
3. The watering mechanism is developed to suit the robot design rather than designing the robot around optimal watering strategies - this completely ignores generations of optimising watering approaches. The watering mechanism is actively harmful to many crops.
4. Very unadaptable to different plants' needs.
TL;DR: There is no best of class product in this area because only someone who doesn't understand the problem space would try to develop a product to do this.
If you have resources I can read or learn from about all this, please share them. You've clearly got wisdom in this space!
Modular hydroponic pods have always been a better idea and if someone handed me 100 million I'd use it to develop standardised farming skyscrapers/towers to hydroponically grow food in towns/local communities with minimal water, electricity usage and human intervention.
It's so crazy that we have the tech to do this sort of thing now, but don't. We could do so much if things weren't so profit focussed and the wealthy weren't able to skim most of it off to dump into tax havens.
Land use for vegetable farming is really not an issue. Just build your hydroponics setup on the ground, you'll cut costs by an order of magnitude.
If you actually want to reduce land use, get people to eat less meat. The crops that use the most land by far are corn and soy, and most of those ends up just being fed to livestock.
I am a software engineer, I also runs a small family farm. I have 3d printers and laser cutters and lots of aluminum extrusion and raspberry pis... but I keep those things indoors, away from the dirt, sun, and rain. I can't imagine a real farmer using a contraption like this. Tools have to be reliable to last. I have to replace my solid steel shovels every few years because they wear out, how is this supposed to work?
If they have a solid planning software that accounts for crop rotation, companion planting, etc. then that's already a much better value proposition.
I don't really see what problem it solves. Growing in a raised bed with drip irrigation looks a lot less hassle than setting up a giant cnc watering machine. If you mulch once a year you don't need to add nutrients to a no dog bed at all.
I wonder if he asked farmers about their problems before creating this project.
Think there is more potential industrial scale. i.e. run the arm over half a mile rather than a couple of feet
That's like saying you watched The Bachelor and now have Opinions about marriage.
It’s a very cool project.
I mean, with that land size, it can be easily done by a human in a few minutes? And I'm guessing most people who grow crops at that size do it for a hobby, which means they don't mind doing the work?
Various APIs still exist and are callable. https://github.com/Growstuff/growstuff/blob/e8bc72dc900e2593...
Remove the tires from two old bicycles to run them on rails, build a gantry between them mounted to seatposts and handlebars. Probably drive it with chains on winches for robustness.
Use movable wall elements so that the pick and place machine can set up both shade and increased illumination. Maybe have portable rain protection too. Maybe deploy close-up UV and IR lamps.
I'd like to know the max size that a single gantry can serve, see how high its utilization can be.
My guess is that it all can pay off once it's big enough. I just don't know where that point is. 100ft long? 200ft? 300? And 20ft wide?
There is a lot of discussion in a lot of threads about the design of the robot to water "from the top" by spraying the leaves instead of watering directly on the roots, and whether that's a good or bad thing, and whether the designers of the robot thought about it.
Here's the problem with watering the leaves: yes, plants ultimately get their water from rain. But under normal conditions, the rain comes in sporadically in large quantities -- not every day -- and soaks into the soil, which is where the plants actually pick it up. Flood irrigation does largely the same thing. Spray irrigation doesn't attempt to water the soil that deeply, it tends to give the plants just what they need for the next 24-48 hours, and that encourages wilt and fungal infections.
Also, domesticated vegetable crops are far more susceptible to wilt and fungal infections than natives, and than grain crops, which are at the end of the day grasses. So you can in the same garden have perfectly healthy corn but all of your melons and squash have such bad fungal infections that the leaves are literally white. You can criticize the selection of vegetables for yield and not hardiness, but the fact is this is where we are with vegetable crops.
This is an interesting project, but IMHO it isn't practical, and there isn't any way to make it practical. The X-Y gantry design, for gardening, has a number of intractable problems, watering from the top being just one of them. Another is that the design doesn't scale. You can't make this thing handle a 25 by 100 foot grade bed, which is the size you'd need to even start making a serious dent in the nutritional needs of one person. It can't really weed, and there's no way to modify the design to make it weed effectively; you'd have to add degrees of freedom to the gantry so that it could reach down to soil level and grasp roots (or, alternatively, to very selectively apply an herbicide). Garden crops grow to dramatically different heights; micro greens will be a few inches about the soil, zucchini will be three feet high, tomatoes can be 4-5 feet, and corn depending on cultivar can be as much as 9 feet tall.
And finally, watering and weeding, if you know what you're doing are actually the easiest parts of the problem. Preparing the bed so you don't have to weed is a lot more work. To do that, you plant your crops and then apply large amounts of mulch. If you've never prepared beds, shoveled dirty barn straw for mulch or tried to wrangle weed barrier cloth on a hot, humid day, you haven't lived, my friend. That's the physically hard part. THe mentally hard part is diagnosing problems in your crops before they become problems. Noticing that those shiny weird insects flying around are squash vine borer. Looking at the underside of leaves and seeing squash beetle eggs or going around your tomatoes with a blacklight looking for cutworms.
If you want to apply robotics to gardens, you either need a low mobile base, or you need to carefully lay out rows with fixed spacing, and have a high mobile base that can clear the height of the crops, and can take a variety of attachments, e.g. tillers to handle weed control. Which means you need think about monocropping. Which starts to look like the mid 20th century basic garden tractor, the International Harvester Farmall Cub, just with maybe an electric power plant and an autonomy appliqué kit. THis makes sense because the mid 20th century was the last time people in North America practiced gardening as a survival mechanism, and the Farmall Cub was the result of 50 years of practical design by people who knew how to garden when it counted.
"Aimed at prosumers...uh...more nerdsumers"
"Oh I just saw the price, $4000 to avoid an hours work"
