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Farmer Coalition Offers $250K Prize For Blueberry Picking Robot (robohub.org)
Hallie Siegel writes: Having spent many a back breaking hour in deep woods Ontario picking wild blueberries in summer time, I can only imagine the challenge of farming and harvesting these awesome little flavour nuggets. Blueberries are in record demand (probably my son alone accounts for a significant percentage of that!) so it's no surprise, really, that a coalition of farmers has banded together to offer a prize for automated blueberry picking solutions. We've seen competitions and challenges spur innovation in other areas of robotics — think robocar — why not blueberry picking? Can't wait to see the results of this one.
"Who would be stupid enough to give away such an invention for a mere $250k?"
-1, irrelevant
The conditions of the contest do not involve alienating all rights.
Case in point, here's what today's $200k solution looks like. http://www.oxbocorp.com/Produc... You should be able to add telemetry, control and associated support systems for less than $50k.
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There are, in fact, several species of blueberries. The commercial cultivates in the USA and Europe are nowadays (unfortunately) the American high brush blueberries, but the European wild blueberry tastes far more intensive. They are small berries with violet flesh and red-violet juice and they will colour your tongue to the hue of the tongue of a Chow-Chow dog.
"It's such a fine line between stupid and clever" -- David St. Hubbins, Spinal Tap
And when seeds blow onto a neighbouring farm Monsanto will sue both farmers for illegal distribution and use of their generically-engineered seeds. Monsanto is one of the "Great Satans."
I agree that Monsanto is evil, the world is still dealing with the results of their criminal chemical past (e.g. agent orange, contaminated with Dioxin, sprayed all over Viet Nam) but this is not what happened. Someone willfully saved seed he knew to belong to Monsanto, and then he got nailed. It's still wrong, but it's not as simple as you make it out to be. It was one patch, he had the choice of what crop to use as seed crop, and that's the patch he chose.
Now, I think it is horribly wrong to lose your farm over that, and I think it's wrong for anyone to be able to patent a plant to begin with, it's just not needed. People would develop new cultivars whether they would own them outright or not. But let's not bullshit about what happened. Monsanto is evil enough without lies.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Absolutely. I worked for a small blueberry farmer who was making sorting equipment back in the early 2000s. It didn't take him long before he was making more from the machines (they were much more basic than a picking machine) than his entire blueberry farm. There is big money in reducing the need for seasonal labour and $250k is peanuts.
As an aside, one of the things that was common on the blueberry farms was to use a tree shaker to harvest the lower grade fruit. It was only the really high quality fruit that was hand picked. I never enquired as to what the main benefits of this were (whether quality or yield?), but the tree shakers seemed to work pretty well at getting everything out of the tree and weren't exactly complex pieces of equipment. I wonder if that puts more constraints on the economics of such a project that make it less attractive for agricultural equipment manufacturers.
Preserving sugar is large grain sugar suitable for making jams and jellies. The theory is the smaller surface area results in less froth and scum. Jamming sugar is that with pectin added. I've never needed to add pectin, though - I've just added some lemon juice if I have trouble getting it to set. Frequently, my problem is the opposite, and I've got lots of over thick jam in the cupboard.