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.
Not a huge erlang person but I think the idea is that redundancy and robustness is managed by the BEAM process on each host, so that layer is much higher in the stack. Compared with k8s where it’s like okay die if something goes wrong and the container orchestrator makes you a whole new chroot as if you just rebooted.
Well, you're hearing it from a guy who has written hardly any Elixir or any other BEAM language. (For a proper intro I recommend this video https://youtu.be/JvBT4XBdoUE). Less practitioner, more fanboy. So I may not be the best source. But I'll try anyhow.
The BEAM is a virtual machine, I guess kinda like the JVM. So just like you can write Java or Kotlin or Clojure or a million other JVM languages, so too can you write Erlang or Elixir or Gleam (I like the look of Gleam)... And expect similar interoperability.
The BEAM has its roots in the telecom world. So while Sun Microsystems was doing the Java thing to make webservers or applets or whatever for the JVM, Ericcson was doing Erlang things to make things like long distance phone calls happen on the BEAM.
(I'm not a fan of Java, I just think it's a decent thing to compare with in this case)
The BEAM folks take a different approach to concurrency than is common elsewhere. BEAM processes are much more lightweight than OS processes, so while it might be insane to run a separate copy of your server for each user, it's less insane to run a separate BEAM process for each user.
BEAM processes interact through message passing. Of course most other processes do to, but only because the developer built it that way. With the BEAM it's built in, each process periodically checks its mailbox for a message which matches its criteria, and if there's no message, it sleeps until it is revisited by the scheduler. There's no async/await business. They're all single threaded and sequential. Instead, you achieve coordination by having many of them, some of which are in charge of starting/stopping/organizing others. (I guess they build structures out of these things called "supervision trees" but I don't precisely know what that is).
This has all grown up in a world where nodes are expected to be physically separate (like either end of a phone call) so you end up with a bit more fault tolerance than if each process is expected to be on the same machine.
In Kubernetes you've got this mountain of yaml which you craft to tell the container orchestrator how to treat your app. And then you've got your app itself which is probably not written in yaml. So I find it very jarring to switch between my dev hat and my ops hat.
And Kubernetes... That's Google's baby, right, so it makes sense that it doesn't feel the same as the underlying app. As a cloud provider, they need a rather high wall between the app and the infra. But I think it causes all kinds of problems. At least in my world, the apps are either in Python or Go, so when there's a problem someone will come along and solve it with yaml-glue to add an additional container which may or may not resemble the app which has the problem.
My brain struggles to hop from Python to Yaml to Go (and there's usually some bash in there too).
The BEAM, by contrast, expects processes to start and stop other processes. So your orchestration logic and your application logic are in the same language. You don't have to express your wishes in yaml and then navigate all of these superfluous layers (e.g. the container entrypoint script, port forwarding, in-cluster DNS, etc) to have your wish granted. That kind of communication is handled by the BEAM's inbuilt message passing system.
If I got to rebuild our stack from scratch I'd use Kubernetes as a cloud-provider-agnostic interface to get access to compute, but instead of expressing anything about the app in YAML, I'd handle all of that extra stuff (e.g. log scraping, metric aggregation, whatever hacky fix is needed today...), I'd handle it in the BEAM, right alongside my app.
People like to say "build security into the app" or "build observability into the app", but standard practice is to bolt on solutions that don't resemble the app at all. My...
Different person, but thank you for the writeup! Very interesting.
For anyone else reading: Please write more comments like this, they're one of the best parts of HN.
To elaborate a little bit on the supervision tree thing then: there's a bunch of different behaviours you can associate with process failure depending on your needs. Let's say you have a Postgres connection pool and for some reason the pool manager process dies. You can set it up so that the death of the manager will:
- kill all of the child processes that the pool was managing
- return an error to all of the request handlers who had active queries going while not touching the request handlers who didn't
- restart the pool manager
- once it's running, respawn the managed pool processes
This is all machinery that's pre-built into the OTP runtime. While that's all happening your app as a whole can keep trucking along and everything that doesn't need to make a database query carries on without even noticing that something was amiss.
The slogan "let it die" gets tossed around the Elixir/Erlang community quite a bit. This is referring to Erlang Processes (the internal lightweight processes, not the host process with a formal OS PID associated with it). Your whole app doesn't die, just the broken parts, and the OTP supervisor subsystem brings them back to life quickly.
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 :)
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.
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.
I've talked about this on this site over the years. My family is close to providing enough food on its own little farm for the whole family, all year (except dairy products and wheat products).
It has taken decades. And about 15 acres. And honestly I don't know how many hours. Tens and tens of thousands.
You can grow a small amount of your own food "without too much investment or work". To replace a substantial portion of your food with home grown takes a shit load of work and time.
That's interesting, I've had a very different experience. Maybe it comes down, partially, to a difference in climate?
We're on a larger piece of land actually, mainly because we have cattle that we may eventually use for meat and dairy. Were producing a large chunk of our food on about 1 acre though, and even then most of that is non-productive land around our house.
We have chickens that give us 6-7 eggs every day. Our garden is 2,500 square feet but well be expanding it a bit for next year. We're very hands off with our garden, though, compared to how most people do it. We don't till, partly to avoid any potential disturbance to the soil and partly out of laziness. We did have to water too much for a couple weeks in June, but that is about it for this year.
We haven't hit the 80-90% goal yet but are on track for that next year, our third year here. Right now I'd estimate us at around 40-50% with the rest supplemented mainly from local farms.
It is work, no doubt about it, especially if you aren't used to working outside. I haven't yet felt like the amount of work has blown past what it costs to buy groceries from the store though, and bonus that we know it's all local without any pesticide or herbicide use.
We live in the southeast US now, the climate is helpful for farming. I lived in Seattle for a few years and that climate would have been much harder to work with. I don't particularly like the task of preserving foods, here we don't need to do nearly as much of that.
> We live in the southeast US now, the climate is helpful for farming. I lived in Seattle for a few years and that climate would have been much harder to work with.
Because of (a lack of) winter sunlight? Or something else?
A combination of a shorter growing season and less rainfall. Seattle has an interesting rap for being extremely rainy, but their average rainfall is around 38 inches while I get around 60 inches per year here.
We've had cattle on the land with us for the last two years, and though we have had to buy in hay its has been to supplement for 2-3 months rather than 5-6 months. We actually have the pasture space to grow and cut our own hay, that's just a comparatively big investment that we haven't taken on yet but is on the list to next year.
We don't own a tractor and aren't interested in getting one. That is our main blocker for producing our own hay, today everyone assumes you have a heavy tractor and all the implements needed to do the job.
Also in the southeast, and it should be pretty easy to find someone to come and bail your hay for you and take a percentage of the hay for themselves. I believe we do 9 acres, and get two harvests. After splitting it with the bailer that's still enough to feed about 25 head of cattle through the year. Though we do supplement with some feed for nutrition reasons. (Our Nutrition, not the cows, we eat them). Late in season the bailers will also typically bring us free hay too because they will cut some fields and have extra. You would still likely need a tractor to move the hay though but you might could figure something out with a trailer. Look for the market bulletin in your area if you haven't already subscribed.
Yep, all of that is definitely on the table. Our first year on this property we actually did talk with someone about cutting hay on a 50:50 split. He used to lease this land and built most of the fences that are still here. It didn't end up working out that summer but we're keeping that in our back pocket for later.
As far as moving hay goes, we have bough square bails the last two years and aren't afraid of hauling it around by hand. If we bring someone in to cut and bail hay wed probably just spend around the same amount the first year around to buy a round bail trailer we could pull with an ATV or mini truck.
Hell I figured I eat about one onion a week, and one whole garlic bulb. I planted 75 onions and 40 garlic bulbs expecting that that would keep me going for a year.
Not even close. Between some of them dying, many of them producing tiny output, and the difficulty of keeping them stored I exhausted my harvest in about four months.
I have a small patch of land, 10m x 10m, and I grow potatoes, garlic, cucumbers, and similar things. But I quickly realized I would never become self-sufficient, not unless I dedicated the whole patch of land to 100% potatoes, which would be far less fun and start to feel like work.
I grew up in a family of 6, we had a 1 acre garden and 3 acres for goats and sheep, 2 acres of fruit trees. Yes, it was a full-time job for my parents, but we canned and froze everything for the winter and only went to the store for sacks of flour. It's possible to do on less land. It took about 5 years to get to the point of sustainability.
It doesn't need to be ready for Instagram but you need to keep weeds under control, you need to keep insects under control, and you need to keep deer, rabbits, and other veggie-loving animals away or barricaded. You also need to provide irrigation when needed, and of course harvest the vegetables when they are ready. It's quite a bit of work if you want to maximize your harvest. Any kind of serious vegetable garden probably demands at least an hour a day of your time, large gardens may require much more than that.
Its all in expectations I guess. We have been focusing on balancing yield with investment. If we can get half the production for a quarter of the work, we'll take that trade off.
We've actually been running a test this year that has been interesting to watch play out. Our garden isn't very dense comparatively, and its planted into what was pasture before. We did cut the grass when planting and have trimmed it a few times, but its far from a garden free of weeds.
We also planted a space along the lines of a milpa or a chaos garden. We planted corn in rows, untilled and effectively just a grass pasture that we clipped short to start. When the corn germinated we followed behind with a variety of beans, peas, squash, and greens. It isn't nearly as productive per foot as it could be, but we haven't put much time into it beyond planting and a few deep waterings during a drought.
I think an hour a day is a totally reasonable expectation. To me that's worth it, but that wouldn't work for everyone and finding an hour a day may not be an easy ask depending on your lifestyle. I would argue, though, that if it isn't worth an hour a day to you you probably aren't too concerned with growing a large portion of your own food.
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.
But, wow apparently the FDA rounds cups in nutrition labeling to be exactly 240ml “legal cup”, which I agree is super annoying. It’s 1.4% more.
“For purposes of nutrition labeling, 1 cup means 240 mL, 1 tablespoon means 15 mL, 1 teaspoon means 5 mL, 1 fluid ounce means 30 mL, and 1 ounce means 28 g (21 CFR 101.9(b)(5)(viii))”
The unit of a "cup" there is sourced from the US government, and thus it's well known to be a volumetric measurement that is equal to 1/672 of a standard oil barrel's volume. It's not vague for US customers at least.
It hurts my soul that it's using a volumetric measurement for leafy food, like if you cut lettuce leaves into pieces, they have the same nutrients but take up way less space, so 3 cups of roughly cut lettuce leaves is different from 3 cups of finely chopped lettuce leaves, which is also different from 3 cups of uncut lettuce leaves. Just give it to us in mass or calories please (like grams or fractions of an oil barrel's mass, or fraction of a barrel of oil's calories and nutrients).
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.
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.
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.
It doesn't really look like it can handle weather or ordinary dirt getting into the belt drive and rails. Automating the watering isn't hard with existing technology. if it can't remove weeds, I don't see what's the point.
I have a garden that I enjoy, but after years of trial I've learned to only plant hardy native plants and wild flowers because I have a black thumb for vegetables. My main issue is a lack of patience -- I don't want to go out to water everything or monitor if things are getting as much sunlight as I thought they would. But for the last couple years I'd been considering setting up a raspberry pi, some moisture sensors and some kind of drip system as a fun summer project to add on top of my flower garden, so that'd be a journey for me.
It's a cool toy, but in the end you're going to be spending more time and money maintaining and troubleshooting this contraption than you would have by just touching grass and getting your hands dirty.
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?
Lol dirt is going to get in all of it and it's very hard to clean extruded aluminum rails, not to mention how small those wheels were. How's it driven - belts / gears? How often are you going to disassemble and maintain this thing? what's the maintenance schedule like? I would bet it is more demanding than planting a 4x8 raised bed.
That said I still love the project. I don't think the point is to grow plants maximally efficiently at this point, it's a early release of something cool and it's open source.
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.
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.
Nature isn't perfect and has disadvantages compared to us.
We don't have to invent ex post facto explanations for why something is the case in nature or why there is some un-intuitive reason as for why the natural way is better.
Nor are we perfect and we've been wrong about much in nature more often than we've been right over the past many millennia. The previous poster didn't imply either case regardless. The post simply pointed out an assumption being made.
Frankly, I prefer the way that thinks of 'ex post facto' explanations for nature. At least that keeps us hypothesizing and not sitting there tooting our own horns.
> Nature isn't perfect and has disadvantages compared to us.
Wow we have completely different world views. I think nature is perfect and it's us who have gone too far away from it to notice and hence we are far from perfection as well. Ideally we should not be comparing us to nature since we are part of it. But somewhere deep down we know we are not aligned with it so we end up comparing it to humans which seems pretty grandiose on our end.
How can nature be perfect when it is constantly changing? We alter our environment out of necessity, we would only be able to survive in a very small number of climates on Earth if we did nothing to change our surroundings. Lucky you if you happen to be somewhere with year round fruit to pluck from the vine and temperate climate in the winters but that leaves the other 8 billion people to die of starvation and exposure.
I'm sincerely fascinated by your perspective. I haven't heard this viewpoint before.
Why do you think nature is perfect? I.e. what is your "gold standard" against which you measure?
Something that immediately comes to mind for me is all the death and suffering that is abundant through nature. If the only thing that matters is propagation of life, then nature does seem pretty good at it, but as a being that operates some layers above the selfish gene, it seems far from perfect.
> Something that immediately comes to mind for me is all the death and suffering that is abundant through nature
What if this is the best it can do with all the things that can go wrong or are going wrong. Perfection does not mean things will never go wrong. They can and they will. I can give you example of process that is near perfection: photosynthesis. Nature can store energy and then utilize it without creating adverse effect on other life. This is just one example but there are many processes like this.
> Nature isn't perfect and has disadvantages compared to us.
That's assuming that we are somehow outside of nature.
> We don't have to invent ex post facto explanations for why something is the case in nature or why there is some un-intuitive reason as for why the natural way is better.
We don't have to , no , but we do , because that's how we learn.
Nobody was claiming the "natural" way was better, just that it might serve a purpose.
> Hey and you were wrong. You are pretty bad at understanding what other people are saying.
Or you are bad at conveying an explicit meaning.
> It wasn't related because the other person was correct in that you misunderstood my statement.
I've outlined why i thought what i did, if that was a misunderstanding of your intention I'm willing to accept that, doesn't mean what you said was clear.
Well, actually it's extremely obvious there you aren't actually attempting to understand my argument.
The other person noticed it as well.
Notice, how instead of going on about this, you could have instead gone back to my message and actually tried to figure out what my argument was.
But you didn't.
Because you aren't interested in understanding what my argument was.
> that a 50% failure rate
Oh you still aren't getting it.
It's not a 50% failure rate. It is a 0% failure rate. Instead it is that someone else noticed they you werent even trying.
Of course you aren't going to admit that.
But if someone else backs me up, thats really good evidence.
I am fully confident that the success rate is 100% and actually you could understand the argument if you stopped doing what we both know you are doing right now.
I've clearly stated what my interpretation was, with an explanation of how i got there.
A single line explaining how "people vs nature" doesn't imply that people and nature are different things would have cleared this up easily but instead we get multiple instances of you saying "it's so obvious I'm not going to explain it"
However, you have full confidence that everything is cleared up, so i guess it must be.
Saying something like rain serves a purpose is backwards. Plants have evolved to survive in conditions that include rain, rain has not been deployed to serve a purpose for plants. There may be other conditions that are easier for plants to thrive in.
If modern farming protocols are to water at the soil, I would be strongly willing to bet that is the best way to water, at least for our particular situation of growing the crops we grow on the farms we grow them on.
Much has gone into studying how to best grow these crops, both at universities and research centers and on the field at farms themselves.
I think it’s the difference in frequency. There’s likely other factors too, I’d suppose rain purges mold spores from the air for example, as it does with particulate pollution.
Yep. The thoughts are evolving during the speech process. The speaker might start the sentence thinking about one factor, but decides to make it plural after the first words have already started.
1. If you accidentally say There is and want to use a plural after, (for example, a lot), you can just say a number in between. The sentence stays correct, you just have to say 2 additional words. I personally never had this problem
2. This is internet. You are free to edit your comment and reread it a million times before posting
Hope you understand what I'm trying to say, not being native sometimes restricts my ability to properly articulate semi-complex stuff
These are all things people can do, but might not be in the natural flow. Any it depends how the person is speaking. To use a car analogy, a driver can either be looking far ahead and flowing smoothly or looking only a short distance ahead and having to make lots of awkward adjustments. I personally go back and edit things most of the time, but that takes more time for only "style points" in most cases.
The point is it shouldn't be spoken like this. It's just wrong. I'm wondering whether the person is unaware or is this some slang I don't know about. I've seen a bunch of people speak like this, I'm trying to understand the reason
Language is ultimately descriptive, not prescriptive -- so common patterns are never "just wrong". But as someone who taught English for many years, I'm actually fascinated by what you've noticed. Because as an overeducated native English speaker, I observe that:
- "There's likely other factors" sounds totally fine to me.
- "There is likely other factors" sounds horribly wrong.
- "There's other factors" sounds wrong, but not horribly so.
- "There are likely other factors" sounds fine, but you wouldn't usually say "there are" as two distinct words, you'd say...
- "There're likely other factors" which would sound fine if perfectly enunciated, except the "'re" tends to get swallowed up and it will easily sound like "There likely other factors" to the listener which will sound wrong
So my theory here is that, in order to aural eliminate confusion between "there" and "there're", there's an unwritten rule in spoken English where we substitute "there's" instead when the plural object isn't immediately following, but has an adverb intervening.
I'm not 100% sure this is a full explanation of the phenomenon, but what I can tell you is that criticizing it is useless. It's just how native speakers talk -- it's conventional English (at least in the US). What is interesting is investigating it, though! So thanks for noticing a little quirk of English like that.
hell, I'd argue that it should be fine for formal writing as well. Ideally, the gap between written and spoken language is as narrow as possible, since ideally a written text communicates with the reader directly, with as little hurdles to parsing the content as possible. Having to maintain a secondary vocabulary is exhausting and creates barriers. There is a limit to how permissive I am with this personally though, generally I'd only be happy with changes that are semantically near identical, or introduce words which represent genuinely novel concepts rather than slang that re-brands existing concepts.
I agree with all of your examples. But his sentence misses the crucial to be part to be correct. I'm just wondering whether this is deliberate and just a way of speaking informal english, or just the person doesn't know it's incorrect
I'm a native English speaker, and if I'd spoken what they said out loud then I would've said "there's" precisely because "there're" is more difficult to pronounce. It's also how I'd write it, even though I know "there is" is not correct; it's just an evolution of the language, like "ain't".
Yes, and rain fall causes the spread of fungal infestation as said above and it is why we farmers use drip irrigation when possible. FarmBot defenitly has a great marketing video, 3d animation and logo though!
Part of the problem is water composition. Water which contians fertilizers, surfactants etc is going to damage the protective waxy layer on leaves, while rain water will do so less. Next, when watering youre doing so as frequently as the plants can make use of, to encourage maximal growth rates. It would never rain that frequently. finally, the size of droplets is different. Rain drops tend to be big and fat and roll off the waxy leaves while smaller dropplets sit on / stick to the surface where they create a nice wet and likely to rot environment.
Yes and that's a problem. Many modern plants aren't selected to grow in natural conditions. They're breed for properties like high yields, large fruit and often other characteristics are traded off to achieve that because the farmers can change the environment to deal with those problems with greenhouses, chemicals, fertilizers, irrigation etc.
in the wild, plants compete for space and resources and the leaves act as a funnel to direct water (including dew) to the roots that might not otherwise be captured. the leaves can also serve as a shield to prevent the soil around the roots from being eroded by rainfall.
in a garden where plants do not have neighbours competing for space and water isn't scarce, there's no reason to water the leaves when you could just water the roots directly.
Just a mild pruning: in natural/wild environments (I.e. not the sterile labs of monocultural agronomy), plants actually cooperate in the resources department, because each species and stage of maturity has different needs and resource extractive capacities. They’ll “use” their root systems and mycorrhizal connections (which are only reliably present in wild soil) as a medium of exchange.
We do plants a disservice by studying them when they’re grouped together by species and age cohort, and generalizing their behavior under those conditions.
You can recreate these circumstances in your garden by, for example, planting the three sisters (beans, squash, corn) together. You can also opt to grow perennial versions of your crops and stagger their planting / surround them with annuals the complement their chemical needs.
Here's a wild thing: at many of the high end vineyards they'll do low-level helicopter flights over the vines every time it rains to blow the water off the leaves and fruit specifically to prevent infection and rot.
having worked at a cargo drone company, that is one thing that our platform would have excelled at. although ours had a tendency to simply flatten vegetation when "cornering" at low altitude.
I could certainly be wrong about the timing. I’m definitely not a grape growing expert by any means, I mostly know about it from being in the UAV world and having had some discussions about replacing the helicopters with drones for getting the water off.
Yep. I recently visited some high end vineyards in Arizona, and the grapes really thrive because of how dry it is. They are able to irrigate carefully to avoid wetting the tops of the plants.
This is 99% urban legend. You can just barely create it in a lab with just the right plant (with thick hydrophobic trichromes) under just the right light with no wind... but that's not what happens in nature.
Exactly. When it rains in nature, 95% of the times a) there isn't enough sunlight for the droplets to focus and make a burn spot, and b) the droplets don't stay on the leaf but flow down instead.
The original advice is solid and not an urban legend, but it applies to cases like watering plants in your balcony when the sun is out, bright and hot. Source: I have caused burn spots in plants of my own.
I believe watering at night will generally lead to more fungal rot problems. Better to water early morning, when the water will have a chance to sink into the soil, but will be pulled up into the plant by evaporation of water from the leaves (the leaves’ own water, not water you applied)
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.
Drip irrigation is a once and done setup and also automated. I feel like this project is insanely cool, but ultimately not practically useful at the pricepoint.
Watering is definitely a solved problem in agriculture. There is absolutely no scenario where two plants growing right next to each other would need drastically different amounts of water. The project, founders and company are utterly useless.
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.
more tricky frequently because you need to measure the moisture for each plant as maintainance is difficult without, but this is generally the most efficient low cost method in very arid regions from what I have seen (dad is prof in the field, so exposure is years of unpaid labour as a child and student)
Yes, but as GP said that doesn't scale. I live in an agriculture heavy community in the desert (mountain-west USA), and drip irrigation is only really used for small gardens and landscaping. Anyone with an acre or more of crops is not using drip.
I certainly agree that drip is the ideal, and when you aren't doing drip you want to minimize the standing water on leaves, but if I were designing this project I would design for scale.
But drip irrigation doesn’t scale because you would need to lay + connect + pressurize + maintain hundreds of miles of hoses. It’s high-CapEx.
A “watering robot”, meanwhile, can just do what a human gardener does to water a garden, “at scale.”
Picture a carrot harvester-alike machine — something whose main body sits on a dirt track between narrow-packed row-groups, with a gantry over the row-group supported by narrow inter-row wheels. Except instead of picker arms above the rows, this machine would have hoses hanging down between each row (or hoses running down the gantry wheels, depending on placement) with little electronic valve-boxes on the ends of the hoses, and side-facing jet nozzles on the sides of the valve boxes. The hoses stay always-fully-pressurized (from a tank + compressor attached to the main body); the valves get triggered to open at a set rate and pulse-width, to feed the right amount of water directly to the soil.
“But isn’t the ‘drip’ part of drip irrigation important?” Not really, no! (They just do it because constant passive input is lazy and predictable and lower-maintenance.) Actual rain is very bursty, so most plants (incl. crops) aren’t bothered at all by having their soil periodically drenched and then allowed to dry out again, getting almost bone dry before the next drenching. In fact, everything other than wetland crops like rice prefer this; and the dry-out cycles decrease the growth rates for things like parasitic fungi.
As a bonus, the exact same platform could perform other functions at the same time. In fact, look at it the other way around: a “watering robot” is just an extension of existing precision weeding robots (i.e. the machines designed to reduce reliance on pesticides by precision-targeting pesticide, or clipping/picking weeds, or burning/layering weeds away, or etc.) Any robot that can “get in there” at ground level between rows to do that, can also be made to water the soil while it’s down there.
Fair point, the robot could lower its nozzle to the ground and jet the water there, much like a human would, with probably not a lot of changes required. That does seem like it would be a good optimization.
Isn't it better to mist plants, especially if you can't delay watering due to full sun?
IIUC that's what big box gardening centers do; with fixed retractable hoses for misting and watering.
A robot could make and refill clay irrigation Ollas with or without microsprinkler inlets and level sensing with backscatter RF, but do Ollas scale?
Why have a moving part there at all? Could just modulate spec valves to high and low or better fixed height sprayers
FWIU newer solar weeding robots - which minimize pesticide use by direct substitution and minimize herbicide by vigilant crop monitoring - have fixed arrays instead of moving part lasers
An agricultural robot spec:
Large wheels, light frame, can right itself when terrain topology is misestimated, Tensor operations per second (TOPS), Computer Vision (OpenCV, NeRF,), modular sensor and utility mounts, Open CAD model with material density for mass centroid and ground contact outer hull rollover estimation,
There is a shift underway from ubiquitous tilling to lower and no till options. Tilling solves certain problems in a field - for a while - but causes others, and is relatively expensive. Buried lines do not coexist with tilling.
We are coming to understand a bit more about root biology and the ecosystem of topsoil and it seems like the 20th century approach may have been a highly optimized technique of using a sledgehammer to pound in a screw.
> IIUC that's what big box gardening centers do; with fixed retractable hoses for misting and watering.
Speaking from experience - they're making it up as their go along. Instructed to water the soil rather than the leaves and a certain number of seconds per diameter of pot, and set loose. The benefit of 'gentle rain' heads (high flow, low velocity, unlike misters) at close range is that they don't blow the heads off the blooming flowers they're selling, which is what happens if you use the heads designed for longer range at close range.
> * By 2023, farmland with strict no-tillage principles comprise roughly 30% of the cropland in the U.S.*
The new model used to score fuel lifecycle emissions is the Greenhouse Gases, Regulated Emissions and Energy use in Technologies (GREET) model: https://www.energy.gov/eere/greet :
> GREET is a tool that assesses a range of life cycle energy, emissions, and environmental impact challenges and that can be used to guide decision-making, research and development, and regulations related to transportation and the energy sector.
> * For any given energy and vehicle system, GREET can calculate:*
> - Total energy consumption (non-renewable and renewable)
> - Fossil fuel energy use (petroleum, natural gas, coal)
> - Greenhouse gas emissions
> - Air pollutant emissions
> - Water consumption
FWIU you have to plant cover crops to receive the new US ethanol / biofuel subsidies.
> Some biofuel groups were encouraged the guidance would recognize climate-smart farm practices for the first time in ethanol or biodiesel's carbon intensity score. Others said the guidance hurts them because their producers have a hard time growing cover crops and carbon scoring shouldn't be limited to a few specific farming practices. Environmental groups said there isn't enough hard science to prove the benefit of those farm practices.
I have "The Living Soil Handbook" by Jessie Frost (in KY) here, and page 1 "Introduction" reads:
> 1. Disturb the soil as little as possible.
> 2. Keep the soil covered as much as possible.
> 3. Keep the soil planted as much as possible.
FWIU tilling results in oxidation and sterilization due to UV-C radiation and ozone; tilling turns soil to dirt; and dry dirt doesn't fix nitrogen or CO2 or host mycorhizzae which help plants absorb nutrients.
Bunds with no irrigation to not till over appear to win in many climates. Maybe bunds, agrivoltaics, and agricultural robots can help undo soil depletion.
What is the scale you are talking about here? Because at any significant scale the hard part is not where and how you spray the water but how you get the water there. Are you imagining a robot with a tank? How much water can that carry?
For non precision watering, we have existing options.
For other things - There are probably opportunities in adapting the existing center pivot systems with their pivots and tracks and wheels, with heavier truss segments that support robotic actuators up and down the line.
If you are concerned about plastic you could substitute terracotta half-round channel pipes and do a micro-canal / channel irrigation. More expensive than plastic irrigation pipes but worth it if you’re determined to avoid plastic. Wood would be a cheaper alternative but requires a lot more maintenance and replacement. We’re talking small scale agriculture with these robots anyways so either option is practical especially compared to the cost of the robot.
You seem like you very much actually know what you’re talking about. Do you have any recommendations for books for laypeople for understanding modern agriculture?
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.
you don't need anything fancy for drip, a small hole in the pipe and a timer on your pump is is generally enough. If you really want to go fancy you can isolate the system and use moisture sensors, which are cheap.
Moisture sensors that measure conductivity are pretty useless unless frequently recalibrated but time domain reflectometry sensors are much better and more accurate.
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.
Growing tomatoes as starts that are transplanted is not required if your frost free season is long enough. The benefit of using starts is you can give plants a head start and only plant the strongest.
I can’t emphasize this enough. I mean, I’m using the GardenGrid watering system and an Orbit automated timer to water my 8 raised bed. So the intensive watering problem is solved.
Automatically planting the seeds? I can take it or leave it.
But the really intensive work is pulling those extraordinarily hardy weeds and pest control.
The cost of this thing at nearly $3000 including taxes is just too high for effectively an automated watering system that is easily solved at HomeDepot and the GardenGrid.
I get maybe 50 or so tomato plants in about 1 square meter in my garden, just from the seeds that are left in the ground from last year's tomatoes. (Of course I don't let all 50 grow and instead give most away.)
Those are not going to bear impressive fruit. People who grow tomatoes for sale almost exclusively plant hybrids. Making hybrid seeds is even more involved, and they cost more, but the crop is much larger, so it’s worth the hassle.
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.
Thanks for busting that myth. Foliar isn't about hydration state, it has chemicals and surfactants and it's recommended to do it in morning/night. according to this AL extension office, it can causes a phytotoxicity (leaf burn) at high leaf temps (probably because higher uptake rate of the chemicals) https://www.aces.edu/blog/topics/lawn-garden/foliar-feeding-...
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.
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.
Yes it is. Water freezes and provides protection from freezing cold as funny as it might sound. Of course watering systems for huge gardens or orchards are expensive even if you have access to enough water.
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.
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.
Come on, there are obvious solutions to this like having lanes, same as farm use for machinery right now. :p
Having a roomba like (yes, obviously different to the standard look of a robot vacuum cleaner; but a small autonomous robot; eg a watering can on tank treads, or a bb8 rolling ball) bot with a docking station out of the weather seems enormously more sustainable and scalable.
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.
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?
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.
368 comments
[ 2.7 ms ] story [ 291 ms ] threadA lot of advances since then.
Open Source Farming Robot - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27628101 - June 2021 (227 comments)
FarmBot Genesis XL - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19002022 - Jan 2019 (1 comment)
It’s a very cool project.
Maybe it's just a grass-is-greener thing but the more Kubernetes I have to stomach, the more interested I become in BEAM languages like Elixir.
Not like they're alternatives exactly, but I get the feeling that the BEAM way is to solve the ops problems in a way resembles how you solved your dev problems. More holistic, less ad hoc.
The BEAM is a virtual machine, I guess kinda like the JVM. So just like you can write Java or Kotlin or Clojure or a million other JVM languages, so too can you write Erlang or Elixir or Gleam (I like the look of Gleam)... And expect similar interoperability.
The BEAM has its roots in the telecom world. So while Sun Microsystems was doing the Java thing to make webservers or applets or whatever for the JVM, Ericcson was doing Erlang things to make things like long distance phone calls happen on the BEAM.
(I'm not a fan of Java, I just think it's a decent thing to compare with in this case)
The BEAM folks take a different approach to concurrency than is common elsewhere. BEAM processes are much more lightweight than OS processes, so while it might be insane to run a separate copy of your server for each user, it's less insane to run a separate BEAM process for each user.
BEAM processes interact through message passing. Of course most other processes do to, but only because the developer built it that way. With the BEAM it's built in, each process periodically checks its mailbox for a message which matches its criteria, and if there's no message, it sleeps until it is revisited by the scheduler. There's no async/await business. They're all single threaded and sequential. Instead, you achieve coordination by having many of them, some of which are in charge of starting/stopping/organizing others. (I guess they build structures out of these things called "supervision trees" but I don't precisely know what that is).
This has all grown up in a world where nodes are expected to be physically separate (like either end of a phone call) so you end up with a bit more fault tolerance than if each process is expected to be on the same machine.
In Kubernetes you've got this mountain of yaml which you craft to tell the container orchestrator how to treat your app. And then you've got your app itself which is probably not written in yaml. So I find it very jarring to switch between my dev hat and my ops hat.
And Kubernetes... That's Google's baby, right, so it makes sense that it doesn't feel the same as the underlying app. As a cloud provider, they need a rather high wall between the app and the infra. But I think it causes all kinds of problems. At least in my world, the apps are either in Python or Go, so when there's a problem someone will come along and solve it with yaml-glue to add an additional container which may or may not resemble the app which has the problem.
My brain struggles to hop from Python to Yaml to Go (and there's usually some bash in there too).
The BEAM, by contrast, expects processes to start and stop other processes. So your orchestration logic and your application logic are in the same language. You don't have to express your wishes in yaml and then navigate all of these superfluous layers (e.g. the container entrypoint script, port forwarding, in-cluster DNS, etc) to have your wish granted. That kind of communication is handled by the BEAM's inbuilt message passing system.
If I got to rebuild our stack from scratch I'd use Kubernetes as a cloud-provider-agnostic interface to get access to compute, but instead of expressing anything about the app in YAML, I'd handle all of that extra stuff (e.g. log scraping, metric aggregation, whatever hacky fix is needed today...), I'd handle it in the BEAM, right alongside my app.
People like to say "build security into the app" or "build observability into the app", but standard practice is to bolt on solutions that don't resemble the app at all. My...
- kill all of the child processes that the pool was managing
- return an error to all of the request handlers who had active queries going while not touching the request handlers who didn't
- restart the pool manager
- once it's running, respawn the managed pool processes
This is all machinery that's pre-built into the OTP runtime. While that's all happening your app as a whole can keep trucking along and everything that doesn't need to make a database query carries on without even noticing that something was amiss.
The slogan "let it die" gets tossed around the Elixir/Erlang community quite a bit. This is referring to Erlang Processes (the internal lightweight processes, not the host process with a formal OS PID associated with it). Your whole app doesn't die, just the broken parts, and the OTP supervisor subsystem brings them back to life quickly.
Various APIs still exist and are callable. https://github.com/Growstuff/growstuff/blob/e8bc72dc900e2593...
Edit: Found a link to yield analysis https://farm.bot/pages/yield It appears the answer is however many Farmbots cover 549 square meters
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.
Most people with any yard or outdoor space could get to the point of growing/raising a large portion of their own food without too much investment or work. A garden doesn't have to be manicured and ready for Instagram, it just needs to produce quality food. Meat and dairy would be the outlier lowering that % if you eat a lot of it, though chickens work well with a modest sized yard and finding a local dairy or farm for meat is still a big improvement on grocery store meat and dairy.
It has taken decades. And about 15 acres. And honestly I don't know how many hours. Tens and tens of thousands.
You can grow a small amount of your own food "without too much investment or work". To replace a substantial portion of your food with home grown takes a shit load of work and time.
We're on a larger piece of land actually, mainly because we have cattle that we may eventually use for meat and dairy. Were producing a large chunk of our food on about 1 acre though, and even then most of that is non-productive land around our house.
We have chickens that give us 6-7 eggs every day. Our garden is 2,500 square feet but well be expanding it a bit for next year. We're very hands off with our garden, though, compared to how most people do it. We don't till, partly to avoid any potential disturbance to the soil and partly out of laziness. We did have to water too much for a couple weeks in June, but that is about it for this year.
We haven't hit the 80-90% goal yet but are on track for that next year, our third year here. Right now I'd estimate us at around 40-50% with the rest supplemented mainly from local farms.
It is work, no doubt about it, especially if you aren't used to working outside. I haven't yet felt like the amount of work has blown past what it costs to buy groceries from the store though, and bonus that we know it's all local without any pesticide or herbicide use.
We live in the southeast US now, the climate is helpful for farming. I lived in Seattle for a few years and that climate would have been much harder to work with. I don't particularly like the task of preserving foods, here we don't need to do nearly as much of that.
Because of (a lack of) winter sunlight? Or something else?
We've had cattle on the land with us for the last two years, and though we have had to buy in hay its has been to supplement for 2-3 months rather than 5-6 months. We actually have the pasture space to grow and cut our own hay, that's just a comparatively big investment that we haven't taken on yet but is on the list to next year.
We don't own a tractor and aren't interested in getting one. That is our main blocker for producing our own hay, today everyone assumes you have a heavy tractor and all the implements needed to do the job.
As far as moving hay goes, we have bough square bails the last two years and aren't afraid of hauling it around by hand. If we bring someone in to cut and bail hay wed probably just spend around the same amount the first year around to buy a round bail trailer we could pull with an ATV or mini truck.
Not even close. Between some of them dying, many of them producing tiny output, and the difficulty of keeping them stored I exhausted my harvest in about four months.
I have a small patch of land, 10m x 10m, and I grow potatoes, garlic, cucumbers, and similar things. But I quickly realized I would never become self-sufficient, not unless I dedicated the whole patch of land to 100% potatoes, which would be far less fun and start to feel like work.
Interesting. Where I'm from (CEE), this would be about one onion per one or two days.
We've actually been running a test this year that has been interesting to watch play out. Our garden isn't very dense comparatively, and its planted into what was pasture before. We did cut the grass when planting and have trimmed it a few times, but its far from a garden free of weeds.
We also planted a space along the lines of a milpa or a chaos garden. We planted corn in rows, untilled and effectively just a grass pasture that we clipped short to start. When the corn germinated we followed behind with a variety of beans, peas, squash, and greens. It isn't nearly as productive per foot as it could be, but we haven't put much time into it beyond planting and a few deep waterings during a drought.
I think an hour a day is a totally reasonable expectation. To me that's worth it, but that wouldn't work for everyone and finding an hour a day may not be an easy ask depending on your lifestyle. I would argue, though, that if it isn't worth an hour a day to you you probably aren't too concerned with growing a large portion of your own food.
A small farmbot covers 4.5 m^2 and costs $3,000, an XL covers 18 m^2 and costs $4,500.
I think 3-7 sq m makes sense as a practical range, maybe round up to 10 to have some wiggle room.
It's a lightweight gantry system for seeding, watering, and (chemical spray) weeding.
Handy for big seeding greenhouses and some leafy greens.
It's not going to significantly help with you apple, lemon, orange, fig, grapefruit and etc. trees.
It's not going to significantly help with your potatoes and other root vegetables.
It's not going to tend to and protect your lambs, goats, chickens, etc.
FWiW I do have one spry old chap born n 1935 who can do all that already, has a few decades of experience, and can feed an easy magnitude more than just four.
Fun project, needs a wee bit of work.
And, there are scaled up Farm bots for farms, not just for oversized regular garden beds.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AqqOQdDBUwQ
https://www.sydney.edu.au/engineering/news-and-events/news/2...
https://www.agricultural-robotics.com/news/connectivity-in-a...
It hurts my soul that anybody producing a table such as that is using something as vague as a "cup" in their calculations.
American legal cup ? metric cup ? Canadian cup ? or one of the other ones.
Even if you narrow it to just the roughly the US you still have 4 + metric , so 5 different options.
and that doesn't even account for people just using the cup they have to hand.
It's not a rant at you, it's frustration with non-specific, arbitrary units.
US cups and metric cups are different?
But, wow apparently the FDA rounds cups in nutrition labeling to be exactly 240ml “legal cup”, which I agree is super annoying. It’s 1.4% more.
“For purposes of nutrition labeling, 1 cup means 240 mL, 1 tablespoon means 15 mL, 1 teaspoon means 5 mL, 1 fluid ounce means 30 mL, and 1 ounce means 28 g (21 CFR 101.9(b)(5)(viii))”
It hurts my soul that it's using a volumetric measurement for leafy food, like if you cut lettuce leaves into pieces, they have the same nutrients but take up way less space, so 3 cups of roughly cut lettuce leaves is different from 3 cups of finely chopped lettuce leaves, which is also different from 3 cups of uncut lettuce leaves. Just give it to us in mass or calories please (like grams or fractions of an oil barrel's mass, or fraction of a barrel of oil's calories and nutrients).
> To each their own
I agree. Some people might just want to be in control of where there food comes from.
> but small gardens like this are about the journey, not the destination
Again, to each their own. Also, coding a robot to automate gardening is a journey as well.
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?
That said I still love the project. I don't think the point is to grow plants maximally efficiently at this point, it's a early release of something cool and it's open source.
If they have a solid planning software that accounts for crop rotation, companion planting, etc. then that's already a much better value proposition.
We don't have to invent ex post facto explanations for why something is the case in nature or why there is some un-intuitive reason as for why the natural way is better.
Frankly, I prefer the way that thinks of 'ex post facto' explanations for nature. At least that keeps us hypothesizing and not sitting there tooting our own horns.
Wow we have completely different world views. I think nature is perfect and it's us who have gone too far away from it to notice and hence we are far from perfection as well. Ideally we should not be comparing us to nature since we are part of it. But somewhere deep down we know we are not aligned with it so we end up comparing it to humans which seems pretty grandiose on our end.
Why do you think nature is perfect? I.e. what is your "gold standard" against which you measure?
Something that immediately comes to mind for me is all the death and suffering that is abundant through nature. If the only thing that matters is propagation of life, then nature does seem pretty good at it, but as a being that operates some layers above the selfish gene, it seems far from perfect.
What if this is the best it can do with all the things that can go wrong or are going wrong. Perfection does not mean things will never go wrong. They can and they will. I can give you example of process that is near perfection: photosynthesis. Nature can store energy and then utilize it without creating adverse effect on other life. This is just one example but there are many processes like this.
That's assuming that we are somehow outside of nature.
> We don't have to invent ex post facto explanations for why something is the case in nature or why there is some un-intuitive reason as for why the natural way is better.
We don't have to , no , but we do , because that's how we learn.
Nobody was claiming the "natural" way was better, just that it might serve a purpose.
No it isn’t. You know what they meant, you are just one-upping them on a technicality in a way that doesn’t advance the discussion at all.
Yes, it is.
> You know what they meant.
I have clearly stated what i think they meant.
They specifically said "disadvantages compared to us." that heavily implies ( if not outright declares ) an us vs them.
It seems you have a different interpretation, I'd be interested to hear what that is if you don't mind ?
> you are just one-upping them on a technicality in a way that doesn’t advance the discussion at all.
If you don't see how what i said was related to the discussion then we probably aren't going to agree on what constitutes a technicality.
Hey and you were wrong. You are pretty bad at understanding what other people are saying.
> how what i said was related to the discussion
It wasn't related because the other person was correct in that you misunderstood my statement.
Or you are bad at conveying an explicit meaning.
> It wasn't related because the other person was correct in that you misunderstood my statement.
I've outlined why i thought what i did, if that was a misunderstanding of your intention I'm willing to accept that, doesn't mean what you said was clear.
The other person understood me just fine, and also noticed how obvious my statement was, and how you avoided it.
> doesn't mean what you said was clear.
Oh it absolutely does. The other person understood it perfectly.
Of a sample size of two that's a 50% failure rate.
You stated an us vs them, i pointed out that drawing an us vs them assumes that us and them are different.
That you apparently meant something different is odd to me, but you do you.
> Oh it absolutely does. The other person understood it perfectly.
Again, 50% failure rate.
If you wish to conclude that a 50% failure rate makes something obvious in favour of one side, feel free.
Well, actually it's extremely obvious there you aren't actually attempting to understand my argument.
The other person noticed it as well.
Notice, how instead of going on about this, you could have instead gone back to my message and actually tried to figure out what my argument was.
But you didn't.
Because you aren't interested in understanding what my argument was.
> that a 50% failure rate
Oh you still aren't getting it.
It's not a 50% failure rate. It is a 0% failure rate. Instead it is that someone else noticed they you werent even trying.
Of course you aren't going to admit that.
But if someone else backs me up, thats really good evidence.
I am fully confident that the success rate is 100% and actually you could understand the argument if you stopped doing what we both know you are doing right now.
A single line explaining how "people vs nature" doesn't imply that people and nature are different things would have cleared this up easily but instead we get multiple instances of you saying "it's so obvious I'm not going to explain it"
However, you have full confidence that everything is cleared up, so i guess it must be.
I'll see myself out.
Much has gone into studying how to best grow these crops, both at universities and research centers and on the field at farms themselves.
1. If you accidentally say There is and want to use a plural after, (for example, a lot), you can just say a number in between. The sentence stays correct, you just have to say 2 additional words. I personally never had this problem
2. This is internet. You are free to edit your comment and reread it a million times before posting
Hope you understand what I'm trying to say, not being native sometimes restricts my ability to properly articulate semi-complex stuff
Language is ultimately descriptive, not prescriptive -- so common patterns are never "just wrong". But as someone who taught English for many years, I'm actually fascinated by what you've noticed. Because as an overeducated native English speaker, I observe that:
- "There's likely other factors" sounds totally fine to me.
- "There is likely other factors" sounds horribly wrong.
- "There's other factors" sounds wrong, but not horribly so.
- "There are likely other factors" sounds fine, but you wouldn't usually say "there are" as two distinct words, you'd say...
- "There're likely other factors" which would sound fine if perfectly enunciated, except the "'re" tends to get swallowed up and it will easily sound like "There likely other factors" to the listener which will sound wrong
So my theory here is that, in order to aural eliminate confusion between "there" and "there're", there's an unwritten rule in spoken English where we substitute "there's" instead when the plural object isn't immediately following, but has an adverb intervening.
I'm not 100% sure this is a full explanation of the phenomenon, but what I can tell you is that criticizing it is useless. It's just how native speakers talk -- it's conventional English (at least in the US). What is interesting is investigating it, though! So thanks for noticing a little quirk of English like that.
Why are we grammar policing on hackernews? This is a tech and startup forum not a language forum.
By example:
"There are likely to be cows over that hill" - correct, many cows
"There is likely to be a herd of cows over that hill" - correct, one herd
"There are likely to be other factors" - correct, many factors
"There is likely to be a number of other factors" - correct, one collection of many factors
"There are likely to be a number of other factors" - correct, emphasizes the factors over the collection
"There are likely to be other factors" - correct if you want to treat 'other factors' as a singular group. Up for debate.
Also, "there're" is very hard to say, so using "there's" as a contraction for "there are" is, in my book, okay, even if it's not technically correct.
Genuine question, does it help the plants in some way?
in a garden where plants do not have neighbours competing for space and water isn't scarce, there's no reason to water the leaves when you could just water the roots directly.
We do plants a disservice by studying them when they’re grouped together by species and age cohort, and generalizing their behavior under those conditions.
You can recreate these circumstances in your garden by, for example, planting the three sisters (beans, squash, corn) together. You can also opt to grow perennial versions of your crops and stagger their planting / surround them with annuals the complement their chemical needs.
It’s pretty rare though. They usually only do it when it rains heavily right before harvest.
Exactly. When it rains in nature, 95% of the times a) there isn't enough sunlight for the droplets to focus and make a burn spot, and b) the droplets don't stay on the leaf but flow down instead.
The original advice is solid and not an urban legend, but it applies to cases like watering plants in your balcony when the sun is out, bright and hot. Source: I have caused burn spots in plants of my own.
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.
I certainly agree that drip is the ideal, and when you aren't doing drip you want to minimize the standing water on leaves, but if I were designing this project I would design for scale.
A “watering robot”, meanwhile, can just do what a human gardener does to water a garden, “at scale.”
Picture a carrot harvester-alike machine — something whose main body sits on a dirt track between narrow-packed row-groups, with a gantry over the row-group supported by narrow inter-row wheels. Except instead of picker arms above the rows, this machine would have hoses hanging down between each row (or hoses running down the gantry wheels, depending on placement) with little electronic valve-boxes on the ends of the hoses, and side-facing jet nozzles on the sides of the valve boxes. The hoses stay always-fully-pressurized (from a tank + compressor attached to the main body); the valves get triggered to open at a set rate and pulse-width, to feed the right amount of water directly to the soil.
“But isn’t the ‘drip’ part of drip irrigation important?” Not really, no! (They just do it because constant passive input is lazy and predictable and lower-maintenance.) Actual rain is very bursty, so most plants (incl. crops) aren’t bothered at all by having their soil periodically drenched and then allowed to dry out again, getting almost bone dry before the next drenching. In fact, everything other than wetland crops like rice prefer this; and the dry-out cycles decrease the growth rates for things like parasitic fungi.
As a bonus, the exact same platform could perform other functions at the same time. In fact, look at it the other way around: a “watering robot” is just an extension of existing precision weeding robots (i.e. the machines designed to reduce reliance on pesticides by precision-targeting pesticide, or clipping/picking weeds, or burning/layering weeds away, or etc.) Any robot that can “get in there” at ground level between rows to do that, can also be made to water the soil while it’s down there.
IIUC that's what big box gardening centers do; with fixed retractable hoses for misting and watering.
A robot could make and refill clay irrigation Ollas with or without microsprinkler inlets and level sensing with backscatter RF, but do Ollas scale?
Why have a moving part there at all? Could just modulate spec valves to high and low or better fixed height sprayers
FWIU newer solar weeding robots - which minimize pesticide use by direct substitution and minimize herbicide by vigilant crop monitoring - have fixed arrays instead of moving part lasers
An agricultural robot spec:
Large wheels, light frame, can right itself when terrain topology is misestimated, Tensor operations per second (TOPS), Computer Vision (OpenCV, NeRF,), modular sensor and utility mounts, Open CAD model with material density for mass centroid and ground contact outer hull rollover estimation,
We are coming to understand a bit more about root biology and the ecosystem of topsoil and it seems like the 20th century approach may have been a highly optimized technique of using a sledgehammer to pound in a screw.
> IIUC that's what big box gardening centers do; with fixed retractable hoses for misting and watering.
Speaking from experience - they're making it up as their go along. Instructed to water the soil rather than the leaves and a certain number of seconds per diameter of pot, and set loose. The benefit of 'gentle rain' heads (high flow, low velocity, unlike misters) at close range is that they don't blow the heads off the blooming flowers they're selling, which is what happens if you use the heads designed for longer range at close range.
No-Till Farming > Adoption across the world : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/No-till_farming#Adoption_acros... :
> * By 2023, farmland with strict no-tillage principles comprise roughly 30% of the cropland in the U.S.*
The new model used to score fuel lifecycle emissions is the Greenhouse Gases, Regulated Emissions and Energy use in Technologies (GREET) model: https://www.energy.gov/eere/greet :
> GREET is a tool that assesses a range of life cycle energy, emissions, and environmental impact challenges and that can be used to guide decision-making, research and development, and regulations related to transportation and the energy sector.
> * For any given energy and vehicle system, GREET can calculate:*
> - Total energy consumption (non-renewable and renewable)
> - Fossil fuel energy use (petroleum, natural gas, coal)
> - Greenhouse gas emissions
> - Air pollutant emissions
> - Water consumption
FWIU you have to plant cover crops to receive the new US ethanol / biofuel subsidies.
From "Some Groups Pan SAF Rules for Farmers Groups Criticize Cover Crop Requirement for Sustainable Aviation Fuel Modeling" (2024) https://www.dtnpf.com/agriculture/web/ag/news/business-input... :
> Some biofuel groups were encouraged the guidance would recognize climate-smart farm practices for the first time in ethanol or biodiesel's carbon intensity score. Others said the guidance hurts them because their producers have a hard time growing cover crops and carbon scoring shouldn't be limited to a few specific farming practices. Environmental groups said there isn't enough hard science to prove the benefit of those farm practices.
I have "The Living Soil Handbook" by Jessie Frost (in KY) here, and page 1 "Introduction" reads:
> 1. Disturb the soil as little as possible.
> 2. Keep the soil covered as much as possible.
> 3. Keep the soil planted as much as possible.
FWIU tilling results in oxidation and sterilization due to UV-C radiation and ozone; tilling turns soil to dirt; and dry dirt doesn't fix nitrogen or CO2 or host mycorhizzae which help plants absorb nutrients.
Bunds with no irrigation to not till over appear to win in many climates. Maybe bunds, agrivoltaics, and agricultural robots can help undo soil depletion.
"Vikings razed the forests. Can Iceland regrow them?" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40361034
https://westurner.github.io/hnlog/# ctrl-f soil , no-till / notill / no till / #NoTill
For other things - There are probably opportunities in adapting the existing center pivot systems with their pivots and tracks and wheels, with heavier truss segments that support robotic actuators up and down the line.
https://www.dripworks.com/drip-irrigation
I use the VH400 from Vegetronix: https://www.vegetronix.com/Products/VH400/
Automatically planting the seeds? I can take it or leave it.
But the really intensive work is pulling those extraordinarily hardy weeds and pest control.
The cost of this thing at nearly $3000 including taxes is just too high for effectively an automated watering system that is easily solved at HomeDepot and the GardenGrid.
That’s pretty much what happens when plants get “watered” naturally though… I’m thinking about rain of course
Watering the soil means you don't need to care about the sun.
They started this project a decade ago. But robotics has advanced quite a bit in that time. Surely, today it is much more viable to have four wheeled robots watering, weeding etc at the same precision this product can. Then why build a gantry.
> Then why build a gantry.
Part of at scale agriculture is growing seedlings (fruit trees, etc), conducting ANOVA trials (small plots to test many seed varieties).
There's a good chunk of "big agriculture" taking place in warehouse sized greenhouses with roller topped tables, big sliding trays, tightly packed young plants, overhead gantries for cameras | sprays | lifting hooks, etc.
This is a lightweight garden bed gantry .. but there is a place for big gantries in agriculture.
Having a roomba like (yes, obviously different to the standard look of a robot vacuum cleaner; but a small autonomous robot; eg a watering can on tank treads, or a bb8 rolling ball) bot with a docking station out of the weather seems enormously more sustainable and scalable.
Yeah I remember seeing this years ago, and feeling like it was the future. Now it barely feels like a robot.
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?
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
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Center-pivot_irrigation
This thing only drills the seeds and waters the plants.