It sill looks like the software is written by people who don't know how to care for plants. You don't spray water on leaves as shown in the video; you'll just end up with fungus infestation. You water the soil and nourish the microorganisms that facilitate nutrient absorption in roots. But, I don't see any reason the technology can't be adapted to do the right thing.
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.
The best way to water a garden is drip irrigation. You do have to manually lay the tubing and then in the fall roll it up. But there are farmers doing it in large fields so a small garden should be possible. Once everything is hooked up it can be pretty well automated. Home Depot now in some stores has drip irrigation supplies.
A few years ago I saw on a tropical island some open ended poly tunnels growing salads and things that, in my own open air garden, are very heavily predated. They had a simple but very effective solution: they ran misters for a few minutes every hour. This made an environment that the plants thrived and insects left alone. And they lost very little water (on an island where fresh water was conserved generally) even though the tunnels were not closed at the ends. Fungus wasn’t mentioned when I asked about them. It was very simple tech level but I was struck by the smarts and knowledge behind it.
Reminds me of when I got into electric skateboarding only to realise late in the game every around me had never had a skateboard when they were younger, they were all engineers. This was back in the day when it was only affordable to make your own. Not disrespecting anyone I just found it funny and surprising.
You seriously think they haven't thought of that? I have no association with this project but it has been going for many years, has sold to many customers and institutions and the pictures certainly look like many healthy plants. Probably there is a cost/benefit trade-off to engineering watering at the soil level. Perhaps leaves would get damaged by the hardware.
I had the same thoughts when watching this. Cucumbers either require twine, in which case they grow quite tall), or each plant will take up half that raised bed. Tomatoes are not planted directly from a seed, you first need to grow seedlings, a very laborious process that’s hard to automate. Tomatoes can also get quite tall, with some plants exceeding 5 feet. You don’t need such elaborate setups for irrigation either - this is trivially solved with drip irrigation stuff available at any Home Depot. And so on and so forth. I grew up on a farm and will probably retire on a farm. The most labor intensive part was weeding and pest control. If you want to do something real, automate that, without making any unwarranted assumptions on how the various crops are planted.
I think the idea is that using the CNC style design for everything makes it a simpler system? Watering from the soil may be better, but harder to automate to such an extreme? Automating the setup of irrigation lines with a CNC head seems like a pretty cool project though.
Shove some Bravo once in a while in the solution and your fungus worry is gone. If you're going with a chemical solution with fertilizer, etc, you might as well use other chemicals like fungicides and pesticides.
There's a thing called foliar spraying, where you do spray water and nutrients on the leaves. You don't do it in the sunshine though because the water droplets will magnify the light and burn the leaves.
This is a Juicero of farming. The whole setup is easily replaced with a raised garden bed and a drip hose. Hearing about this a few years back, I was hoping it would at least do some weed control, but no.
It is indeed a juicero of farming. It costs 4 grand for something that can handle a single garden bed. This is not suitable for even small commerical growers, they'd need hundreds of these things.
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.
> The rotary tool features a 24 volt DC motor, interchangeable implements, and an adjustable motor angle allowing FarmBot to perform light duty weed whacking, soil surface milling, and drilling operations.
Drip irrigation is a PIA to setup in my experience. This looks a lot easier.
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...
It’s a bit like a pick-n-place and conformal coat setup for circuit boards except gardening has none of the requirements for precision of circuit boards.
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 agree. What they should have done is make the raised bed thinner and build a wheeled rover for planting. In exchange for having smaller beds, you can now let the rover service dozens of beds. The irrigation system should be integrated directly into the beds and the rover merely tries to check the soil moisture to conserve water and prevent mold.
Seems an interesting engineering project, but like a terrible product. Who is the customer? If you like gardening, why would you pay thousands of dollars so that you don't need to do it? If you don't like gardening, you obviously wouldn't be interested in having a robot do it for you.
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.
It took steam engines 100 years to reliably outperform horses. Maybe in 100 years the situation will be different. Until then, I might buy one because I want to tinker with it. After all, it's 100 years of tinkering that got us there with steam engines.
> Seems an interesting engineering project, but like a terrible product.
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).
You are wrong. Industrually one can have one of these to work for perhaps 50 beds that go in a conveyor belt or a single large belt conveyor. One would then need only the small version.
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.
Maybe you like gardening but also want to vacation during the summer. The overhead of having to water every day can be a chain for doing other things you love.
This checks out with someone I know who grows their own plants, and me, who doesn't spend time growing plants. We're both not interested in the product.
Maybe it has a niche. Millionaires who want to go on holiday but still like to grow plants. It seems more like a gimmick.
We could do with a lot less grass lawns and a lot more gardens. Even just growing flowers adds tremendously to the local ecosystem of insects, while adding beauty to your life. If this gets more people thinking about gardening, I'm all for it!
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.
It’s using the Nerves project! I’m bias since I work directly with the Nerves Foundation a lot these days but it’s such a wonderful development experience to get Linux based embedded stuff up and running :)
This worries me from a positioning standpoint. I imagine a large amount of people with a garden bed, even a large one, garden because they like it, this would get in the way of that. The device doesn’t appear like it would scale well to anything large enough, and even then it would compete with much more sophisticated solutions that do this.
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.
It makes more sense targeted towards "people that like robots" rather than "people that want to grow their own food".
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".
I posted elsewhere on this story about this, but I have a flower garden I like to grow and fiddle with each year, and I'd still be interested in doing something like this Farm Bot too. I don't think I'd purchase one, I'm more interested in building one from scratch (so I appreciate that it's open source), but just seeing what kind of automated vegetable operation I can set up with a raspberry pi, a few servos and some moisture/sunlight sensors has been a project I've wanted to do for a couple summers.
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.
Is this not the best way to start on that path, an open source project yhat shares all the info so others can join branch and improve. Yiu cannot climb the mountastarting at the top !
For a while I was considering something similar, where instead a couple of windows at a home would be miniature greenhouses/aquariums with openings arranged so that if the interior access was latched it would be impossible to gain access from the outside, but it would be possible to fill up consumables and drop off additional items (think tilapia for a scheduled dinner, but the usual protein product would be shrimp).
That said, I think making room for something like:
I would love to grow some of my own food, the way I did when I was a kid. But alas, I will never be able to afford a garden, and the soil here is heavily contaminated with PFAS, heavy metals, and goodness knows what else.
Every family having to have a robot instead of a handful of tractors for every ten thousand families or so. And that is likely a less optimal use of acreage. I think what you might actually be advocating for is “people should convert more residential land into gardens” which is always fun. I love my garden as a hobby.
We keep trying to un-invent the division of labour.
Edited for unnecessary pre-coffee poor behaviour. Sorry.
You'd be better off doing the farming the old fashioned way if the goal is to feed a family. Farming is a terrible business to be in today, but that's mainly due to the abysmal profit margins. When your goal is to feed your family rather than turn a profit, that stops mattering.
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.
To summarize the analysis: you would need 100-200 square meters of farmbotting to get 2000 daily calories from farmbots alone. If you're just trying to get your daily recommended servings of veggies, you instead target volume of veggies, because that's how the recommendations work, and it's a much smaller quantity. It ends up being 3-7 square meters per person for that.
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.
In all seriousness, from a real life feeding people farming perspective, it's well short of sufficient unto itself.
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.
It would take 31 of their largest model, the Genesis XL to cover that area as each robot covers 18 square meters. So for the low low cost of 31 × $4,295 = $133,145 you could buy enough farm bots to feed yourself. Then you'd just have to worry about the cost of repairs, land, processing, and harvesting.
At about $110k for 8000 daily calories, you might as well just wait for android robots to be capable of farming and then buy one from a company like Figure, though you'd then have to worry about it getting hacked and trying to knife you in your sleep.
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.
I've always wondered why this robot uses a gantry system.
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.
I toyed with a cable-bot (like what is used for top-down shots at sporting events) for gardening. Needs three towers and probably difficult to make sturdy enough for watering but way cheaper at large scales than anything rigid and relatively more portable.
The idea of introducing robotics to farming is very attractive. It doesn't seem like this is a scalable solution for farming, but a sufficient one for gardening.
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.
Your points are largely valid and there are many examples of mobile robust at scale autonomous robot vehicles for "big farms" today, it's still a growing market domain with much innovation.
> 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.
The cheapest option is to buy $40 worth of hosing, then lay hose around the plants with small holes in it so that water drips out onto the ground at a constant rate.
How many harvests would it take to offset the emissions that go into producing a kit? My guess is that this uses more steel per sapling than almost any other method of tending to a vegetable
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.
I'm surprised no one has mentioned hydroponics. For $2800 you can build a very nice, large, and mostly automated hydroponics setup. It would have higher yields, no weeding, minimal pests if indoors, better nutrient control, a smaller footprint, more reliability, and less complexity.
Seems like a cool project, but not something I would pay thousands of dollars for as a hobbyist gardener. By the looks of it, might work for smaller plants, but not much use in growing larger varieties of tomato or cucumber for example.
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 be interesting if they could get it to work in a circular pattern with multiple layers, where one FarmBot traverses each ring of the garden's "onion".
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.
That seems like an efficient approach for a commercial scale version. The form would essentially mirror center-pivot irrigation [1] so you can keep a fixed point for delivering energy, water, fertiliser etc and cover larger circular patch with a series of smaller linear robots. Each span could also be modular to adapt to different sizes as suitable for the landscape.
Everyone should absolutely do a small garden in their yard instead of grass or other wasteful landscaping.
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.
My first thought was exactly this. How reliable can it be to run autonomously and how long before parts start breaking down.
On the other hand this is cheaper than apple vision pro.
ROI shouldn't be calculated based on the costs of transportation, because no one goes to the store to buy just vegetables (and not everyone drives to the store, it's a purely suburban american thing). Not to mention 'CO2 costs' that you don't pay at all
> and not everyone drives to the store, it's a purely suburban american thing
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.
A lot of people are criticizing this product. Does anyone know what "best in class" small-scale farming or gardening projects are? Very curious! Also any community recommendations would be great.
> Does anyone know what "best in class" small-scale farming or gardening projects are?
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.
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.
> develop standardised farming skyscrapers/towers to hydroponically grow food in
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.
this is very wastefull and stupid, you can buy a auto prinkler with a timer for 100 euros, and seeding can be done by hand in the same time the bot does it.
I can't help but feel like this is a satirical send up of "tech bros solve farming," except it's not satire.
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?
I'm both as well. Imagine all that maintenance of keeping a hobby electronics project outside, all just to remove maybe 5% of the effort of growing vegetables. You can't even grow anything tall with it.
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 found it to be incredibly annoying, with overly dramatic music and narration, not to mention nonsensical claims. This kind of thing immediately turns me off to any product.
I don't want to be accused of pedantry...but isn't this a gardening robot? I don't see how it scales to fields.
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.
If it was just a automated irrigation system and a camera with some detection for seeing if the plants look oka and can send a ping if a human needs to intervene. I remember hearing about this year's ago, and find it really cool, but it probably does to little, or is to expensive to be able to justify.
I think it's like, "I want to help in an industry I don't know anything about". This is not scalable. I understand that this person would like to help, but this is not the help that Farmers and needed.
I wonder if he asked farmers about their problems before creating this project.
The main criticism against this seems to be it doesn't kill weeds. But it's an open system, with standardised, autonomously selectable attachments. Can someone come up with an attachment or two for it that could control weeds?
My garden bed has a slug problem. How can FarmBot help me with this? Is there a tool, like a grabber, that automatically catches intruders and carries them away?
I would love to contribute to something like this for cattle ranching. Track your herd with a mapping app, analyze the cows' vital signs, estimate how much land you need for grazing, etc.
The amount of work required in getting this up and running and maintaining it could never pay for itself. The capital cost alone would take decades to pay back of ever.
This is very cool and I immediately wanted one. Hobby gardening is not exactly cost effective but I can think of cheaper ways to outsource growing vegetables...
Having watched Clarkson's Farm, I can't help but feel that farming is extremely antiquated. The sensitivity to unexpected weather and the low profit margins despite the high investments of time and money seem terrible. I can't see us as an advanced species doing this in 100 years, except for specialty experiences.
Modern farming is anything but antiquated. A lot of science goes into it, and it's the most efficient use of national resources to produce food. The downsides you mentioned is purely the fault of the market, not farming itself.
There's a reason hundreds of miles of abandoned stone walls are hidden inside forests all throughout the Northeast US - people deforested everything and tried to farm, but abandoned it all until nature reclaimed it again. It's tough.
Lol @ most of you who think this is real. It's a troll post w Sora or something. Turn your fucking brain on. By the time you fuck around with that, you could have done the garden by hand 20 times.
Looking at the pricing and the area the robot covers, isn't it too expensive?
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?
My retirement project is going to be this but at larger scale.
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.
I used to love things like this, now I realise that actually caring for living things is quite nice and life affirming, and spending yet more time behind a screen really is not. 40 hours+ per week obligate online-time plus recreation is not a great way to live life. Our working lives are too long and our hours per week are too many. The sooner we learn to touch grass regularly, the better. Robots are evidently not the way to do this.
This project sucks ass - I know some research groups (non-engineering, they were more ag programs) who purchased it from them for a few thousand dollars and pretty much shelved it after a few months - unreliable hardware, buggy software, minimal support - all in all it would probably have been much more easier if we hired a bunch of engineering undergrads to build something like this from scratch.
Some comments were deferred for faster rendering.
getpost|1 year ago
mapt|1 year ago
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.
rmason|1 year ago
https://www.dripworks.com/drip-irrigation
wood_spirit|1 year ago
SoftTalker|1 year ago
ionwake|1 year ago
loftsy|1 year ago
ein0p|1 year ago
6gvONxR4sf7o|1 year ago
semicolon_storm|1 year ago
m00x|1 year ago
znpy|1 year ago
That’s pretty much what happens when plants get “watered” naturally though… I’m thinking about rain of course
jcims|1 year ago
enraged_camel|1 year ago
alisson|1 year ago
thatcat|1 year ago
jejeyyy77|1 year ago
torlok|1 year ago
Maxion|1 year ago
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.
schleck8|1 year ago
RobotToaster|1 year ago
Looks like it does do weeding, kinda https://genesis.farm.bot/v1.7/assembly/tools
redman25|1 year ago
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...
svnt|1 year ago
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.
imtringued|1 year ago
constantcrying|1 year ago
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.
__MatrixMan__|1 year ago
robxorb|1 year ago
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).
naasking|1 year ago
Why? Do people who don't like gardening not like gardens or fresh produce? I just don't see how you reached this conclusion.
Xen9|1 year ago
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.
redman25|1 year ago
everybodyknows|1 year ago
Other ag-academic research teams.
SpaghettiX|1 year ago
Maybe it has a niche. Millionaires who want to go on holiday but still like to grow plants. It seems more like a gimmick.
j_m_b|1 year ago
__MatrixMan__|1 year ago
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.
doawoo|1 year ago
e1gen-v|1 year ago
rurban|1 year ago
greenie_beans|1 year ago
antoniojtorres|1 year ago
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.
defrost|1 year ago
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".
nozzlegear|1 year ago
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.
Maxion|1 year ago
snickmy|1 year ago
apexalpha|1 year ago
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.
quijoteuniv|1 year ago
James_K|1 year ago
lukas099|1 year ago
WillAdams|1 year ago
That said, I think making room for something like:
https://ogardengroup.com/
is perhaps a bit more marketable (though they missed out by not sizing it to fit next to a refrigerator).
asdf6969|1 year ago
elric|1 year ago
riiii|1 year ago
Waterluvian|1 year ago
We keep trying to un-invent the division of labour.
Edited for unnecessary pre-coffee poor behaviour. Sorry.
myprotegeai|1 year ago
Edit: Found a link to yield analysis https://farm.bot/pages/yield It appears the answer is however many Farmbots cover 549 square meters
_heimdall|1 year ago
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.
jamilton|1 year ago
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.
defrost|1 year ago
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...
James_K|1 year ago
j_timberlake|1 year ago
NilMostChill|1 year ago
It hurts my soul that anybody producing a table such as that is using something as vague as a "cup" in their calculations.
serf|1 year ago
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.
ragebol|1 year ago
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
daemonologist|1 year ago
pedrodelfino|1 year ago
A lot of advances since then.
dang|1 year ago
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)
abdullahkhalids|1 year ago
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.
defrost|1 year ago
> 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.
__MatrixMan__|1 year ago
James_K|1 year ago
maxglute|1 year ago
Yeah I remember seeing this years ago, and feeling like it was the future. Now it barely feels like a robot.
taneq|1 year ago
willguest|1 year ago
henearkr|1 year ago
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.
NotGMan|1 year ago
People don't want poisoned food from pesticides etc... primarly.
f0e4c2f7|1 year ago
driverdan|1 year ago
pcarolan|1 year ago
jejeyyy77|1 year ago
weweweoo|1 year ago
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.
john_minsk|1 year ago
Would it be a terrible idea to destroy weeds with laser shots? Or crops don't provide enough margin for such advance tech?
1. https://www.stingray.no/delousing-with-laser/?lang=en
gohai|1 year ago
owenpalmer|1 year ago
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.
[0] https://farm.bot/pages/yield
_kb|1 year ago
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Center-pivot_irrigation
torlok|1 year ago
This thing only drills the seeds and waters the plants.
silexia|1 year ago
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.
CapstanRoller|1 year ago
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
simpaticoder|1 year ago
unknown|1 year ago
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0cf8612b2e1e|1 year ago
kyriakos|1 year ago
klntsky|1 year ago
luckylion|1 year ago
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.
cl42|1 year ago
lucideer|1 year ago
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.
fennecfoxy|1 year ago
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.
pbmonster|1 year ago
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.
aussieguy1234|1 year ago
theo1996|1 year ago
unknown|1 year ago
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taylorfinley|1 year ago
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?
torlok|1 year ago
If they have a solid planning software that accounts for crop rotation, companion planting, etc. then that's already a much better value proposition.
garbagewoman|1 year ago
nmeofthestate|1 year ago
elric|1 year ago
jimnotgym|1 year ago
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.
gunalx|1 year ago
Brosper|1 year ago
I wonder if he asked farmers about their problems before creating this project.
quijoteuniv|1 year ago
schleck8|1 year ago
indus|1 year ago
robxorb|1 year ago
tmaier|1 year ago
d_burfoot|1 year ago
wmoxam|1 year ago
Havoc|1 year ago
Think there is more potential industrial scale. i.e. run the arm over half a mile rather than a couple of feet
rammer|1 year ago
craftoman|1 year ago
matthewiiiv|1 year ago
unknown|1 year ago
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unknown|1 year ago
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avodonosov|1 year ago
ensocode|1 year ago
greenhearth|1 year ago
chfritz|1 year ago
madmask|1 year ago
mherrmann|1 year ago
torlok|1 year ago
rob|1 year ago
CapstanRoller|1 year ago
That's like saying you watched The Bachelor and now have Opinions about marriage.
unknown|1 year ago
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fareesh|1 year ago
_Marak_|1 year ago
cactusplant7374|1 year ago
BigParm|1 year ago
ChrisMarshallNY|1 year ago
It’s a very cool project.
wiradikusuma|1 year ago
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?
donw|1 year ago
throwaway346434|1 year ago
Various APIs still exist and are callable. https://github.com/Growstuff/growstuff/blob/e8bc72dc900e2593...
nvy|1 year ago
hengheng|1 year ago
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?
GlenTheMachine|1 year ago
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.
kingkawn|1 year ago
hkt|1 year ago
greenie_beans|1 year ago
vertis|1 year ago
"Aimed at prosumers...uh...more nerdsumers"
"Oh I just saw the price, $4000 to avoid an hours work"
alsodumb|1 year ago
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unknown|1 year ago
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aaron695|1 year ago
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