Airponics is even better, but requires high pressure pumps. You can grow pretty much anything, as long as you feed the right nutrients and control the temperature and the pH.
"Aeroponics" is indeed a good option but it does not need the "high" pressure pumps. We can pump with very low powered pumps. We, actually, formulate our own nutrients. We are about to start testing our automatic IoT solution to mix nutrients, measure the temperature pH and EC. Right now, we do the testing manually and we can slide the EC by a factor of 0.1 easily.
For those interested here is a video of our lab. Our structures are vertical for our research. However, our commercial (big) deployments will be flat or an "A" system. Right now, we are leveraging the abundance of sunlight in the tropics (India). We can produce 10x the traditional farming without any stacking but at a fraction of the cost of other hydroponics/Aeroponics setup.
Awesome work! I'm experimenting with a custom built, mostly-computer-controlled aeroponic myself, but it is way more on the hobby scale than this work you are doing.
One question - do you have any kind of automatic way to clear clogs in the sprayer heads?
You could...
detect pressure build up -> assume clogged
set pressure 0
open a solenoid connected to h2o2 with enough elevation to reach the clog
detect flow increase ->assume unclogged
close solenoid, set pressure 50 psi (or whatever)
This might best be done with a hydraulic circuit rather than electronic sensors, by the way. Ie. to detect pressure build up have a secondary line with slight resistance before the nozzle that when pressurized triggers other hydraulic elements which cut pressure, etc.
As replied earlier, we tested and realized we can do much better by dripping it from top instead of the mist. We will also be doing flood-n-flush kinda method in the much bigger setup. Cleaning was one thing we learned the hard way and so the reason for our modified method.
We will still be using mist spray method with other crops that has less dense rooting, etc.
Woah, very neat setup. That looks more like a vertical NFT setup than aeroponics though. Is there a fine nutrient mist that I can't see? or is it simply pumped to the top then drips down the edge?
Yes, the structures are vertical NFTs. The method is borrowed from aeroponics. In our lab test, we wanted to source things locally, reduce CAPEX/OPEX to the lowest we can and have the best ROI possible. We realized that instead of spending additional motor horsepower and thus more electricity, we can reduce it by pumping up once and then dripping them from the top. The mist/spray method also clogs quite often and is more cumbersome to clean. Our next step with both Flats and "A" systems will use something similar -- perhaps a "flood and drip". We have also realized the benefit of the "Dutch Bucket" system for growing more common food/plants.
In glasshouses a reasonably wide variety of crops can be grown hydroponically including tomatoes, cucumbers, eggplant, lettuce, cannabis, peppers. This Nat Geo article [1] has some interesting data/analysis on greenhouse growing in the Netherlands. The Netherlands are the leaders in high-tech greenhouse growing. Approx 0.2-0.33 of the world's high-tech greenhouses are located there. The biggest costs are financing/depreciation, labour and energy. The balance of these three costs changes significantly depending on your geographical location.
I am the founder of a startup [2] based in the Netherlands and backed by Founder's Fund focussed on scaling high-tech greenhouse growing as a method of crop production. I have both a technical background in Reinforcement Learning and have spent time training as a tomato grower. Happy to answer any questions anyone may have at dave@optimal.ag.
Right off the bat they compare the production output of their robot interior farm with a comparable exterior farm "5 times the size" - which is another, more subtle, form of BS - how does it compare with a standard "meat powered" indoor farm? Production from hydro/hybrid is higher than traditional outside soil only.
>> "What we found is that the two biggest costs in the indoor farm are labor and electricity"
this may be true but it doesn't mean the costs of outdoor farming are lower, plus the added cost of land (good farm land is expensive to own or rent)
"plus the added cost of land (good farm land is expensive to own or rent)"
Urban land is much more expensive per unit. not only that, but you have the Capital expense of the machinery and buildings, plus the operational expense of heating, lighting, ventilation, and fungus control.
http://blog.zipgrow.com/indoor-hydroponic-farming-costs-prof... has a good overview of the costs. $110k for 500 square feet. excluding building. Then you have the opex for lighting which is $1100 a month. You'll need heating in winter, which will similar cost.
You can probably grow just about anything, but things with a long growing cycle, big root systems, heavy plants prone to falling over if not well-anchored, etc., are more work. So, fruit trees are a challenge, for example. They end up needing pretty involved scaffolding; I'd imagine that would be a particular challenge to implement with a robot.
Strictly from a nutritional perspective, fruits and green vegetables are better than grains, beans, and tubers. But the cost of farming them is [currently] higher. It is likely that automated farms capable of growing anything would produce the highest-value produce first, and the nutritional value of cheaper foods would increase.
Your fast food burger would replace iceberg with leaf lettuce, then the pale flavorless commodity tomatoes with deep red juicy ones. Then maybe the bun will be made with some cauliflower meal in it. The price you pay for the burger will mainly be for the labor, facilities, and transportation, and the mean quality of ingredients will rise, rather than the price going down.
If you make meals at home, you will likely have more options for pre-cut foods, and more distributor-packaged, fixed-weight bags with recognizable brand names on them. Rather than one whole head of cauliflower at a time from who-knows-where, you will get a 2# bag of pre-cut fork-sized cauliflower florets in a microwave-ready steamer bag from Edible Head Farms, with full nutrition panel, a recipe, and a heartwarming story about their plucky farming robots on the back. The market already knows you are willing to spend $X on cauliflower, and captures that same amount with lower production costs and a heap of value-adds like pre-processing, brand, convenience, and maybe flavor, if there's still room. The grocery store is already operating on 1% margins, and can't afford to take a hit on giving the same amount of shelf space to cheaper cauliflower. Your lettuce will come in stacked, equal-sized leaves for sandwiches, and in bagged, fork-sized bites for salads.
Theoretically those jobs would be pushed into distribution, which the article seems to hint at, large amount of small automated farms spread out, rather than small amount of large farms concentrated, could mean more jobs on the middle and tail end of the supply chain.
Tbh, I have my doubts it would play out like that, but it does seem they're conscious of it, at the very least.
When I thought about this, the next part of the chain to be automated will be automated trucks. So then we need automated distribution from the trucks to the stores. The stores already have self check out.
So the whole food chain for plants will not need a human involved.
At one point, most of human labor was agricultural, your ancestors surely included. Today in the US, it's now less than 2% of the population. Some of those farm hands probably will become coders. And there are plenty of other good things for them to do.
AutoMicroFarm founder here. Thanks for the shoutout! I talked to Iron Ox founders (who went through YC, incidentally) a bit ago. They are focused on the robotics systems for commercial green houses, while I am focused on ways to grow food in your (residential) back yard.
I'm not sure I understand the market of your product. Is the intent to trick people into gardening by making it seem "high tech" or trendy or something? Are people actually willing to do more work to grow food if you make it sound new/different? Most people don't garden the easy way, so it just seems like a tough sell to get them to do it a harder way.
AutoMicroFarm's vision is to enable people with back yards to
1) grow the majority of their food in their back yard (asymptotically converging to 100%), and
2) spend a minimum of time and effort in order to do so (asymptotically converging to zero time and effort).
AutoMicroFarm will provide products and services to that effect.
I started out with aquaponics, thinking the end product would need to be high-tech. But it turns out that good design (which the aquaponics industry has not completely agreed upon yet) can obviate the need for high tech.
Aside from aquaponics, permaculture goes a long way towards maximizing yield while minimizing time and effort needed on an ongoing basis. However, the time and effort is often front-loaded when the design is installed.
Robotics, when ubiquitous and affordable, will transform agriculture, whether on a commercial or a residential level. In the meantime, there are lots of opportunities that I hope to capitalize on.
But the setup described on your website is more work than just an ordinary garden. Maybe it is a regional thing, I don't know where your main market is, but here in Canada even in low income rural areas the vast majority of people absolutely refuse to grow a garden. They will spend $2000 on a plastic and chinesium riding mower and then $30 of gas and 6 hours of time every week mowing an acre or more of grass, but they won't spend 5 minutes and $2 planting a couple of tomato plants. Doesn't anyone who is willing to garden already do it, and so not need to pay you for a way to do it that involves more work? Are you moving more towards being a permaculture design consultant?
The setup on my website (which is a bit out of date, compared to what I currently have) is not more work than an ordinary garden and an ordinary pond put together, which would be a proper comparison.
Not everyone who is willing to garden, does so. I've worked with a couple local clients who love the idea of gardening, but weren't sure how to start.
Permaculture design (on a back-yard level) is one of the services I offer, although I don't call it that.
In the meantime, I am in the process of updating my website. It's taking longer than I would like (day jobs: can't live with them, can't live without them yet...).
I wonder how they might deal with something like disease? Robots can easily monitor nutrient levels in the soil, but I wonder if there is a way to monitor the plant's health directly? Theoretically, the plants should be healthy given the controlled environment, but I imagine something will go wrong eventually.
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> "Over three billion dollars were lost in California alone [in 2017], because there's not enough people to actually do the operations in seeding or harvesting," Brandon Alexander, co-founder of Iron Ox Robotic Farms, told Engadget. "The average age of the farmer now is 58. And so one of the big issues just plaguing farming is that there's just not enough labor to go around. The problem is getting worse every year."[1]
I call BS. There is almost always enough labor at the correct price. That means the juice wasn't worth the squeeze (or the employers are making bad choices...) . If farm hands were making $100 an hour I'm sure you'd see a lot more farm hands. Of course they'd also probably be losing money, so that's why we dont see that.
Yeah why did Alexander even toss in that bit about average farmer age and in the next sentence point out that there's not enough generic labor to go around at the price the average 58 year old farmer is willing to pay? Well-called BS it is.
That goes without saying. Anyone who thinks about it for even the least amount of time understands that you can get more labor if you pay a lot for it. "There is not enough labor to go around," means, "There is not enough labor to go around at prices such that we could competitively produce our goods and retain a desirable amount of profit," in essentially one hundred percent of cases. Your objection doesn't take anything away from the thesis that automation may be a way to become more competitive by cutting labor costs.
I actually agree that automation is a great way to become profitable. I would suggest your modified statement (not enough labor at profitable prices) is true for every extinct industry. We probably could have produced an extra $1B of hand produced typewriters this year, but no one wants to make them by hand for $1 an hour and no one wants to buy them.
Saying there is $3B of produce that could have been produced, ignores the fact that it would have been produced at a loss (after labor costs sufficient to incentivize workers) and there may not of even been a market for the over supply.
If there is an actual unmet market need the price curve will move upward meaning employers can pay workers more to fulfill the unmet need. To me this looks like a lack of a market for $3B of produce...
I don't really understand your reply. "A lack of a market for $3B of produce" is also equivalent to saying, "A lack of market for $3B of produce at the prices required to make production profitable." The claim about automation allowing the meeting of that need simply means that the speaker believes automation will reduce prices enough to make targeting this need profitable.
That's not BS. That's you stating explicitly something people familiar with the issues see as implicit.
Both CEOs and journalists, as well as most readers of MIT's Technology Review, understand that you can get more labor by raising the price. The implicit understanding is that a) most Americans don't want to do back-breaking manual labor for a living, and b) most Americans also want food to be cheap. This is an ongoing problem in agriculture and has been for decades.
>Americans don't want to do back-breaking manual labor for a living
This makes me wonder...
Autonomy is the biggest hurdle for these technologies and manual labor is the reason they are needed. Why aren't we meeting halfway and using remote controlled robots instead of autonomous ones?
That way workers could do the job from anywhere in the world without having to break a sweat and you'd only need a fraction of the investment to get it running.
I assume the tech isn't there, but mechanical turk for manual labour sounds like a fun concept, in a black mirror sort of way. Can't wait for Uber to try to solve its self driving cars with this.
Have you ever watched any streams of somebody trying to play Job Simulator or other similar VR games? We have a long, long way to go with input tracking and control to get anything close to human dexterity over telepresence.
Robotic assisted surgery involves the surgeon using an expensive console in the same room as the operation. As others have said, the systems require a fair amount of training to become accustomed to. The training requirement is offset by the additional capabilities that the robot brings that humans do not possess. In particular robotic tools have a larger range of motion than conventional minimally invasive instruments do.
Telesurgery is a bit of a myth. It's been done a few dozen times.
It doesn't make that much sense economically. It's actually cheaper to fly a surgeon or a patient around for the few occasions when it really needs to be done.
Most surgery still isn't done with Da Vinci robots or whatever. Surgeons with their hands can do many more things. That's not to say those robots are not amazing, it's just that they don't do everything.
The military is the one area where it might make sense, but have a close look. They don't do it either. Instead the US military has an amazing extraction system where someone injured in battle in the middle east can be at Rammstein within hours.
IMO there are plenty to do the work. There are not enough people who are sufficiently incentivized to do the work at the wages that farming pays. This is in comparison to other choices people have be it easier work or higher paying.
I think it’s worth pointing out. We see the same ‘we can’t find people to hire’ point being made by tech companies trying to find developers. The solution is the same for both: pay more. If you’re going to use shorthand it make it accurate. Just say ‘we can’t/don’t want to pay for the workers we need’.
> a) most Americans don't want to do back-breaking manual labor for a living
No. Most american don't want to do back-breaking manual labor for peanuts. As maerF0x0 said, raise the wages and watch how many americans love back-breaking manual labor. It's strange how the tar oil fields in south dakota are able to attract workers from all over the country.
> and b) most Americans also want food to be cheap.
> most Americans don't want to do back-breaking manual labor for a living
If it was just some cultural thing, then we'd have more than enough immigrants to correct for most Americans not wanting to do it. The problem is that there exists no cultural group that wants these jobs, native born or otherwise, at the pay and benefits offered. People switch to better jobs as soon as they find one.
> Americans also want food to be cheap
I assume everyone would prefer if everything is cheap? This is a problem that effects any business.
It's not as much about the fact that people don't want to do the work, it's about the quality of life said work allows. These cheap farm laborers need housing food schools medicine transportation goals a life.
What robots do is reduce all that ripple effect of societal load on all the other aspects of sustaining the labor force and their human needs.
Focusing on simply labor and it's price for the task at hand is stupidly myopic.
And reveals the greater impact autonomous robotic labor will really have.
Let's assume California's Central valley in 50 years time is vast swaths of robotic farms.
All other human infrastructure in these places die. Restaurants, stores, schools, housing, police fire etc fall back to early 1900s levels (or some smaller density level of the past)
Farm labor is a tiny fraction of the cost of retail food. It's not material and there is no dilemma.
It is extremely material to the narrow profit margins of farms, so you see a race to the bottom with importing slave labor, terrible practices, etc.
But enforcing labor standards and minimum wages wouldn't add much to the average American's food bill, even assuming farms couldn't avoid some of the hit by using less or more productive labor.
Those views are only in tension as long as labor is a significant fraction of the cost of farm output. But the most labor-intensive part the supply chain (per pound of apples) is picking it. This source [1] gives 1000-2000 lb/hour as a typical output rate. At $50/hour, that would only account for ~5 cents/lb.
Even if you had policies that firehose-flooded the labor market, that still only saves you a trivial amount on the price of farm output. (I'm guessing most of the cost of apples comes from the price of the land and capital.)
It just doesn't look like there's this huge tradeoff we're facing that could justify massively increasing the labor supply.
A better explanation would be that, if everyone else uses unauthorized[2] labor, then you have to do it yourself to keep up.
most Americans don't want to do back-breaking manual labor for a living
Nobody from any country wants to do back-breaking manual labor for a living.
But the whole "jobs Americans won't do" is nothing more than a political slogan/talking point.
The reality is that Americans will do any job, provided they are fairly compensated.
More than once, it's been in the news that a factory/food processing plant/etc... has been busted for having illegal workers, paying its workers below minimum wage, or both. A week later, the factory has to hire legal workers and Americans for the previously under-paid jobs, and there's a line around the block of people willing to now work for a fair rate of pay.
"More than once, it's been in the news that a factory/food processing plant/etc... has been busted for having illegal workers, paying its workers below minimum wage, or both. A week later, the factory has to hire legal workers and Americans for the previously under-paid jobs, and there's a line around the block of people willing to now work for a fair rate of pay."
I've never heard that, could you provide a couple of concrete examples?
Wish I could, but I get most of my news from traditional media.
I remember there was a meat packing plant in Colorado a few years ago. I tried Google News, but it's apparently incapable of showing anything but the most recent stories.
Yep, the “shortage of employees” meme comes from the same propaganda sources as the “jobs Americans just wont do” one. If you offer above-market wage, and the labor pool is not artificially constrained (like for doctors), then you will get a line of applicants out the door. This is true for any job.
> The reality is that Americans will do any job, provided they are fairly compensated.
To the extent this is true, I think it's tautological.
At some point, much of American labor was manual. People's notion of a fair wage for that was not high, and the work was accepted as normal. But now there are a lot of people who work in offices, and much manual labor is now way easier than agricultural work. There's also a broad (but not universal) societal expectation that people shouldn't have to destroy their bodies at work. So I think the perceived "fair" compensation for this has risen dramatically. And I think the number of people willing to spend 14 hours a day, 6 days a week [1] doing that work at any price is much smaller than before.
And honestly, I think that's great. We should find ways to turn every job that people don't want to do over to robots.
> most Americans don't want to do back-breaking manual labor for a living, and b) most Americans also want food to be cheap.
Combine these and you're right. Most Americans don't want to do back-breaking labor for a pittance. Grocery checkers (union) make $18.50/hour. Bus drivers (union) make $29/hour. Journeyman (union) electricians make $50/hour.
Try paying more than $15/hour for farm labor and you'll have more applicants than you know what to do with.
If farm workers were making $100 an hour and there was billions to be earned nation wide, we'd see "Farmer" be a valid H1B Visa job. More income means more taxes and the government, businesses involved and workers (foreign ones if US ones are too lazy) are all incentivized to make this production happen.
You are correct in that experienced pickers are amazing to behold..really amazing productivity. But at $100/hour you'd soon find plenty of Americans ready to get that experienced and efficient.
This 58 number has been debunked repeatedly. There is very little incentive to transfer ownership to your children while you still have your faculties. When you are too old or infirm to farm at all you sell it to your kid or they get power of attorney and take it.
The average age of the oldest member of farming families is 58.
That's kind of the parent poster's point - if a father and son are both working on a farm, they're both farmers, but the father is "principal farm operator"; the father's age is not representative of the age of those working there.
Kinda getting into the weeds here (a case for Roundup?) but I gently disagree. Son may qualify as the Principal Farm Operator. It depends.
For better or worse "Principal Farm Operator" is defined term (please see https://www.ers.usda.gov/topics/farm-economy/farm-household-...) and just to make things more confusing the moniker is self-applied. In a perfect world the principal would be the most important or the most active Operator in a multiple Operator farm but perfection is going to elude us w/r/t the USDA.
Edited to note the upvote for your reasonable demeanor while disagreeing. An example I strive to follow.
Nothing to do with the USDA. You share a business with your parent, they're going to keep writing their name on things until you have a very uncomfortable conversation where you point out to them that really it's your business now and they work here.
Unless there is some sort of blowup, or an ER visit, you're not going to be in any kind of hurry to see the look on your mom/dad's face when they realize you're right. Or how angry they get if they refuse to see reason.
I also wonder how they define a farmer. Is a Mexican laborer who arrives in the spring and works through harvest time a farmer? Or is it only the people who own the farm?
>When you are too old or infirm to farm at all you sell it to your kid or they get power of attorney and take it.
When my grandfather retired from farming, he simply leased the land to the guy who owned the adjacent farm. After my grandfather passed away ownership transferred to my grandmother until her death at 101. The same lease arrangement continued for a nearly thirty years. What was the age of the farmers of those farms?
> The average age of the farmer now is 58. And so one of the big issues just plaguing farming is that there's just not enough labor to go around. The problem is getting worse every year.
If you keep making teen-aged labor more and more impractical, then you're going to have problems. A lot of the really labor intensive work in farming requires almost no skill, just a whole bunch of hands and bodies. The cycles of farming naturally have highs and lows; when it's time to plant or time to reap, it's all hands on deck to get it done before time and weather runs out, and the rest of the season you need considerably less labor.
I think they still take two weeks off school in the middle of the fall in Aroostook County, Maine, so the potato farmers can get their harvest in.
Most of the schools there voted to stop it because it was stupidly poor value. Incredibly few kids were needed to actually work the fields. Potatoes have not been a labor intensive crop since the sixties.
It's funny. They can't find enough labour and I, as a farmer, can't find enough ground to expand my operation to utilize the full capacity of my labour and equipment. Seems like the obvious solution is to downsize their operation and let someone else fill the void. In my experience, people interested in farming would rather own their own business than work for someone else.
From a technical side, I do not really understand why so many companies use such a complex robotic arm with 5-6 DOF. Wouldn't a SCARA in this case be much better? They're easier to program, simpler kinematics, cheaper, and more robust.
Actually higher degree of freedom arms with 6-7 DOF have simpler kinematics and are easier to program, in general. This is especially the case if you're using sensing and a lightly unstructured task.
An end effector pose has 6 DOF (3 translation, 3 rotation). A robot with fewer than 6 DOF can't physically reach all poses in its task space, so if sensing says go here, the kinematics will often say it can get close, but not exactly.
A robot with exactly 6 DOF can usually reach all poses in its task space, with a catch. Typically there are only a discrete number of joint configurations for a given pose (like 4 or 8). Thus, if you want to reach a certain pose but all joint configurations are in collision then you are in trouble. Adding just 1 more DOF, making it a 7 DOF arm, ensures that the arm can generally reach any pose with an infinite number of configurations, the last dimension used to plan avoiding collision.
If you use motion planning and sensing for all of this, instead of something like a teach pendant where you carefully set all of the desired poses manually, then higher DOF is easier.
Are high DOF robot arms easier to program? Most of the ones I've seen are usually done through human "mirroring" where the arm is moved in a generic fashion (and fine tuned by surrounding sensors) by a user and recorded similar to the pendant method you mentioned. I totally understand that a SCARA arm has a lot less flexibility. But wouldnt a low DOF arm be beneficial for an application like this, where the parts being grabbed and placed are in a highly gridded configuration?
I am not so sure either why a complex robotic arm with 5-6 DOF is necessary. It seems more suited for manufacturing in general, for handling components of varying size and complexity, or areas with limited space issues. Or the need for more modular-based processes
But farms generally have lots of land / space availability. The pipeline for growing, farming, and transporting crops is fairly predictable, minus unexpected events like hurricanes/tornados/rainfall, diseases, pests, spoilage, etc
With farming, everything to my understanding is mostly predictable for crop size. Farms generally specialize in one type of crop if I'm not mistaken, especially if its hydrophonics /inhouse like in the dutch farm video mentioned in this thread.
I personally would love to work on a farm, but not the type you see today. Monoculture and pesticide laden farming practices make for boring work with little to no cultural value.
It seems to me that we would see more adoption of farm positions if we provided smaller, integrated farm plots where folks that had their fill of urban living, wanted to raise a family and be closer to nature could be apart of a community. Sort of a replacement for the sterile suburbs where people go to raise families, only with flexible family focused farm jobs.
I realize there are intentional communities that provide this, but I wonder if the ag industry is missing out on an opportunity also.
I think the issue is that small farms aren't very efficient. My wife's father owns a small farm in Iowa but has another job because it just doesn't make enough money to afford even his pretty meagre lifestyle. Having been around farms in small communities I think that people in cities have idealistic views of what farm life is like.
They're almost talking about a fundamentally different type of farming. If your just plowing, growing a several crops and using fertilizers and pesticides, your highly dependent on things like price of fertilizer, price of seeds, price of diesel, price of pesticides. Now the hard goods manufactures are killing the secondary market for farm implements and building implements that can't be owner serviced, which makes the farmer even more dependent on price to service those equipment from the dealer only. All of these easily surmountable in a big operation, but stacked against the farmer next door.
I think this depends on your definition of efficiency. For food production to land use, small polyculture farm techniques have been proven to produce more yield. If you're only interested in man hours to yield, then yes large scale farming techniques are more efficient.
By efficiency I mean food per $. I met someone who runs a small organic dairy farm and each small container of yogurt was 12$ and it's not like he was making tons of money (and that was after years getting organic certified).
Edit: it was super cool to meet his cows but the market for 12$ yogurt is so small that it would he hard to break into that market. He only got there because his family has run a very natural dairy farm for decades (or at least that's what he told me).
food per dollar is one interesting measurement, but products like yoghurt are not fungible, no matter how much we would like to treat them that way in industrial agriculture.
So the real question isn't can someone produce yoghurt cheaper than this person (they can) but is the product they produce worth the $12 for enough people to make a go of it.
Yeah, I agree that it's not a great metric and you can aim for a more expensive market but one thing I was pointing out is that the market for significantly more expensive food that this sort of farming would entail is really hard to break in to and also once you break in it also isn't hugely profitable (the guy compared it to the restaurant industry, which is a famously bad investment for inexperienced people). Anyway this is just one conversation I had with one guy to take it with a grain of salt.
I wonder if we will learn to value food again, meaning what portion of our earnings would be willing to pay, if say we all got healthy, very fresh, organic, non-pesticide food that we know isn't contaminated - and if we factor indirect costs of not eating the "safest" and healthiest food throughout our lives? Maybe "$12" can be considered a "good deal" or reasonable. With automation, cost of unit produced can reach "$0" - so long as we pass all of that value created to the consumer. We're going to see more and more layers converted from jobs requiring manual labour, to not requiring it - like one example soon to rapidly scale is Amazon Go stores.
Truth in labelling will help. Labels that stretch the truth to the limit make us all cynics, and you wonder if this pricey organic chicken was really raised any differently from the cheap chicken.
I grew up on a farm, so I have a pretty good idea of what goes on. Not sure why I'm being down voted, do people always assume that folks post about things they have no experience with?
Sure it was boring as a kid, but I got a lot of hands on training fixing machines and working with plants and animals. It was also much safer than the last 25 years that I've lived in Oakland.
I think you got downvoted because your statement about safety of the farm vs Oakland is off topic and irrelevant to to parent post's statement about the economic inefficiency of small farms.
Thanks, the downvote that I was referring to was the original post which was being down voted. That post was meant to be linked to that post not the above. My bad.
I can see that I'm touching on a heated topic (Rural vs. Urban living) that people feel strongly about.
My original point is that there appears to be people willing to work on farms, but not the types of farms that build culture and invite communities to be a part of. So we are left with migrant workers which in this day in age are probably largely illegal.
I would assume that this is an untouched labor force and economic niche that is being underutilized.
*In San Francisco. My friend lives exactly the lift GP describes, but in the Hudson River Valley, in a beautiful Victorian house (with roommates). He's also incredibly jacked now. It's totally possible.
The people I know are averaging $100k/acre a year doing intensive farming and CSA, which doesn't seem bad to me. Examples would be Jean Martin Fortier style farming techniques.
People you know of, not people you know. If you knew him, you would know he doesn't actually farm, his money comes from selling overpriced lettuce to expensive restaurants. And that the entire market in Montreal is saturated just from his operation. A single person can make a living that way in each market of a few million people. That does not provide a path for 99.99% of the people who would like to get into farming. We can have about 10 people doing that in all of Canada. There's a lot more than 10 people who would like to be farmers, and most of them would like to actually be farmers not lettuce salesmen.
It can work, but the part that is missing from most people's thoughts is the amount of self-sufficiency you need outside of farming to live such a life style. You certainly aren't going to make a lot of money doing such a thing, but you will make some if you pick the right crops. However to be able to afford everything you need you will need additional tools and skills. You won't be able to afford getting your house roofed or your tractor repaired by somebody else, you will be roofing your own shit, fixing your own tractor, you are going to want to be canning or preserving a lot of your own foods, you might need to switch to wood heat and cut your own fire wood or otherwise have a MUCH smaller house, fix and maintain your own tools and equipment, ect.
If you can do all that, it is a good sustainable life, but if the most you can do is grow some garden crops and shit, you will not be able to afford the service costs of everything else you need to survive. You won't be able to sell some tomatoes and afford all the same services as before, especially out int he country where land is cheap. It takes a lot of fuel to get in and out of the areas where land is cheap enough to do any of that also.
There's something so weird about seeing HN readers saying "I'd love to live on a subsistence farm" when there's so many people in the world struggling to survive on the food they farm themselves.
HN readers are mostly imagining growing botique organic heirloom vegetables and that sort of thing- high end, high margins, very possibly as a hobby farm. Nobody here writing about how they want to work on a farm is imagining monocropping ten thousand acres of corn or living hand to mouth subsistence farming. IMO.
The ag industry doesn't care about what some people would like to do for a living, they care about making money. That's why they shut out small operations deliberately rather than supporting them. As an example, the big pork producers own all the pork processing plants. They set the rules, and the rules require very uniform hogs. So small farms who grow heritage pork breeds on natural diets instead of growing the single commercial pork breed on a corn+soy diet can't get their hogs slaughtered and processed. Everything in agriculture has been massively consolidated into a small number of huge corporations who exert tremendous influence in trying to make it even more consolidated. Small farms have to market directly to consumers and jump through lots of hoops to work around legal barriers lobbied for by huge agricorps. We end up spending more time as food salesmen than as farmers, which is far less enjoyable.
Unrelated to the article (since I couldn't get to it), but it's interesting to see that MIT Technology Review does not allow you to browse in Incognito mode.
Seems like wheel-reinvention. There are already many companies providing machinery for large-scale optimized horticultural operations. I used to work with this one:
What does this mean for subsistence agriculture? Is starting a self-sufficient religion all of a sudden much cheaper and feasible (after the up-front robot cost has been payed)?
Aside: try opening this tab in an incognito window. In Firefox it works fine, but on Chrome you get "Hello, we noticed you're browsing in private or incognito mode. To continue reading this article, please exit incognito mode or log in." Not even complaining; it's their site and they're absolutely allowed to restrict access to paying customers only, and I commend the frankness with which they admit that they need ad revenue.
Wait, I thought Incognito mode wasn't supposed to give telltale signs of being Incognito, besides e.g. lack of cookies, which is indistinguishable from a new user?
a quick Google search suggests that the Filesystem API is disabled in incognito Chrome...
I never understood why APIs like this would ever be disabled. Why not just have it return "blank" responses?! Same goes for e.g. iPhone "access to contacts/location/etc"...
I don't think it's ad revenue -- they say on that page that "Visitors are allowed 3 free articles per month (without a subscription), and private browsing prevents us from counting how many stories you've read. We hope you understand, and consider subscribing for unlimited online access."
As hopeful as I am that we find a technological breakthrough that allows large scale, highly energy efficient production of crops, I'm always struck by that fact that these facilities seem to only produce leafy greens.
IINM, to make a dent in the larger agricultural system, these facilities will have to produce high calorie and protein bearing crops, like grains, beans, etc.
I wonder what the reason that leafy greens would be the "lowest hanging fruit" to go after at first? I assume because they are rapidly growing and would therefore yield a high crop yield, and things like baby spinach in grocery stores always feels brutally expensive - so perhaps a good starting point in terms of retail markup possible? Lightweight, high price point, etc.
Leafy greens are low hanging goals because 1. Quick turn around (45-60 days) 2. Easy to create hybrids suitable for whatever environment 3. Single harvest(as opposed to tomatoes where there is flowers, ripe and unripe and over ripe fruit amongst canopy all the time).4. We are not trying to make it flower or fruit which makes nutrients easier. 5. Low energy. Doesn’t need a lot of light or heat.
That makes sense. I suppose the argument for this tech is from a business and product quality perspective, which I get.
It doesn't seem to have much to do with lowering the natural resources (water, fossil fuels) spent per calorie of food produced at a large scale, though.
I asked the founders of one of these agri-robot startups at demo day and they said that leafy greens are just the easiest to automate and so they will start there. What makes it easy is that they can be grown in a greenhouse rather than outdoors, and the main task that needs to be automated is moving plants from a smaller to a larger container, not the mechanics of picking a fruit off a plant.
Also pretty sure its a ton more efficient to grow these in a field, under the sun. Want to make a cool robot? Make a field scale planting/harvesting robot for this and that might have some application. This is just a gimmick.
programming organic farmer here, we live in a 7 acre organic farm north of Berkeley. The robots aren't going to win in agriculture, maybe you could do with with pot; but not with lettuce. There is lots of stupid money in the system and this is just one example.
This is one of my future farm scenarios (like Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities, I am going to come up with a hundred diff future ways to farm!)..Asimov is awesome but I am also inspired by Kim Stanley Robinson’s Mars trilogy. Anyways...underground cities with aqua/hydroponic farms and orchards and livestock on the surface. Permaculture style farming!
There has to be a way to have a standard container of dirt, and have it move around various "stations" on a set of tracks or rails, where it is tended to at each station by robots.
This article is all over the place and then apparently quotes an academic out of context. The real problem with indoor farming is not setup cost. For the fundamentals: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ISAKc9gpGjw&feature=youtu.be... ... Bruce Bugbee, Utah State University Department of Plants, Soils and Climate, has studied plant growth in controlled environments for most of his career presents the results of his analysis of the environmental effects of Vertical Farming/Indoor Agriculture (September 2015). With regards to the machinery shown at the top of the article, it is standard industrial automation equipment you can purchase off the shelf, apparently not even hardened or substantially adjusted for outdoor use.
Hmmm. Planting and harvesting workers, and their machines (combines, etc), move around to follow the seasons. A useful tech for these folks might be a weather- and demand- aware Lyft-like system.
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[ 5.2 ms ] story [ 182 ms ] threadEdit: apparently not. The Engadget article is a bit better. "What we found is that the two biggest costs in the indoor farm are labor and electricity"
https://www.engadget.com/2018/10/03/future-indoor-agricultur...
That tray-lifting machine looks expensive.
Are plants other than lettuces suitable for hydroponic farming?
For those interested here is a video of our lab. Our structures are vertical for our research. However, our commercial (big) deployments will be flat or an "A" system. Right now, we are leveraging the abundance of sunlight in the tropics (India). We can produce 10x the traditional farming without any stacking but at a fraction of the cost of other hydroponics/Aeroponics setup.
Photos https://photos.app.goo.gl/XytrQYsQ0UaSKozV2 Locavore Demo Tour https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U2CRI61_DlQ
One question - do you have any kind of automatic way to clear clogs in the sprayer heads?
set pressure 0
open a solenoid connected to h2o2 with enough elevation to reach the clog
detect flow increase ->assume unclogged
close solenoid, set pressure 50 psi (or whatever)
This might best be done with a hydraulic circuit rather than electronic sensors, by the way. Ie. to detect pressure build up have a secondary line with slight resistance before the nozzle that when pressurized triggers other hydraulic elements which cut pressure, etc.
We will still be using mist spray method with other crops that has less dense rooting, etc.
I am the founder of a startup [2] based in the Netherlands and backed by Founder's Fund focussed on scaling high-tech greenhouse growing as a method of crop production. I have both a technical background in Reinforcement Learning and have spent time training as a tomato grower. Happy to answer any questions anyone may have at dave@optimal.ag.
[1] https://www.nationalgeographic.com/magazine/2017/09/holland-...
[2] http://optimal.ag
>> "What we found is that the two biggest costs in the indoor farm are labor and electricity"
this may be true but it doesn't mean the costs of outdoor farming are lower, plus the added cost of land (good farm land is expensive to own or rent)
Urban land is much more expensive per unit. not only that, but you have the Capital expense of the machinery and buildings, plus the operational expense of heating, lighting, ventilation, and fungus control.
http://blog.zipgrow.com/indoor-hydroponic-farming-costs-prof... has a good overview of the costs. $110k for 500 square feet. excluding building. Then you have the opex for lighting which is $1100 a month. You'll need heating in winter, which will similar cost.
To put that in perspective, https://www.uklandandfarms.co.uk/rural-property-for-sale/eas... grade II soil. $80k, buys you 211266 square feet, with change left over for tractor, plough, seed and tillage hire/buy.
Moreover, its not an asset that will depreciate, unless one lets the soil blow away/don't improve it.
Your fast food burger would replace iceberg with leaf lettuce, then the pale flavorless commodity tomatoes with deep red juicy ones. Then maybe the bun will be made with some cauliflower meal in it. The price you pay for the burger will mainly be for the labor, facilities, and transportation, and the mean quality of ingredients will rise, rather than the price going down.
If you make meals at home, you will likely have more options for pre-cut foods, and more distributor-packaged, fixed-weight bags with recognizable brand names on them. Rather than one whole head of cauliflower at a time from who-knows-where, you will get a 2# bag of pre-cut fork-sized cauliflower florets in a microwave-ready steamer bag from Edible Head Farms, with full nutrition panel, a recipe, and a heartwarming story about their plucky farming robots on the back. The market already knows you are willing to spend $X on cauliflower, and captures that same amount with lower production costs and a heap of value-adds like pre-processing, brand, convenience, and maybe flavor, if there's still room. The grocery store is already operating on 1% margins, and can't afford to take a hit on giving the same amount of shelf space to cheaper cauliflower. Your lettuce will come in stacked, equal-sized leaves for sandwiches, and in bagged, fork-sized bites for salads.
Tbh, I have my doubts it would play out like that, but it does seem they're conscious of it, at the very least.
1) grow the majority of their food in their back yard (asymptotically converging to 100%), and
2) spend a minimum of time and effort in order to do so (asymptotically converging to zero time and effort).
AutoMicroFarm will provide products and services to that effect.
I started out with aquaponics, thinking the end product would need to be high-tech. But it turns out that good design (which the aquaponics industry has not completely agreed upon yet) can obviate the need for high tech.
Aside from aquaponics, permaculture goes a long way towards maximizing yield while minimizing time and effort needed on an ongoing basis. However, the time and effort is often front-loaded when the design is installed.
Robotics, when ubiquitous and affordable, will transform agriculture, whether on a commercial or a residential level. In the meantime, there are lots of opportunities that I hope to capitalize on.
Not everyone who is willing to garden, does so. I've worked with a couple local clients who love the idea of gardening, but weren't sure how to start.
Permaculture design (on a back-yard level) is one of the services I offer, although I don't call it that.
In the meantime, I am in the process of updating my website. It's taking longer than I would like (day jobs: can't live with them, can't live without them yet...).
You can read more on the current state of my own yard, and the types of services and products I am offering, here: https://blog.automicrofarm.com/state-of-my-suburban-homestea...
Cool concept nonetheless!
It's also something that is done from orbit. E.g.: https://www.esa.int/Our_Activities/Observing_the_Earth/Coper...
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Access denied What happened? The owner of this website (www.richardmudhar.com) has banned the autonomous system number (ASN) your IP address is in (7922) from accessing this website.
I call BS. There is almost always enough labor at the correct price. That means the juice wasn't worth the squeeze (or the employers are making bad choices...) . If farm hands were making $100 an hour I'm sure you'd see a lot more farm hands. Of course they'd also probably be losing money, so that's why we dont see that.
[1]: https://www.engadget.com/2018/10/03/future-indoor-agricultur...
Edit: this quote was actually from an engadget article linked elsewhere in this post's comments
Saying there is $3B of produce that could have been produced, ignores the fact that it would have been produced at a loss (after labor costs sufficient to incentivize workers) and there may not of even been a market for the over supply.
If there is an actual unmet market need the price curve will move upward meaning employers can pay workers more to fulfill the unmet need. To me this looks like a lack of a market for $3B of produce...
Both CEOs and journalists, as well as most readers of MIT's Technology Review, understand that you can get more labor by raising the price. The implicit understanding is that a) most Americans don't want to do back-breaking manual labor for a living, and b) most Americans also want food to be cheap. This is an ongoing problem in agriculture and has been for decades.
This makes me wonder...
Autonomy is the biggest hurdle for these technologies and manual labor is the reason they are needed. Why aren't we meeting halfway and using remote controlled robots instead of autonomous ones?
That way workers could do the job from anywhere in the world without having to break a sweat and you'd only need a fraction of the investment to get it running.
I assume it's not very hard (for experts) to build an AI that would push the right buttons at the right times.
Telesurgery is a bit of a myth. It's been done a few dozen times.
It doesn't make that much sense economically. It's actually cheaper to fly a surgeon or a patient around for the few occasions when it really needs to be done.
Most surgery still isn't done with Da Vinci robots or whatever. Surgeons with their hands can do many more things. That's not to say those robots are not amazing, it's just that they don't do everything.
The military is the one area where it might make sense, but have a close look. They don't do it either. Instead the US military has an amazing extraction system where someone injured in battle in the middle east can be at Rammstein within hours.
>there's not enough people to actually do ...
IMO there are plenty to do the work. There are not enough people who are sufficiently incentivized to do the work at the wages that farming pays. This is in comparison to other choices people have be it easier work or higher paying.
Unless you have a greater point or suggestion to make, why waste time on pedantry?
It is BS.
> a) most Americans don't want to do back-breaking manual labor for a living
No. Most american don't want to do back-breaking manual labor for peanuts. As maerF0x0 said, raise the wages and watch how many americans love back-breaking manual labor. It's strange how the tar oil fields in south dakota are able to attract workers from all over the country.
> and b) most Americans also want food to be cheap.
Don't all humans?
If it was just some cultural thing, then we'd have more than enough immigrants to correct for most Americans not wanting to do it. The problem is that there exists no cultural group that wants these jobs, native born or otherwise, at the pay and benefits offered. People switch to better jobs as soon as they find one.
> Americans also want food to be cheap
I assume everyone would prefer if everything is cheap? This is a problem that effects any business.
What robots do is reduce all that ripple effect of societal load on all the other aspects of sustaining the labor force and their human needs.
Focusing on simply labor and it's price for the task at hand is stupidly myopic.
And reveals the greater impact autonomous robotic labor will really have.
Let's assume California's Central valley in 50 years time is vast swaths of robotic farms.
All other human infrastructure in these places die. Restaurants, stores, schools, housing, police fire etc fall back to early 1900s levels (or some smaller density level of the past)
It is extremely material to the narrow profit margins of farms, so you see a race to the bottom with importing slave labor, terrible practices, etc.
But enforcing labor standards and minimum wages wouldn't add much to the average American's food bill, even assuming farms couldn't avoid some of the hit by using less or more productive labor.
Even if you had policies that firehose-flooded the labor market, that still only saves you a trivial amount on the price of farm output. (I'm guessing most of the cost of apples comes from the price of the land and capital.)
It just doesn't look like there's this huge tradeoff we're facing that could justify massively increasing the labor supply.
A better explanation would be that, if everyone else uses unauthorized[2] labor, then you have to do it yourself to keep up.
[1] https://www.thepennyhoarder.com/make-money/side-gigs/like-wo...
[2] "illegal" is apparently taboo now, but "undocumented" is Orwellian.
Nobody from any country wants to do back-breaking manual labor for a living.
But the whole "jobs Americans won't do" is nothing more than a political slogan/talking point.
The reality is that Americans will do any job, provided they are fairly compensated.
More than once, it's been in the news that a factory/food processing plant/etc... has been busted for having illegal workers, paying its workers below minimum wage, or both. A week later, the factory has to hire legal workers and Americans for the previously under-paid jobs, and there's a line around the block of people willing to now work for a fair rate of pay.
I've never heard that, could you provide a couple of concrete examples?
I remember there was a meat packing plant in Colorado a few years ago. I tried Google News, but it's apparently incapable of showing anything but the most recent stories.
https://www.denverpost.com/2013/01/14/fear-from-swift-plant-...
To the extent this is true, I think it's tautological.
At some point, much of American labor was manual. People's notion of a fair wage for that was not high, and the work was accepted as normal. But now there are a lot of people who work in offices, and much manual labor is now way easier than agricultural work. There's also a broad (but not universal) societal expectation that people shouldn't have to destroy their bodies at work. So I think the perceived "fair" compensation for this has risen dramatically. And I think the number of people willing to spend 14 hours a day, 6 days a week [1] doing that work at any price is much smaller than before.
And honestly, I think that's great. We should find ways to turn every job that people don't want to do over to robots.
[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2014/08/08/nyregion/in-harvest-seaso...
Are the margins that slim that the owners can't afford to pay their workers more?
Combine these and you're right. Most Americans don't want to do back-breaking labor for a pittance. Grocery checkers (union) make $18.50/hour. Bus drivers (union) make $29/hour. Journeyman (union) electricians make $50/hour.
Try paying more than $15/hour for farm labor and you'll have more applicants than you know what to do with.
Farm workers at harvest time are almost Olympic-level endurance athletes.
Most Americans who show up don't last a day in the fields.
So no, $100/hour won't inspire more than a few workers who have alternatives.
The average age of the oldest member of farming families is 58.
See https://www.ers.usda.gov/topics/farm-economy/beginning-disad...
For better or worse "Principal Farm Operator" is defined term (please see https://www.ers.usda.gov/topics/farm-economy/farm-household-...) and just to make things more confusing the moniker is self-applied. In a perfect world the principal would be the most important or the most active Operator in a multiple Operator farm but perfection is going to elude us w/r/t the USDA.
Edited to note the upvote for your reasonable demeanor while disagreeing. An example I strive to follow.
Unless there is some sort of blowup, or an ER visit, you're not going to be in any kind of hurry to see the look on your mom/dad's face when they realize you're right. Or how angry they get if they refuse to see reason.
>When you are too old or infirm to farm at all you sell it to your kid or they get power of attorney and take it.
When my grandfather retired from farming, he simply leased the land to the guy who owned the adjacent farm. After my grandfather passed away ownership transferred to my grandmother until her death at 101. The same lease arrangement continued for a nearly thirty years. What was the age of the farmers of those farms?
If you keep making teen-aged labor more and more impractical, then you're going to have problems. A lot of the really labor intensive work in farming requires almost no skill, just a whole bunch of hands and bodies. The cycles of farming naturally have highs and lows; when it's time to plant or time to reap, it's all hands on deck to get it done before time and weather runs out, and the rest of the season you need considerably less labor.
I think they still take two weeks off school in the middle of the fall in Aroostook County, Maine, so the potato farmers can get their harvest in.
An end effector pose has 6 DOF (3 translation, 3 rotation). A robot with fewer than 6 DOF can't physically reach all poses in its task space, so if sensing says go here, the kinematics will often say it can get close, but not exactly.
A robot with exactly 6 DOF can usually reach all poses in its task space, with a catch. Typically there are only a discrete number of joint configurations for a given pose (like 4 or 8). Thus, if you want to reach a certain pose but all joint configurations are in collision then you are in trouble. Adding just 1 more DOF, making it a 7 DOF arm, ensures that the arm can generally reach any pose with an infinite number of configurations, the last dimension used to plan avoiding collision.
If you use motion planning and sensing for all of this, instead of something like a teach pendant where you carefully set all of the desired poses manually, then higher DOF is easier.
Which one looks 'better' or 'more sophisticated'? SCARA or a robotic arm? Which one is going to attract more investors?
But farms generally have lots of land / space availability. The pipeline for growing, farming, and transporting crops is fairly predictable, minus unexpected events like hurricanes/tornados/rainfall, diseases, pests, spoilage, etc
With farming, everything to my understanding is mostly predictable for crop size. Farms generally specialize in one type of crop if I'm not mistaken, especially if its hydrophonics /inhouse like in the dutch farm video mentioned in this thread.
SCARA makes more sense for farming
It seems to me that we would see more adoption of farm positions if we provided smaller, integrated farm plots where folks that had their fill of urban living, wanted to raise a family and be closer to nature could be apart of a community. Sort of a replacement for the sterile suburbs where people go to raise families, only with flexible family focused farm jobs.
I realize there are intentional communities that provide this, but I wonder if the ag industry is missing out on an opportunity also.
Edit: it was super cool to meet his cows but the market for 12$ yogurt is so small that it would he hard to break into that market. He only got there because his family has run a very natural dairy farm for decades (or at least that's what he told me).
So the real question isn't can someone produce yoghurt cheaper than this person (they can) but is the product they produce worth the $12 for enough people to make a go of it.
The real question is if you love doing it, can you support yourself...
Sure it was boring as a kid, but I got a lot of hands on training fixing machines and working with plants and animals. It was also much safer than the last 25 years that I've lived in Oakland.
I can see that I'm touching on a heated topic (Rural vs. Urban living) that people feel strongly about.
My original point is that there appears to be people willing to work on farms, but not the types of farms that build culture and invite communities to be a part of. So we are left with migrant workers which in this day in age are probably largely illegal.
I would assume that this is an untouched labor force and economic niche that is being underutilized.
The main issue isn't can you do it, but can you make anything like a living wage doing it. Lots of variables in that equation.
I'm certainly not suggesting it's impossible, but it clearly isn't easy.
If you can do all that, it is a good sustainable life, but if the most you can do is grow some garden crops and shit, you will not be able to afford the service costs of everything else you need to survive. You won't be able to sell some tomatoes and afford all the same services as before, especially out int he country where land is cheap. It takes a lot of fuel to get in and out of the areas where land is cheap enough to do any of that also.
Check it out.
https://www.visser.eu/
Notice the task-specific machines and the high plant volumes, such as transplanting machines capable of handling 35,000 plants per hour.
Here's a jsfiddle to demonstrate: http://jsfiddle.net/w49x9f1a/
TL;DR: the disabling of the filesystem API gives it away.
I never understood why APIs like this would ever be disabled. Why not just have it return "blank" responses?! Same goes for e.g. iPhone "access to contacts/location/etc"...
IINM, to make a dent in the larger agricultural system, these facilities will have to produce high calorie and protein bearing crops, like grains, beans, etc.
Leafy greens along with soft fruit need quite a bit of labour which is in short supply in higher income countries. It makes some sense to target them.
It doesn't seem to have much to do with lowering the natural resources (water, fossil fuels) spent per calorie of food produced at a large scale, though.
That isn't food, it's a condiment.
Also pretty sure its a ton more efficient to grow these in a field, under the sun. Want to make a cool robot? Make a field scale planting/harvesting robot for this and that might have some application. This is just a gimmick.
But they probably already have it.
Good. I hate it when my food has human workers in it.