Most of the chemicals (yes, including nitrogen fertilizers) offset labor, so when the labor is free we shouldn’t need them. And people won’t have to spend their lives in stoop-back work or exposed to toxic chemicals.

I’m building a company/platform that does a lot of this, particularly the “metering just the right amount of water for each individual plant” part.

The thing I have in mind is very low cost devices (sub-$20) with mesh radio comms, inputs to read from sensors and outputs to control irrigation, and TinyML running the devices to optimize everything in real time.

I have about 10 years experience working in the field (mostly with high-value crops like wine grapes, nuts, avocados) and several iterations of prototype devices and web software, but am keen to attract people who are excited at the idea of working on this kind of thing.

Anyone - particularly low-level programmers or hardware engineers - interested in working on it can contact me (email in bio).

I spent some time in this sector (at one company irrigation of almonds and stone fruit, another in wine) and the margins are very tight. Fortunately the farmers have sharp pencils.

The thing about this field that I’ve learned over the decade I’ve been involved is that creating the tech is less than half the challenge; the distribution - building awareness, selling it, installing it, maintaining it - is a huge undertaking, and a lot of money needs to come from somewhere to make that viable.

[1] I’d like to have a RTOS to run on these devices that is as approachable and familiar as common Linux distros like Ubuntu, for people to install and customise themselves, with a full open source license.

But a bunch of small devices can be managed by a huge device running Linux — maybe even something as expensive as a Raspberry Pi.

(Apart from some time trying to sell in the Ag sector I spent a lot of time on embedded devices)

I hear you that $20 is high - but the status quo in this business now is monitoring devices that sell for AUD $600+, and with LTE-M or LoRa comms modules that cost over AUD $60 alone.

I'm forever thinking about ways you could drive the cost down further. I'd love it if there were a way to get the on-plant modules under $1. Feel free to get in touch if you want to discuss further.

It's an interesting problem and I am sure reference designs already exist. Maybe talk to someone at Nordic.

As I said in the previous comment, right now, high-value crop growers like wine grape growers pay $700-$1000 or more per site (including reader/comms module and sensors), and generally only install one monitoring point per block (I have a system running at one of Australia's top boutique/biodynamic wine makers and at current prices he can only cost-justify having one 10 monitoring sites over his 70 acres of vines).

So, whatever we can do to drive down the cost to $20 or less should deliver big wins.

> Maybe talk to someone at Nordic

Yep, we're working with hardware engineers who are well connected to people at Nordic.

But the economics of farming in the Eyre Peninsula is quite different and they really have a water problem. From a food PoV these are the people we really need to help.

(I have family in both, not to mention in laws in Germany who also have a water problem...getting rid of it!)

Right now it costs about $750-$3000 to set up each monitoring site, so growers can only afford to install a low number of devices per acre [1], thus a high number of plants per device. In that case you’re not optimizing to anywhere the specific requirements of each plant, you’re assuming (often falsely) that all the plants in that area have the same needs as the one you’re monitoring.

The lower the cost per device, the higher your resolution and precision of monitoring can be, and the more you can accurately provide for the specific needs of each plant.

[1] Very often that number is zero.

Such a robot is still SF today, so deploying a frob with each seedling would be the only choice at the moment (or continue current irrigation practices). The frobs have to be cheap enough to be consumables.

So why isn't it done today? Probably still cheaper to rely on the weather or center pivot irrigation.

Put another way, drip is massively parallel. Robot waterers, not so much.

Are we talking about irrigation pivots[1] here? Because those are a known technology.

If we are thinking about robots driving up and down the rows and watering plants from a tank, and then returning to some central location to re-fill their tank that feels like a "carrying water for elephants" situation. I suspect the logistics won't work out. Could try to run some numbers on it of course. Is that how you are thinking about it?

1: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7j1lMs7fcIQ

We work with fruit growers in South Eastern Australia where temperatures routinely hit high 30s and even low-mid 40s (°C) a few days each year.

Those growers want to see our soil moisture data readings updated every 15 minutes so they can turn the drippers on very quickly as soon as the soil starts drying out rapidly.

It would just be too slow to rely on robots driving up and down the rows in those conditions.

This is not robust. Humans don't use GPS for this purpose (and anyway, the plants are closer than GPS resolution.

Looking and using the local data is the more robust approach. Trying to assume the real world is the same as your model has been the source of countless visual gags since the advent of movies.

For the use case invoked in this subthread (an individual monitoring device on each plant), I don’t think it’s the best.

We’re currently working with Nordic nRF52xx/53xx/54xx modules, which have dual ARM cores and built-in 2.4GHz radio, so, support for protocols like Bluetooth Mesh, Zibgee, Thread.

That means you can have a single module that can handle mesh comms with neighboring devices, as well as sensor reading, machine learning and output control. You wouldn’t need a separate comms module to communicate back to a base station or a high post and antenna for long-range comms. So it offers big savings on the device production side and the installation time/cost side.

When I've done similar projects in the past, we did the edge compute on a more expensive box that could be more conveniently accessed by users. It was also the system collected and summarized data into reports, so having the data locally helped.

So you’d centralize the more intensive processing on a unit with more power, and have smaller node devices on the plants doing simpler tasks - just reading from sensors and uploading data, and/or receiving commands to switch things on/off. They’d be solar powered too but the batteries and solar panels can be smaller.

These are all the trade offs you’re constantly working with in this game.

But we don’t build computing like that any more. Instead of large centralized single devices we use a large amount of protean hardware with various adapts (software).

Hordes of small devices can flood through the fields, using sensors to decide at any point what to do, and can use different effectors for different tasks at different times of the year, like the humans used to do.

I mean an autonomous device that picks a row, then does the same on the next row on the way back, then maybe unloads into a hopper and continues with the next couple of rows. And you don’t one, you have 50 or a couple of hundred of them rather than one huge combine harvester.

And if you have 50 of these platforms designed to go up and down the rows they could have been doing the planting at the beginning of the season (or desuckering your vines in spring or whatever) using a different tool, so your capex isn’t tied up in a few huge single-application devices, but amortized over a whole season. And when you have a fleet, if one fails and needs maintenance it’s no more of a big deal than when one server in a datacenter fails.

Certainly the logistical challenge of multiple small harvests of varying products is there, but this is definitely more manageable with robots and computers than without.

And for a small close to population centers, if they can supply multiple kinds of produce reliably, they might be able to make orders of magnitude more money on the local market than on the commodities market.

Homogeneity helps with trading commodities, no question. And commodities reduce risk by allowing a very wide fan out on both sides of a two sided market…which has advantages and disadvantages for all participants.

More along your argument, it also lets the farmer use capital better in the short term (you buy the equipment you need for your monocrop).

But if you have multimodal devices you have the opportunity to take advantage of more flexibility. You can do crop rotation to use less chemicals or to take advantage of trends in the commodity market. You can have a different mix of crops for the same reason (half corn, half row crops, though they re typically worth less). You have more flexibility to adapt to climate change. The commodity markets can handle all this, in fact they help enable it.

This isn’t magic wand — crop rotation doesn’t make sense if, say, you have an orchard. But mechanization also caused us to abandon growing multiple crops in the same field, which can have benefits and improve yield. It was just way too labor intensive. If we go back to individual “labor” (automated in this case) it could be worthwhile.

As a result, we're still going to optimize for the most productive use of robots, just as we do for humans.

Changing farming methods along with automation might work better, like vertical farming techniques.

Plant growth is (for most plants) limited by available energy, which comes in the form of sunlight. Sunlight is extremely bright compared to artificial light sources and extremely cheap, i.e. free. Replacing it makes no economic sense in most situations.

If we talk about producing a lot of calories to feed the starving, even most reservations go out of the window, because staple crops are staples because they are very efficient at turning sunlight into chemical energy and they need all the sunlight they can get.

Look at the following three graphs: global population, staple crop yield, and nitrogen fertilizer application.

Now overlay them. That's why.

Also, there are myriad chemical inputs that cannot be removed simply due to free labor. Sure, a robot can pluck weeds, but what about fungal and bacterial diseases?

The black grass was slowly out competing his cash crop and would difficult to remove (perhaps taking the entire field out of any production for a year or the use of chemicals).

Having a horde of little robots might greatly assist in manually keeping other plants at bay without indiscriminately affecting the field with chemicals (extra one-use expense, robots would last many years).

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Countryfile

Indirectly by increasing yield per acre per day.

But having 1/4 of the land under soy beans or other locally appropriate nitrogen-fixing plants doesn't seem like it would hurt yields too much.

Even if you made a plant that fixes nitrogen extremely efficiently, every joule of sunlight it pumps into the ground is not available as calories you harvest. And fixing nitrogen will take an amount of energy per acre on the order of what you harvested from that acre in a year.

Btw, I don't think plants are close to optimal efficiency in terms of using sunlight. See eg C3 vs C4 plants.

My point is that you can't have corn that is as nitrogen-fixing as a legume and still produce nearly as much corn - the plant (or its microbes) will need the majority of the available photosynthesis products to fix nitrogen. This directly makes the cobs smaller.

> Btw, I don't think plants are close to optimal efficiency in terms of using sunlight. See eg C3 vs C4 plants.

That's true, even photovoltaic panels (which are still far away from their theoretical maximal efficiency) are an order of magnitude more efficient at pulling energy from the sun than plants are. But significantly improving photosynthesis in crop plants is far beyond our current genetic engineering ability.

And I'm not aware of any way to organically fix nitrogen that uses energy outside what is provided by photosynthesis - or gets its energy from digesting dead organic matter, which also doesn't beat the limits of photosynthetic efficiency on a per-acre basis.

I can believe that. However for people who don't want to use nitrogen fertiliser, this might still be useful.

You can see it as an alternative to clover (or manure), that happens to produce eg a bit of grain.

You still need to hack up the eg cereal plants so they can actually engage in that symbiotic relationship (or perhaps actually directly fix nitrogen all by themselves, without any outside help at all).

I'm also looking forward to this technology being widely available and helping solve the issue of herbicide run-off, and later additionally the same for pesticides and fertilization.

Short of the singularity happening - "labor" (even Robotic) - at this scale - is not going to be anywhere near free.

I mean, in some ways, "labor" is already "free" in agriculture if you compare current cost of labor per yield vs what you would get before the industrial revolution.

The average labor cost to farm an acre of wheat pre-industrial revolution was 50-100 hours. Today, it's <1.

Short of the singularity, we are not getting a 100x improvement from here in our lifetime.

There's not only so many 100x improvements you can make until you need a perpetual motion machine traveling faster than light...

Not even close. The sorts of critters and diseases that pesticides combat cannot be mitigated by plucking things off plants, nor can nitrogen fertilizer be replaced with elbow grease. Identifying and removing (burning) infected plants would help, but only if each plants was isolated from its neighbors, otherwise you are just back to burning fields once infection is detected. Growing each potato inside its own little box cannot scale.

For many farmers the "right amount of water" ends up being however much is available. Crop fields are not home gardens. The amounts of water needed are measured in acre-feet. Metering it out to each corn stalk individually would certainly help, but likely fails the cost/benefit analyses at scale. A corn field has roughly 50,000 plants per acre, and commercial farm several hundred acres. That will be a heck of a lot of plastic tubing to install/maintain.

There's huge variability in what can be grown where, especially if you want to reduce the amount and number of inputs that are imported from further afield. There are places that can support all the crops and livestock that provide a healthy, balanced, and sustainable human diet, but not everywhere can. What if you want to eat flour in a place where grain crops aren't tenable, or butter where cows, sheep and goats don't do well?

Producing food this way also means that we need to build houses on fertile land that's good for growing things. That happens a _lot_ where I live, and I hate the site of previously productive soil disappearing under concrete house-slabs.

If you want to see less fertile land covered up make it easier for people to make money growing on their own land.

What you described would be more costly and I don't think there is really any relationship to health. Your food would end up being more expensive as most of the things you listed cost very little in the grand scheme, labor is the most expensive part.

A lot of people have drawn inferences that it may have been the government, their leadership and application of ideology rather then the shift from agrarian economy.

similar to how in the american south in the 20th century, sharecroppers were forced to work on commodity farms and didn't grow food. instead, they imported processed corn from the midwest that gave them pellagra. thanks in part to market forces of the midwest corn trade.

Impossible. The world is too urbanized, there simply is no space to do this for more than a few % of the population.

> Way too-many of the problems plaguing society atm can be solved by reducing transport and eliminating all the huge intermediate steps [...]

Maybe some problems can be solved, many more will be unsolved. Reducing our transport capacity of food increases the vulnerability to crop failures. De-centralizing processing will make it harder (read: more expensive) to test for pathogens, nutrients and ensure hygiene.

> we'll be be contributing less to AGI/automation and creating actual valuable jobs

No, we would be shrinking the GDP by moving labour from highly productive sectors into agriculture. At the same time food will become much more expensive, even more so if those new employees are paid minimum wage.

> and eliminating all the huge intermediate steps between our food (other other food-related products) and ourselves

How? You're simply replacing one set of steps for another, more labor-intensive one. I encourage you to visit one of those museums where people demonstrate how people in the 18th century lived for some perspective.

> we'll be reducing the amount of plastic, fuel and electricity used for transport, storage, processing, packaging,

You didn't quite state the full conditions to achieve this reduction, so I'll do it for you. Basically we have to completely change our diets. Fresh food can only be eaten in season, and only what is locally available. We can only store food that does not need climate control to keep, so in winter there are only conserved vegetables and fruits. Not using any modern packaging and storage methods means that even in season things have to be eaten really quickly.

On the whole, your insinuation that our food distribution is some kind of unnecessary luxury that we can do away with just rubs me the wrong way. It is the reason the amount of people in famine has been dropping every decade despite a population explosion. It ensures that there are no mass-scale outbreaks of botulism, moulds and other pathogens that used to kill lots of people and waste huge quantities of food. Its efficiency (along with high productivity) guarantees that almost everyone can afford to eat sufficient nutrients even through winter.

Sure we could get some of those benefits in your agrarian fantasy, but the cost would be enormous.

Your first criticism as an example. "World too urbanized". Again, the solution solves a big chunk of other problems we have. One need only read HN a bit to see a bunch of them. E.g. 1. Food islands. 2. Focus on transport to get food because mom and pop stores closed and we only have Walmart. 3. Car culture.

My point is don't shoot the idea down, we have to consider how working towards this arguable ideal moves the needle in a better direction. And yes, maybe the end-goal I presented isn't 100% possible or the right direction for society. But working towards it means we solve a host of intermediate problems, with each one making things a bit better.

Sorry I'm not answering all your points, which some are 100% valid and I agree, but others are just us talking past eachother. E.g. I'm not entirely advocating for us to go to the middle-ages and churn butter for 2 hours a day. But there has to be an in-between that opens up additional options and ideas that I can't possibly envision, or articulate well-enough, or consider every angle and potential criticism.

It's astonishing how high-tech agriculture has become without the general public noticing much of it.

I recently had a longer talk with my uncle, who is a farmer in South Germany, where he told me about the newish technology he is using:

- Milking robots: the process is entirely automated, the cows basically go inside the milking stations by themselves.

- His newer tractors are all driving GPS based, which allows him to keep the track with a precision of about 20cm. He is now able to exactly apply the amount of fertilizer, pesticides or seeds he wants to apply and plan the amounts in advance.

- A lot of data is collected for each cow and processed by an external company. This goes down to temperature measurements at each teat in the milking robot. The external company monitors each cow and plans individual treatment to prevent diseases and to optimize milk production.

- He currently plans to build a manure biogas plant, which will produce enough electricity for him and then some. I really like the approach to mainly use manure instead of harvested biomass (the economics of the two are vastly different, an interesting discussion in itself).

And that's just one farm. There are a lot of innovative things happening in agriculture.

A lot of that is done locally here ( large grain fields in Australia ).

Edited for clarity.

A drone flies over the field, maps where the fawns are staying put, sends a message to automated tractors to reroute.

This is probably the most "feel good" application of drones. That and detecting landmines.

On the infrastructure side, you can use thermal drones in construction planning to detect if/where a building is losing heat, spot (beginning) defects in industrial installations and inspect if a power line is still working acceptably. DJI also pairs the thermal camera with a decent photo camera so you don't need to send up two drones for the job.

They specifically have the opposite instinct, because fawns usually lack coordination to flee like an adult. So they have the instinct to still.

Can you imagine being I the cabin and witnessing that, how it probably sounds in the process?

Then cleaning up the mess and repairing the damage?

Surprisingly enough, there was almost no blood, but every bone in the animal was broken. The load of silage that it ended up in had to be thrown out, the forage harvester itself, needed some light repairs, the harvest got delayed a few hours, and the whole thing was really depressing.

Luckily as far as I can remember it happened only once, and it was definitely something that we tried hard to avoid.

So we will always have incentives for innovation.

(I specifically say 'localised', because on a global level we are living in extreme abundance by historic standards.)

Iceland has more geothermal power than it knows what to do with, north of Canada has abundance of fresh water but it’s uneconomical to move it to California, etc.

Basically there being a limit to abundance before it is too extreme to exist sustainably (without being extracted). You can have Cerro de Potosi, a very silver rich mountain sustainably exist. But a mountain made of solid gold? That would be extracted from until gold devalued itself.

There's no global market for water, like there is for oil and liquified natural gas, because the price of water is much lower. Instead there are regional water projects.

Even for natural gas, there aren't pipelines everywhere, and shipping natural gas (by ship) is more expensive than transporting it through pipelines.

I guess I can rescue my statement that we don't have localised abundances of (easily) tradeable goods. And that leads to no localised abundances of all the inputs required to make a tradeable good.

To come back to the original example: flood farming would produce an abundance of agricultural outputs, and those are fairly easy to trade. Both across space and these days also across time, thanks to preservation techniques.

(Not all agricultural outputs are easy to transport or preserve, but there's probably something you can grow that is.)

I hope that in the future almost everywhere in the world will still have way too much air so that it's too cheap to measure; but thanks to global trade food prices will always be relatively flat across the globe.

So even people farming insanely productive regions will have plenty of incentives to innovate to further improve productivity.

Water rights are complicated, so water is far from freely-traded commodity, but over time, cities do pay more, and that means they tend to get their way. There's a saying that water flows uphill towards money.

Local abundance is traditional: fruit and vegetables in season. It's still true for people with big gardens, when it's not worth their while to sell it.

Yes, that was basically my point: participating in modern economies tends to smooth out local abundance. [0]

That's good overall! Less waste, more innovation. But, of course, there are certain specific things lost to be nostalgic about.

You are also right that water as an input is subject to lots and lots of distortions. And that leads to wasting of water, especially expensive in places where water is actually scarce.

> Yes, we can see that in the American West where most water is used by agriculture. Exporting food can be seen as a more practical alternative to exporting water. When there's a drought, maybe don't export quite so much?

When water has a proper market clearing price, that's exactly what happens.

[0] Home production in a garden is a good example here, because it's usually not for participating in the wider market economy.

I work for john deere. But I don't have non public information and I don't speak for the company.

Very unfortunate for cows that they're able to produce milk for human consumption.

Of course, the individual cow might (or might not!) disagree.

Compared to aurochs, the cows are thriving.

(On a side note, I just saw a mounted skeleton of an aurochs yesterday, in the Danish National Museum in Copenhagen. That beast was huge, and it would look even more overwhelming to medieval or Iron Age people, who were on average shorter than us; I am 6 ft and that animal was as tall as me. That is probably why it was so prestigious to hunt one, I can't even imagine a close combat with that. But it was hunted to extinction.)

This depends on the level of empathy you have for cows.

If you empathise with them as you would with humans, imagine making the same argument to justify slavery

One could argue industrial farms are fate worse than death

Milking is the least bad thing we do to them, I would recommend focusing more on other parts of farming/ranching if you care.

I think the cows would prefer that.

It used to be difficult/expensive to get drones here, but I see DJI stores all over town now. Seeing this is super cool and speaks towards how innovative and creative Vietnamese get with whatever they can get their hands on.

Interesting - here in Japan the consensus is that the level of English went down, as we had a few years of no tourists and no language assistants.

Vietnam is my favorite place in Asia. It felt like the country is trying very hard to address many of the environmental problems like moving from gas powered to electric vehicles.

This is my favorite IG: https://www.instagram.com/sai_gonxanh/

But also SOOO depressing at the same time. The country is actually really really bad with trash and waste. The culture is literally to just toss trash into gutters. I can't tell you how many times on this trip alone that I've seen people just toss trash out car windows. Sigh...

Here is what is happening now, due to over farming, building dams everywhere and generally poor management...

https://www.instagram.com/p/C8Bk7jgvF65/

They realized that they make more money when they speak English to foreigners, so they studied up. I'm not even making this up, one of the kids I was talking to said that.

There was a push for English fluency in K-12 around 10 years ago. Most people you are bumping into are products of that era. The non-Saigon/Hanoi/DaNang/DaLat kids who didn't get that opportunity attended the hundreds of ESL schools like "Wall Street English" and "California English" in town

It was pretty mediocre and that was the depth of it.

Unless you're in a private school, my experience is that education here is still pretty poorly handled. Kind of "blind leading the blind".

What I'm seeing now is that even the older generations are speaking some English too now, where previously I would just get the infamous jazz hands.

I'm also in a big city... it'll be interesting to see how things are when I head out into the country side again.

It is, but the tourism boom began around sa decade ago as well, which pushed (pidgin) English fluency front and forward in Tier 1 cities (eg - https://laodong.vn/chinh-sach-giao-duc/dieu-kien-lam-giao-vi...).

Most Vietnamese born after 1980 who consume foreign content prefer Korean, Chinese, and Japanese content over Western (based on my wife and her extended family's experience)

In Saigon at least there was a push for English teaching in K-12, and ik international teachers (mostly Pinoy) were hired as contractors to teach part time in that initiative.

Agreed, I've noticed this as well from when I was living here before. The difference today is that I'm noticing more english youtube content being consumed. I wish we could see youtube stats on this.

My partner is 1983... grew up in D3... near perfect english... only likes western content. A bit of an oddball in that regard, which sets them apart mentally from the rest.

Keeping ahead of beatles is a big thing for him. Better aerial detection would be good. Currently he misses stands that could have been managed better earlier.

Documenting and automating what current forresters would be huge because their kids aren't interested and aren't spending the time to learn and will be managing things much more like a farm than a healthy forest if they manage at all (most likely they will just harvest it all and then sell the land).

Farming drones aren’t all airborne. I guess the ones driving around on the ground might be called robots though? At least in English.

I imagine that the main reason these ones fly is because you can’t drive around a rice field as you mention. Here in Denmark though most drone tech aimed at farming drives around. Flying drones are mostly used for surveillance, to see which areas need to be watered and such.

As far as repairs go, drones aren’t that bad in comparison to a lot of other farm equipment. This is because farmers can 3D print almost every part of a drone. Of course some manufacturers are going to struggle with this, and this is actually one of the major reasons keeping farming tech “slow” since a lot of the actually sellable solutions are build by startups which John D and his friends struggle to figure out how to make money of something that’s cheap and easy to repair.

Anyway, farming drones is probably the most interesting field of technology you can work in right now. At least in my opinion.

As far as the etymology goes, back in the days a drone was a male bee, so by default airborne. You can trace that meaning back two thousand years or so. It was first used to mean remote controlled aircraft in 1946.

Of course, languages evolve and now it can mean any untethered robot; air, land or sea.

A lot of the farming that is happening in Vietnam is on these smaller scale farmer levels. Drones are a harder sell in America imo because you have large multi-hundred/thousand acre farms in a country optimized for cars. In Vietnam the farmer will have a much much smaller plot of land and in the countryside often the roads will look more like sidewalks to a westerner.

I am not sure how effectively you could move tractors around in the countryside and you would be doing it often with the size of these farms.

As you can imagine rice paddies are a bastard for wheels, because its muddy as fuck. Its not like its economical to put a cement pan underneath as some rice plants have >1m roots[1] so you can't treat it like watercress (thats a wild assertion, maybe you can)

Also, the banks that hold the water to make it a paddy are unlikely to be regular or load bearing. Moreover, the fields are not laid out with a road to link them all together.

So conventional tractor with thin wheels/floaters just won't work. And smaller vehicles are just impractically heavy or impossible to get into most fields.

As for the AI shit, I don't think there is acutally that much. It looks a lot like its just standard drone mapping/possible machine vision to detect the state of the crops/border of the field.

Would this scale up for western style large fields? no. but for small irregular terrace style fieldlets, it would

[1]https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/pdf/10.1626/pps.3.281

The overwhelming majority of the rice comes from the Mekong and Red River Deltas which are, like all deltas, extremely flat.

That guy spraying in the article is most definitely not wearing any PPE, maybe a cloth mask at best, fertilizers/pesticides have not been used in Vietnam for as long as they have in the rest of the world.

These drones are absolutely all benefits.

- No more guy inhaling chemicals all day.

- Hopefully more programmatic approach to spraying where some level of measurement is happening.

- If you have business being built around spraying, they will eventually optimize around using the right amount for their service.

It's kindof frustrating that this isn't the case.

If you're a company developing drones, for instance, how do you even test them?

More like 100: https://geneva-academy.ch/galleries/today-s-armed-conflicts

I'd recommend not to rely on media for the topic "war" but to educate yourself. Otherwise you end up quickly in a war yourself:

> Naturally the common people don't want war . . . but after all it is the leaders of a country who determine policy, and it is always a simple matter to drag the people along, whether it is a democracy, or a fascist dictatorship, or parliament or a communist dictatorship

H. Göring

Interesting listen to on the topic: https://irregularwarfare.org/podcasts/drones-automation-and-...

Most companies though probably have a part 107 pilot on staff, or have had some of their employees in other roles certified as such.

You'd probably get a license to fly drones to test the drones. Wouldn't you expect a test driver to have a driver's license?

In Australia we see drones mapping areas that need to be sprayed, then that data is downloaded into a tractor which traverses the field spraying (or adding nutrient) according to data collected by the drone. Haven't heard of spraying drones yet

> Are drones being used in the US as well

Yes. We even funded a couple prominent players in the space that got acquired a decade ago.

Chicago, Champaign-Urbana, Pittsburgh, and Ames used to be hubs in this niche back then.

Therefore, I wouldn't be surprised if it's more about market protection. Which doesn't make much sense to me because is there a major US drone manufacturer that can't compete with DJI right now?

This is a common misconception. With OTA updates, the backdoor can be introduced at any time in a future software version. For example, right before an attack.

Slightly tangential, but what's the thinking here?

We don't want to get it on us while spraying it, but then we'll eat it and it'll be fine?

Ingesting and breathing in the concentrations of insecticide associated with spraying is orders of magnitude worse risk to the farm worker and people around, than incidental food contact risk post production/packaging.

Many chemicals are also broken down in sunlight and water, or are absorbed into the rootstock, not the fruiting body.

(not an agronomist or food scientist. I too wondered at the Merryl Streep ad 30 years ago where she's washing broccoli with soap..)

I suspect that a big part of the issue is the amount of exposure.

Dental x-rays aren't dangerous to the patient, but they are dangerous to the dental technician, because they're (potentially) exposed to many x-rays every day.

Same deal here - if you consume say... 100 lbs of rice a year that's not that big of a deal. But if the worker is spraying entire fields - they're just in contact with a lot more pesticide. And that's beyond the fact that white rice has the husk removed, etc.

(Of course, the history of pesticides is full of pesticides that don't actually dissipate, or break down, as much as claimed.)

To elaborate that thinking: when absorbed in the quantities experienced by a farm worker in this context, some pesticides can have irritant or toxic effects. They (or rather their application methods and cocktails) are designed not to permeate the food products of the plant, although some do with some foods and this is ongoing research. Farmers need to consistently produce healthy produce people can afford, and want to do as little harm as possible to people in the process.

However, irrigation and the rice's own metabolism will remove some pesticide. And rice grains have a peel which is later removed, often after a drying process at somewhat high temperatures, which will further degrade "safe" pesticides.

This is just the best compromise we can make between labor cost (both financial and human; I have worked in rice crops and it is no joke) and safety, practically speaking. If I had to dream a better solution, I would have our crops grow in completely artificial environments out of planet, while tended by robots. Then insecticides wouldn't be needed, and genetic manipulation would be less of an issue. But, as they say, choose your dreams.

While we do consume some amounts of them it’s minuscule, more so when the food is prepared after proper washing and boiling/fried etc.

Would be interesting to see overtime.

So I think flat, reasonably level fields will stay with us for some time.

The notion that robots and drones will eliminate monocultures and chemical inputs is wildly untrue. In some minor cases they will reduce the need.

It amazes me that software engineers think they have the panacea for whatever faults they see in our food system without a full understanding and history of it.

The majority of the public do not own or fly drones. The government has bigger concerns than a few people getting burnt on their DJI purchase.

Disposable drones are the future of warfare. Would you really want to subsidize China's ability to develop and manufacture them? While also letting China collect data from drones flying over your country? Better to rip that bandaid off sooner rather than later imo.

> Because drones spray or scatter the ideal concentration uniformly over a precise area, farmers require less pesticide and fertilizer than they would if applying materials by hand, says XAG engineer Long Hung.

I hope Long Hung knows that for sure and not just fantasizes.