FarmBot: an Open Source Automated Farming Machine

New submitter ErnieKey writes: Farming has been stuck in a bit of a rut, when compared to other industries. Businesses across the globe have been innovating for decades, while farming has been using techniques that have been handed down from centuries ago. The FarmBot Foundation is creating a machine, similar to that of a CNC mill and/or 3D printer, which is capable of being run by sophisticated software and equipped with any tools you can imagine, including seed injectors, plows, burners, robotic arms (for harvesting), cutters, shredders, tillers, discers, watering nozzles, sensors and more. The goal? To increase food production by automating as much of it as possible.

Comments

Garden Bot

[MarkvW]

Make a GardenBot that works, and you'll become a trillionaire.

Re:Garden Bot

[Qzukk]

You could name the first ones Huey, Dewey and Louie.

Re: Garden Bot

[Dr. Eggman]

Forget the garden, I'll settle for a cheap, effective automated lawnmower! Currently, they're all high-priced for cutting dozens or hundreds of acres. Yet, most of them still can't tell when they're about to run over a poor baby rabbit...

Re: Garden Bot

[LduN]

that's a feature... it gets rid of all those pests

not true at all

[Trepidity]

Businesses across the globe have been innovating for decades, while farming has been using techniques that have been handed down from centuries ago.

That's not true at all. Maybe in some hobby farms, but at a large scale (which is where most food actually comes from), farming in 2014 is nothing like farming in 1914. Modern agribusiness is highly automated, which is why the proportion of the U.S. population engaged in farm work has declined from about 30% to about 2%, while food production has increased.

Re:not true at all

[rogoshen1]

Yar, and i'm guessing here without actually looking it up, there are already harvesters/combines that are GPS guided.
And after googling: Yup.

So we've got plants that since the 1960's are genetically altered (via splicing as well as breeding programmes) to grow shorter, develop more seeds, innate resistance to pests (grumble monsanto grumble grumble). Combines that literally drive themselves, fertilizer has been 'improved' (altered is maybe a better term?) to the point were god knows how much of it is is natural occurring vs petroleum based.

Products like this (while cool) are caught basically without a market. The mega farms which could use something like this, already have their own versions. The smaller farms, can't afford it.

And (yep, gonna get modded troll for this) we have a virtually unlimited supply of cheap labor from Mexico to do the grunt work.

Re:not true at all

[Anonymous Coward]

You can actually tighten that gap up even more. Farming today is nothing like farming was in the 1980's. I left the farm in 1983 and knew every piece of equipment, top to bottom. Last year I was asked to move a tractor to a different part of the yard and I couldn't figure out how to start it, much less drive it, without being shown. We didn't have GPS guided tractors or combines. We didn't even have monitoring systems in the "brand-new, high tech" hog feeding barn. The closest thing to automation we had was hitting the feed auger "on" switch and not having to worry about shutting it off when the feeders were full.

Chemical use is way down overall. Yields are way up. And the physical effort required to do the work is much less. Have farmers moved to using a single machine to do every task? No, but doing so would be dumb. If your main tractor breaks down you can still run the combine. If your disc needs repair, you can still plow or use the tillage unit. Putting it all in one machine would mean you are down when any one thing breaks. One or two people can farm 1000's of acres where it used to require a farmer, his wife, 3 sons, 2-4 hired men and a few daughters to manage a 240 acre farm.

Of course I'm from Iowa. Ethiopia (as a stand-in for 3rd world nations) is likely a different story.

Re:not true at all

[K. S. Kyosuke]

If it destroys the livelihood of millions but improves the livelihood of hundreds of millions, how is your claim different from calling for buggy whip manufacturing protectionism?

Re:not true at all

[plover]

And thus this is likely yet another solution without a problem.

No, I think the desire here is for it to be Open Source. Current agricultural tools are proprietary, where you pay a ton of money for the special GPS receiver, arrays of sensors, a database of moisture, fertilizer, and yield readings, continuously variable spray systems, auto-steering systems, and everything else.

The current systems are brilliant: they can reduce fertilizer usage by 60% or more by applying the proper amount of fertilizer on the areas that need it. This reduces cost, excess chemicals, and greatly reduces polluting runoff. They also measure how much water the crops need, and adjust irrigation accordingly. And in a greenhouse, they can even measure and control the light.

But all of that is not all that difficult to solve, apart from the hardware. Makers are getting pretty good at producing open source hardware for a lot of smaller things; and there is a desire to get open source solutions in the hands of the developing nations.

So I think there's a lot of problem out there that this could yet solve.

Re:not true at all

[jfengel]

Even if it's produced with zero human labor, the price isn't going to be free. There already is practically zero human labor in the actual growing of food. The process is heavily automated already. The consumer price is dominated by the various middle men (distributors, shippers, retailers, etc.) The actual farmer receives less than a dime for each dollar you spend. Far, far less for prepared foods.

If you're willing to cook, you can buy more than enough raw ingredients to feed yourself quite well, for well under a dollar a day. And very little of that money goes to the farmer himself; you're mostly paying to get the food from the farmer to your local outlet, and then to you.

I personally wouldn't mind if MORE people had to get into farming. There are downsides to that massively automated farming: increased pesticide use, large amounts of fossil fuels, soil loss, lack of variety, etc. I'm just fine with subsidizing the food for those people who can't work, or even don't wish to: the raw materials end up costing practically nothing already, at least at the farm itself. But if people want to work... and many do... I think that more labor-intensive agriculture has some advantages.

Re:not true at all

[ksheff]

and more people are leaving the US for México than the other way around since the economy in that nation has been improving and is more diversified than before.

Re:not true at all

[bluefoxlucid]

Whoa wat?

GPS and laser guidance systems for centuries?

[raymorris]

> Farming has been stuck in a bit of a rut, ... farming has been using techniques that have been handed down from centuries ago.

Apparently this author's understanding of agriculture is based on cartoons. Self-driving cars are a brand new thing; largely self-driving agricultural equipment is not so new. Have a look at the cockpit of a modern John Deere in working trim. Better yet, come on down to Tecas A&M (agriculture and mechanical) and we'll show you some things. It's no coincidence that A&M is a leader in drone research too.

Re:GPS and laser guidance systems for centuries?

[bluefoxlucid]

I read that as Texas A&M at first. Hilarious because we have potato scoopers, peanut harvesters, corn combines, and such here; while Arizona is using mexicans, and giving reports on the labor-intensive task of harvesting peanuts and potatoes.

Farms don't employ labor on the east coast.

Start with bad assumptions

[randomencounter]

Get bad results.

Agriculture has been advancing as fast as any other technology field.

Here are some recent developments: http://www.popularmechanics.co...
and GPS is becoming important to farm competitiveness: https://www.bae.ncsu.edu/topic...

None of this depending on massive fixed installations, so it can be used cost effectively over thousands of acres of fields.

Nice Summary

[robstout]

Too bad it's so inaccurate. My wife works for John Deere. Their combines now have GPS in them, and will do crop analysis while harvesting. I tihnk the only thing keeping them from being fully automated is the farmers themselves.

Handed down from centuries ago

[Anonymous Coward]

Someone hasn't been on a farm in a while. Farming is seriously high tech, with computer vision and robots and machines the size most city dweller won't see their whole life. You may think having a latest gen smart phone and sitting in front of a computer all day makes you high tech, but farmers have you beat.

here's a pic

[raymorris]

To make it easy, here's a picture of the "centuries old" technology in a 2010 model John Deere 1910E.
https://c1.staticflickr.com/5/...

laser levelling

[jmichaelg]

The fields I drive by on my way to work put the lie to the author's premise. A week ago, I saw a road-scrapper type device running around a field that had a spinning laser positioned more or less in the center of the field. The laser provided a level reference that the scrapper responded to moment by moment by lifting or lowering the blade. The machines are designed to build a field with a precise gradient so the farmer can minimize the amount of water needed to irrigate the field as well as to uniformly irrigate the crop. The water may be free but lifting it from the aquifer isn't.

Further down the road, there was a device that was building perfect raised beds covered in plastic. Strawberries need to be grown in well drained soil and the raised beds provide that. The plastic is used to keep a fumigant on the bed until it decays instead of leaking into the atmosphere prior to seeding. Once the soil is fumigated, it's planted by an automated planter that leaves the plastic in place to reduce evaporation - again to save water.

The next field over was being harvested by a machine that requires two people to operate it. Ten years ago, there'd be a crew of 30 doing the same task.

The industrial revolution upended farming from what it was centuries ago and that process hasn't stopped since. The net result is fewer people are needed to grow more food at a lower cost. Downside is calories have become so cheap that most of us are overfed.

Nomenclature

[Ideonaut]

That's not a rut, it's a furrow.

a holistic bot ecosystem

[Thud457]

I think you've put your finger on an underserved market - clandestine growbots that can be sent out to tend your crop in national forests while maintaining plausible denialblitiy.
Anti-aircraft-drone drones. Drive-by killbots for defending your territory. And pusherbots. And if you expand into related industries, pimpbots.

Like Syndicate LARP. With robots.
You know, for the kids.

Re:Crazy statement!

[Adriax]

The pilgrims faced starvation and death the first winter until the native americans introduced them to corn based ethanol to power their tractors.