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World's First Robotic Farm To Produce 11 Million Heads of Lettuce Per Year (inhabitat.com)
MikeChino writes: Japanese company SPREAD is preparing to open the world's first robot-controlled farm. The facility is designed to produce 11 million heads of lettuce each year, and it's expected to ship its first crop in Fall 2017. The new 47,300 square feet Vegetable Factory in Kansai Science City will also reduce construction costs by 25 percent and energy demand by 30 percent.
But I can't wait for spinach, radishes and beets.
All your lettuce are belong to us.
Great for water and energy conservation, and this technology can be moved into places that are difficult to grow produce. But if this really catches on, wonder what this will do to the industry as a whole, and the people put out of work.
Fuck Ajit Pai
i welcome our new vegetable overlords. yoroshikune.
>> The new 47,300 square feet Vegetable Factory will also reduce construction costs by 25 percent and energy demand by 30 percent.
Over what? Are you comparing this to "constructing" a field of lettuce from cultivatable land or energy from the sun? Or is this compared to other greenhouse operations? Or hydroponics? (TFA is pretty useless - I tried.)
Are they recycling/reusing the polystyrene? Is that included in the energy equation?
lettuce? All you ever get are the heads.
Even considering the savings with LED's, I still have a hard time believing that it's profitable to grow lettuce this way.
I don't respond to AC's.
"Kansai Science City" suggests to me this is as much about investigating it and building the technology as it is about a business model.
But, I don't think they're ignoring that either:
I for one welcome our new robotic, lettuce-growing overlords.
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
This would be great for Mars. Astronauts land up after a long hard journey and find 30,000 heads of lettuce waiting for them
People can do all kinds of cool stuff with it.
The whole place is run by robots.
Man.... lettuce for dinner again?
My eyes reflect the stars and a smile lights up my face.
I for one can't wait for the square watermelon farm.
I love news like this one.
It may look like an economical disaster now, but this if our future. The way humanity grows, we won't be able to feed the world for another century (if I'm wrong, let's say two centuries then, doesn't matter). There's a lot of confusion about the scientific research of the environmental impact of the food production (especially meat production) but it seems far from negligible.
I've saw a Swiss design a few years ago about a self-sufficient farm skyscraper design that could produce food for 10k people. This sort of tech allows us to grow food without pesticide, without razing forest, use a lot less water and could be used anywhere on earth. Of course, we'll need a better energy source than coal or oil if we eventually want to become completely green.
Or course, it won't slow much the deforestation and we're likely to raze everything before we start building those type of factory but I won't mind if we start sooner.
Elok
Since robots could make a large dent in unskilled farm labor opportunity I wonder if this will be allowed outside Japan? I would think that there would be pushback from labor. There is already looming issues from robot driven trucks, and automation in fast food. Both of those trends will displace workers in growing number in the coming years. The demands for $15/hour wages from fast food workers is creating growing incentives to replace workers with automation.
Computers already execute most Wall Street trades.
Computer programs write a growing percentage of wills and other legal documents.
With computers having mastered winning chess, and now Go, when will large scale use of programs writing programs begin?
If a robot that can do plumbing is invented what will be left for people to do?
much of left-wing thought is a kind of playing with fire by people who don't even know that fire is hot - George Orwell
This would be great for Mars. Astronauts land up after a long hard journey and find 30,000 heads of lettuce waiting for them
All fine and well, but what if one of them is rotten and leads the others in revolt?
Faster than you can saw "'slaw in a salad", we're talking about a 30,000 head army awaiting out gallant Astronauts.
Have you considered that? ... I didn't think so!
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geez. just search google and you'll see tons: https://www.google.com/search?q=minecraft+auto+farming#safe=off&q=minecraft+automated+farm
maybe it'll be news when they automate chicken farming. MAYBE.
this is basically the new cotton gin, the mechanical device that reduced labor on the cotton farm and made events like the abolition movement practical. how will it change america's relationship with the migrant farmworker population, and how does that intersect with all the calls to Build A Wall, etc? What happens when you put millions of low skilled laborers out of work? It will be exciting times!
I thought that the completion date for the first farm run completely by robots wasn't scheduled until October 2077.
Mark Watney's response to that was to sprinkle his potatoes with crushed vicodin.
Let me try that with lettuce and get back to you.
Do the math and a bit of education. If they are full hydro, they are using upwards of 90% less water. They are also producing about 211 years worth of lettuce per year based on the same amount of land and 56,000 heads of lettuce per acre counting 2 harvests per year for a typical farmer. Oh and solar panels on top can totally power all of the lights.
Take into account the massive reduction in labor and yea, I'd say it's a lot more profitable than traditional farming and this is the future of farming. Especially when the climate really starts destroying crops in areas that were traditionally great for farming. Not to mention having the food closer to cities. Put a few of these in the middle of New York and stop shipping food 100s or 1000s of miles and feed everyone.
> The facility is designed to produce 11 million heads of lettuce each year
There should be a farm which grows 39 million leeks each year.
Conventional farming requires massive amounts of land. This lets them go vertical and grow way more in the same square footage. I imagine that's where much of the profit potential lies.
They are also able to grow in an optimal environment (LEDs tuned to ideal wavelengths, precisely controlled temperature/humidity, etc) which should produce increased yields compared to regular field farming. They are also able to recycle 98% of their water.
If you can grow (and sell!) 10x the lettuce in the same area, it's easy to imagine that handily offsetting the energy & water costs they're incurring by growing indoors.
"Mind, as manifested by the capacity to make choices, is to some extent present in every electron." -Freeman Dyson
I doubt the increased yield can account for the massive infrastructure cost for something like this. Their ROI has to be a few centuries, if ever.
I don't respond to AC's.
Before long there won't be one human being left with a fucking job.
I still think we should keep the jobs for the humans.
It is simply a crunchy form of mildly flavoured water.
Ever seen the Imperial Valley? It's where most the lettuce is grown in the US. Flat, fertile fields full of lettuce as far as the eye can see. Warm and sunny most of the year. Lot of Colorado river irrigation water. It's hard to compete with that.
I don't read your sig. Why are you reading mine?
Now all you have to do is ship it to Japan before it rots. 100% doable. However, shipping is a non trivial amount of the cost of food.
But it'll be better when they make a robot that can run on lettuce.
I bet their ROI is somewhere between a few months to a couple of years. When you can increase your yield by over 200 times and reduce labor costs to near zero, yeah, there isn't much overhead here. Just a few higher paid workers for maintaining the equipment and facilities. These are much more skilled jobs than lettuce pickers/planters.
Get to know a commercial farmer or two, if you buy into the "poor, struggling farmer" facade they've fooled you. Farming is huge bucks.
easy, build a few 100,000sqft buildings, done. And you're not wasting nearly the amount of water and if you can automate the harvest and a lot of the maintenance of the plants, you'll end the workers shitting in the fields spreading e.coli across the country.
We are at the beginning of the end of huge tracts of land being used, inefficiently for farming and destroying the land, wasting water and killing the environment with the millions of tons of fertilizer per year that ultimately gets dumped into the oceans. No land farmer in the US reclaims or replaces any water they use, let alone treat it before they let the toxins they put into it seep into the ground. Now to get people to stop eating beef and drinking cow milk. Neither of which our bodies are designed to process well. Cows are a problem to the environment. Smaller animals take less resources to grow, less space and less food and we actually process goat/sheep milk better than cow milk. Not to mention the massive health benefits of drinking goat milk. Cow milk has zero health benefits to humans.
"But what about the electromagnetism? We don't know what effect this will have on the lettuce! We need more testing! And the government should label robotic labor!"
Then you don't put this system into Colorado. As the AC mentioned, this is being built in Japan, where shipping costs from the USA to Japan, at speeds necessary for freshness, won't sink them.
Plus Japan has a real problem with an aging population - especially among it's farmers. A lot of land in Japan is going to end up laying fallow because there just isn't any farmers to replace those that die. It's much easier to get employees to help run a robotic farm in/next to a city thought.
I don't read AC A human right
A nuclear reactor and 20 of these around it.
Nature blows all kinds of ass. It tends to the lowest energy y'know.
Natural growth isn't even remotely the best the universe can give.
Aquaponics, aeroponics and hydroponics are so incredibly more efficient on an industrial scale than a local scale.
Level a few mountains for resources and nutrients to introduce in to the ecosystem and we have a profit of new nutrients for future growth.
It would easily feed our entire species well in to the double-digit billions if done properly.
Will it be? Fuck no.
Instead, traditional barely-functioning retard farmers will complain, it will be blocked, and we will be stuck starving for decades until war.
Fuck luddites. They already attack farmers that try to do more efficient farming methods like these and just generally using any advanced machinery.
When that vast fertile land turns into a barren waste land because the Colorado has no more water trickling down it and as long as they can harvest and store 90% less water than they use today because hydro / aeroponics uses tremendously less water. They can still grow right there, getting power from solar, wind or nuke or a combination and continue on farming. All while doing something they can't do today, harvest fresh fruits and veggies year round 24/7. Since they control the environment they are no longer subject to the sun and earth cycles. Just need power and water.
Do we really want to be training robots to harvest heads?
Water cost go down drastically for hydro. Also depending on the farming a lot of energy is put into it. 1000s of HP in electric pumps to pump water from rivers and even more electricity for running equipment. You ever see a large commercial farm with 100s of circle crops? More electricity to run each of those center pivot irrigation units. You could run 10000s or 100000s of led light setups and still be ahead in savings. Large commercial farms are a blight on the land. They do nothing to condition the soil and only contaminate the planet
Any process that requires repetitive manual labor in a systematic process will and should eventually be replaced by machines. The planting and harvesting of crops is done my human-driven machines already it was inevitable that the human element would be removed all together. Next will be civil and private construction where humans only be involved in the design and coordination phases of the process.
That would be true except for the real scourge that plagues humanity: Religion.
They are all cults intent on command and control; codifying and justifying misogyny and genocide, but also the glory of subsistence living (not for the priests and their acolytes though).
Especially in the West (the US still the clear leader), the quote "It is Work alone that makes man noble" is believed like it was part of the Sermon on the Mount.
If you don't have a job, you're a bum. The Puritanistic morality police (politicians) will insure the cool Star Trek future of 'work for passion, not for suffering' never, ever comes to pass.
Now they can leave those poor whales alone! http://www.newser.com/story/21... http://www.newser.com/story/21...
In the future there will be all organic farms, meaning farms not farmed by robots (inorganic beings). :)