DailyDirt: Robots For Farming
Robots are perfect for tedious and boring tasks, and they seem to be well-suited for the repetitive labor of farming. More and more robots are getting into the farming industry, with the potential to displace a lot of human labor. It might take some time before robots are growing a significant portion of our food supply, but farming technology could solve a lot of problems (and create a few more labor problems as well). Here are just a few more farming robots that might take over our farms.- A "Lettuce Bot" made by Blue River Technology can recognize the difference between weeds and budding lettuce. This robot could improve yields for crops without using pesticides, but it would have to be re-trained for each new crop. [url]
- Hydroponic lettuce farms could be automated with indoor fields maintained by robots. Hortiplan is testing a hydroponic farm in Belgium, and hopefully, world hunger can be solved eating lettuce...? [url]
- Remote controlled helicopters can spray herbicides and pesticides more efficiently, and the RMAX helicopter has been used in Japanese rice fields for 20 years. The same mini-helicopter is being tested in a Napa vineyard, after obtaining FAA clearance to operate at a maximum altitude of 20 feet. [url]
Thank you for reading this Techdirt post. With so many things competing for everyone’s attention these days, we really appreciate you giving us your time. We work hard every day to put quality content out there for our community.
Techdirt is one of the few remaining truly independent media outlets. We do not have a giant corporation behind us, and we rely heavily on our community to support us, in an age when advertisers are increasingly uninterested in sponsoring small, independent sites — especially a site like ours that is unwilling to pull punches in its reporting and analysis.
While other websites have resorted to paywalls, registration requirements, and increasingly annoying/intrusive advertising, we have always kept Techdirt open and available to anyone. But in order to continue doing so, we need your support. We offer a variety of ways for our readers to support us, from direct donations to special subscriptions and cool merchandise — and every little bit helps. Thank you.
–The Techdirt Team
Filed Under: agriculture, ai, farming, harvest, helicopters, hydroponic, image recognition, lettuce, pesticides, rmax, robots, weeds
Companies: blue river technology, hortiplan
Reader Comments
Subscribe: RSS
View by: Time | Thread
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
Re:
I wonder when there will be people who will only eat food that is grown entirely by robots b/c human-harvested food is inhumane.
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
Peak labor
On top of that, we have this superstitious Calvinist notion that "everybody has to work" or they are useless. That somehow, working all the time is a good thing - even that God wants us to work all the time (idle hands...).
At least some of the more sophisticated economies in Northern Europe have figured out job sharing.
What happens when we reach "peak labor"? What happens to people put out of work due to automation? We just don't need everyone to start their own business. Not everyone can or should be, an entrepreneur. How many maids and baristas do we really need? And are we willing to pay even the lowliest job a wage sufficient for survival (currently, we are not and we are fighting over whether to even have a minimum wage)?
And finally, how long can we sustain an increasing consolidation of wealth in the hands of fewer and fewer, especially considering that just may not need everyone to be working - or certainly not working so goddamn hard?
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
Re: Peak labor
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
Re: Re: Peak labor
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
Re: Peak labor
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
Re: Re: Peak labor
Maybe they could just drive really slow wandering around across lanes like they're drunk.
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
Re: Re: Re: Peak labor
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
Electronic Immigration
Suppose that before being used, the machine-vision program's output were overlaid on the camera image (say a red circle for a weed, a blue one for a lettuce, and a yellow circle for a borderline case). This image would be sent to Bangladesh, to a remote village where there are very few sources of employment, and five or ten dollars a day is a good wage. There, a Bangladeshi farm-worker, who does not need to speak English or even to be literate, would sit in front of a screen, and clicks on the various circles with his mouse, correcting them, before they got squirted with fertilizer or not. The machine-vision system would be dynamically reprogrammed by the Bangladeshi farm-worker's choices, rather than being expensively reprogrammed by American computer scientists. This is important, because in different places, and at different seasons, there are different kinds of weeds. The Bangladeshi would adapt to new conditions, and the machine would adapt with him.
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
Re: Electronic Immigration
You don't need a mechanical engineer to drive a combine, nor do you need a computer scientist to operate an automatic weeder.
Machines and robots are and have been used in farming for almost as long as farming itself.
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
reductio ad absurdum ad absurdum
Nor is there a one-to-one relationship in the wages.
What you say does not address my concerns about peak labor and the fallacy of "full employment".
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
Retirement Age, to: PopeRatzo, #5, Jul 13th, 2013 @ 4:40am
As it is, you're trying to put the clock back. To take the example of salad greens, LED gro-lamps have reached the point where they are competitive with the sun, at least for vegetable growing. Combine those with a small hydroponic unit, with robots, and you can put the system in the basement where it stays reasonably warm, even in a cold winter. The commercial growers have to compete with a home system of this kind. The high-end customers, the ones who are fussiest about pesticides and so on, will be the first to buy their own hydroponic greenhouses. If you can't prevent the ultimate customers from producing their own, you are in no position to impose requirements on a commercial producer.
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
Now the Walmart greeters will be replaced with robots??
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
requires political change
That's my concern. In view of high unemployment, greater income disparity, etc, these countries are doing everything they can to make those problems worse.
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
Re: requires political change
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
Re: Re: requires political change
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
Maybe skynet will come about through a real honest to god biological virus...
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
Re:
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
[ link to this | view in chronology ]