Open Source Farming Robot(farm.bot) |
Open Source Farming Robot(farm.bot) |
It’s a very cool project.
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?
Various APIs still exist and are callable. https://github.com/Growstuff/growstuff/blob/e8bc72dc900e2593...
Remove the tires from two old bicycles to run them on rails, build a gantry between them mounted to seatposts and handlebars. Probably drive it with chains on winches for robustness.
Use movable wall elements so that the pick and place machine can set up both shade and increased illumination. Maybe have portable rain protection too. Maybe deploy close-up UV and IR lamps.
I'd like to know the max size that a single gantry can serve, see how high its utilization can be.
My guess is that it all can pay off once it's big enough. I just don't know where that point is. 100ft long? 200ft? 300? And 20ft wide?
There is a lot of discussion in a lot of threads about the design of the robot to water "from the top" by spraying the leaves instead of watering directly on the roots, and whether that's a good or bad thing, and whether the designers of the robot thought about it.
Here's the problem with watering the leaves: yes, plants ultimately get their water from rain. But under normal conditions, the rain comes in sporadically in large quantities -- not every day -- and soaks into the soil, which is where the plants actually pick it up. Flood irrigation does largely the same thing. Spray irrigation doesn't attempt to water the soil that deeply, it tends to give the plants just what they need for the next 24-48 hours, and that encourages wilt and fungal infections.
Also, domesticated vegetable crops are far more susceptible to wilt and fungal infections than natives, and than grain crops, which are at the end of the day grasses. So you can in the same garden have perfectly healthy corn but all of your melons and squash have such bad fungal infections that the leaves are literally white. You can criticize the selection of vegetables for yield and not hardiness, but the fact is this is where we are with vegetable crops.
This is an interesting project, but IMHO it isn't practical, and there isn't any way to make it practical. The X-Y gantry design, for gardening, has a number of intractable problems, watering from the top being just one of them. Another is that the design doesn't scale. You can't make this thing handle a 25 by 100 foot grade bed, which is the size you'd need to even start making a serious dent in the nutritional needs of one person. It can't really weed, and there's no way to modify the design to make it weed effectively; you'd have to add degrees of freedom to the gantry so that it could reach down to soil level and grasp roots (or, alternatively, to very selectively apply an herbicide). Garden crops grow to dramatically different heights; micro greens will be a few inches about the soil, zucchini will be three feet high, tomatoes can be 4-5 feet, and corn depending on cultivar can be as much as 9 feet tall.
And finally, watering and weeding, if you know what you're doing are actually the easiest parts of the problem. Preparing the bed so you don't have to weed is a lot more work. To do that, you plant your crops and then apply large amounts of mulch. If you've never prepared beds, shoveled dirty barn straw for mulch or tried to wrangle weed barrier cloth on a hot, humid day, you haven't lived, my friend. That's the physically hard part. THe mentally hard part is diagnosing problems in your crops before they become problems. Noticing that those shiny weird insects flying around are squash vine borer. Looking at the underside of leaves and seeing squash beetle eggs or going around your tomatoes with a blacklight looking for cutworms.
If you want to apply robotics to gardens, you either need a low mobile base, or you need to carefully lay out rows with fixed spacing, and have a high mobile base that can clear the height of the crops, and can take a variety of attachments, e.g. tillers to handle weed control. Which means you need think about monocropping. Which starts to look like the mid 20th century basic garden tractor, the International Harvester Farmall Cub, just with maybe an electric power plant and an autonomy appliqué kit. THis makes sense because the mid 20th century was the last time people in North America practiced gardening as a survival mechanism, and the Farmall Cub was the result of 50 years of practical design by people who knew how to garden when it counted.
"Aimed at prosumers...uh...more nerdsumers"
"Oh I just saw the price, $4000 to avoid an hours work"
> 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?
If they have a solid planning software that accounts for crop rotation, companion planting, etc. then that's already a much better value proposition.
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 don't really see what problem it solves. Growing in a raised bed with drip irrigation looks a lot less hassle than setting up a giant cnc watering machine. If you mulch once a year you don't need to add nutrients to a no dog bed at all.
I wonder if he asked farmers about their problems before creating this project.
Think there is more potential industrial scale. i.e. run the arm over half a mile rather than a couple of feet
That's like saying you watched The Bachelor and now have Opinions about marriage.
If you want to drink Soylent, go ahead. But even the predominant ingredient, soy, comes from agriculture.
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.
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.
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.
I just can't imagine who would buy this. Gardening can be done very cheap and I believe that most people do it because they like spending time outside, working with their hands, being involved with the food they eat and saving a bit of money. Why would such a person want to have a robot which does away with that?
On an industrial scale this thing is of course totally useless.
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.
I feel like it’s actual market may end up being pretty narrow, not that it isn’t it a cool idea, it is, but it just gave me that gut reaction that it falls squarely in the uncanny valley between industrial users and hobbyists.
I'm in a rural area and my first thought seeing this was "Good kit to play with for a growing teenager interested in agricultural automation" rather than "Serious industrial end use tooling".
That’s a narrow audience though..
Part of the draw is the potential for iterating on it, collecting whatever data might be collectable, adapting it to my environment or what I want to grow, etc. I've got a black thumb for vegetables anyway – that's why I grow flowers instead – so I really don't care if some or all them end up dying because the robot fails.
My hope would be that in 20 years everyone has a little bot that 24/7 runs a garden for you and provides every family with 80% of their vegetable need.
Imagine the amount of acreage we could return to nature / co2 sinking.
Edit: Found a link to yield analysis https://farm.bot/pages/yield It appears the answer is however many Farmbots cover 549 square meters
Would be less intrusive and thus easier to work alongside a human if it was a polar system, with a single pole in the middle/corner, like a tower crane.
Simpler mechanically as well I suppose
A 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)
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.
Yeah I remember seeing this years ago, and feeling like it was the future. Now it barely feels like a robot.
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.
This system is electricity-based, whereas traditional agriculture is fuel-intensive.
Even fertilizer production is fuel-intensive, and this system avoids using any.
Multiply by the time scale you want the system to last, and you get your emissions savings.
Steel contents is a one-off emissions investment.
Now if you want to compare this system to an other electricity-based, renewable energy only, agriculture, say with electric trucks etc, that'd be interesting.
People don't want poisoned food from pesticides etc... primarly.
Hydro gives you a significant amount of control. Exact amount and wavelength of light, exact timing and amount of nutrients, exact temperature, humidity, co2, wind, etc. All with significantly higher costs. There's a reason that those "hydroponics in a skyscraper" basically grow lettuce, because it's the same growing profile as weed, which is a high profit crop.
Really the only thing I would trust and want to automate is watering when I'm away, and that can be done much cheaper. The most burdensome part right now in my greenhouse is actually keeping the large plants in check, prevent them from growing too much by taking away right leaves/branches. The robot probably wouldn't do too much to help with that. Weeds are a problem outside, but that's way too large of an area to cover with this kind of robots.
Would it be a terrible idea to destroy weeds with laser shots? Or crops don't provide enough margin for such advance tech?
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.
This thing only drills the seeds and waters the plants.
As a farmer, this looks like it would be massively expensive per acre and massively wasteful of environmental resources. I currently farm 5,000 acres including 400 irrigated acres for $300,000 per year. I grow enough food to feed thousands of people a year.
You would need 200 of these systems to farm one acre. I could not find a list price on the website, but based on my knowledge of CNC machine pricing, each machine probably costs in the neighborhood of $10,000. So this machine would cost $2,000,000 per acre to farm. Insanity.
Government bureaucrats want you to starve to death, so I am sure money will go to this and be taken from ordinary farmers.
The system also appears to be an environmental disaster... Enormous amounts of heavily machined aluminum, stainless steel, and plastic to do tiny bits of work already done far more efficiently in other ways.
This thing looks like an out-of-touch nerd hobby project, not a real tool one would use in the real world of farming.
The "Commercial Production" link goes to a page mostly consisting of... art projects. https://farm.bot/pages/research
I live in a german town at the edge of a large city, the grocery stores are evenly distributed among this town, max 15 minutes by foot or 5 by bike. I love my bike and use it all the time. On a nice day, there will be 20 bikes and 60 cars at the store. On a rainy day there will be 2 bikes and 80 cars at the store.
"Only americans take the car to the store" is a myth that you shouldn't spread.
I think you're misinterpreting the criticisms. It's not "this particular product is a bad implementation compared to other one-size-fits-all tech-solutionism products", but rather "a one-size-fits-all tech-solutionism approach to this problem space doesn't make any sense"
This is a very typical tech-industry "everything looks like a nail" type issue: going into an area you don't understand with a solution to problems that don't exist.
A small subset of problems here:
1. A robot should automate things you do often/regularly - developing complex machinery do to one-off seasonal steps steps like seeding & pulling is immensely wasteful - that's going to raise the cost of the product a lot just in order to automate tasks you rarely do.
2. It doesn't do those tasks well: the pulling examples are contrived & the failure rates look high.
3. The watering mechanism is developed to suit the robot design rather than designing the robot around optimal watering strategies - this completely ignores generations of optimising watering approaches. The watering mechanism is actively harmful to many crops.
4. Very unadaptable to different plants' needs.
TL;DR: There is no best of class product in this area because only someone who doesn't understand the problem space would try to develop a product to do this.
If you have resources I can read or learn from about all this, please share them. You've clearly got wisdom in this space!
Modular hydroponic pods have always been a better idea and if someone handed me 100 million I'd use it to develop standardised farming skyscrapers/towers to hydroponically grow food in towns/local communities with minimal water, electricity usage and human intervention.
It's so crazy that we have the tech to do this sort of thing now, but don't. We could do so much if things weren't so profit focussed and the wealthy weren't able to skim most of it off to dump into tax havens.
Land use for vegetable farming is really not an issue. Just build your hydroponics setup on the ground, you'll cut costs by an order of magnitude.
If you actually want to reduce land use, get people to eat less meat. The crops that use the most land by far are corn and soy, and most of those ends up just being fed to livestock.
All commercial growers in my latitude start by sprouting their plants indoors, using e.g. soil blocks. Very little is direct sown.
If you practice no-till, weeding isn't even that big of a task.
This thing definitely does not provide value.
One feature request is some form of animal and pest protection. Squirrels and cardinals eat a majority percentage of the veggies in my raised bed here in Austin. I think some bats eat the vegetables as well but that’s difficult to validate.
Looks like it does do weeding, kinda https://genesis.farm.bot/v1.7/assembly/tools
You have to correctly size and adjust every nozzle and need different sizes of pipe as you get further from the hose. It's more difficult than you would think.
A lot of the pieces fit together by friction alone and are a pain to put together. You have to use boiling water to soften the pipes in order to connect them without breaking them. It requires quite a bit of elbow grease.
EDIT: I think I must have responded to the wrong comment. Rereading my reply doesn't make sense in context...
This kind of thing seems to be happening more and more as people get more and more disconnected from the specific fundamental reasons why we do things.
This is like building and programming a home-building robot to build one house, and then just leaving it on site to redo the roof every 20 years.
Couldn't you say that about half the stuff posted here?
To me that's the "product" - an interesting engineering project targeted at people like us; a starting point for learning that can be taken further and those advancements potentially fed back into it, like all good open source projects.
As that kind of product, similar to a large chunk everything else built around RPi's and arduino's posted here (and... celebrated), it looks great to me and I don't get the hate. I was really excited to see it.
> Why would such a person want to have a robot which does away with that?
The same reason they want the many, often entirely pointless automations posted here daily, only this is not just fun, but also useful?
If this actually produces enough consumable food reliably (idk if it does, and be nice to see criticism along that angle), maybe also the cost could be justified?
IIRC it's ~$3K for the base model, seems it could pay for itself in a year or so if it could supply a years worth of fresh veges to a couple of people, depending on the local cost (which can vary a lot).
Why? Do people who don't like gardening not like gardens or fresh produce? I just don't see how you reached this conclusion.
I’ve removed a ton of weeds from between our tiles, I’ve removed exactly three from the raised bed. The watering takes like 30 seconds a few nights a week. The real trick is to plant something with a high output and no maintenance required like squash.
Why do you just ask the most banal questions instead of reading my post and responding to the argument I made?
>Do people who don't like gardening not like gardens or fresh produce? I just don't see how you reached this conclusion.
Yes, if you don't ready post you don't know how I reached that conclusion.
If you just like fresh produce go to a farmers market.
Hire an accoutant. Research where humans consume unusually lots of fresh produce, ensure it works with one bed for that produce, buy a warehouse (near where most Uber Eats users are), and set up a conveyor belt that will be expanded over time. Engineering friend would help with this. While waiting for first produce & collecting data, work on branding, buy fake accounts & hire group of third-country freelancers with Good English to do your marketing, make a media plan ("interview" plan), work on photography, and research Uber Eats, GrubHub, DoorDash matters (talk to them on phone, figure out the most cost-effective still good looking & functional packaging etc.), and reach out to popular cafes (especially popular chains) to get them use your below-profitably sold produce in exchange for attention (ghost restaurants may also be interested).
The profit comes either B2C or B2B (probably a fallback). You sell fresh, consistently high-quality local produce at low cost around the year, cheap because you have no employees and thus no salaries to pay.
Consider expanding out from your first warehouse as a franchise.
I can't really argue with most of the rest, however I can't help but laugh (and cry?) that the hustle obviously has to contain blatantly immoral tactics.
Other ag-academic research teams.
Maybe it has a niche. Millionaires who want to go on holiday but still like to grow plants. It seems more like a gimmick.
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 (probably flawed) perspective is that if you scratch those itches within the BEAM, then you're going to end up with fewer superfluous layers of abstraction. Also fewer distinct niches that you now must find a specialist to fill when the old one quits. Also, you end up more in control of your app because since you more or less wrote the orchestrator, you're relying less on the cloud provider to be a reliable puppet master.
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It's slow going, one class per semester, but I've been taking biology classes on the side. I sometimes think about making a break for it and trying to build something like farmbot but for driving a microscope, or a pipette, or maintaining the temperature/pH/etc in a bioreactor.
These are, for now, just dreams.
Sorry for the diatribe, but you did ask me to elaborate :)
It makes more sense in a laboratory environment but this just seems like overkill for a regular person.
These robots will not help avoid famine, but they will help rich first world people be more cognizant of food and agriculture. Which in turn will help them make better choices with the food they buy. This can only work against calory-dense inudstrial food, which arguably is the larger problem than efficiency in large parts of the world.
But there are also a whole lot of benefits to producing food yourself: resilience, diversity of food crops, taste.
Also, people often enjoy the process, which effectively lowers the economic cost of doing it yourself.
If you factor in wastage and the expensive supply chain logistics for things that spoil quickly it's probably cheaper to grow them closer to the point of use, especially if you can keep down labor costs with automation.
Tastier and more nutritious too.
A combination of clean energy transportation/more local growing would help.
That said, I think making room for something like:
is perhaps a bit more marketable (though they missed out by not sizing it to fit next to a refrigerator).
We only uphold property rights because enough of us see a benefit in doing so. If that changes, so can we.
We keep trying to un-invent the division of labour.
Edited for unnecessary pre-coffee poor behaviour. Sorry.
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.
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.
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).
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.
The gantry design is limited for sure, but extending it into a more independent system might be possible, and the software they wrote to manage crops could potentially be quite useful with a more general system. It seems like a final v1 for a "farm bot".
I’m not a farmer but I live in a farming city, and one thing I notice is that the crops around here are definitely not all harvested at the same time. Some are harvested months before others. Even the same crops like corn or various beans are harvested weeks apart. For corn sometimes months. Farms also share a lot of equipment. Though a lot of farms are just absolutely massive corporate farms so it’s not really “sharing” but has the same effect.
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I realized today that "hustling" is actually very irrational for normal person not only due to prospect theory but ALSO due to the fact that you are not investing in a business with known revenue. For example, having proven that the belt system can work, a VC can probably guess whether this would bring in money. On other hand normal humans "hustle" based on illusion that A brings money because it has "successful" history IN OTHERS' BUSINESSES (probably still high failure rate of course, but say they accounted for that), but they actually should hustle only if they know their A has brought money. This has, with the manipulation of humans to make them "hustle", lead to increased consumption of business "investments" EG SEO-tools, designers, and whatnot—side consumption instead of side hustling.
- 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.
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.
*fixed typo
The downsides of tilling happen because you flip the soil at a depth of 25-35cm, which disturbs the micro and macro fauna, and builds a layer of crust that the roots have a hard time penetrating, especially if you till in wet conditions. The issues with erosion are more a result of prolonged exposure of uncovered soil to the elements. You're not going to do any of that in a raised garden bed.
If you wouldn't mind reviewing https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and taking the intended spirit of the site more to heart, we'd be grateful.
Your comment would be fine without the first (and I would also say the last) sentence.
The thing about growing food locally, is that you don't need individually package your apples in plastic. You just harvest it, then eat it, in it's healthiest possible form, while also not doing insane polluting.
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.
Genuine question, does it help the plants in some way?
I don’t know what you mean here. By 2020 I assume you mean the covid-19 pandemic? I agree that the pandemic itself put people at risk. But what do you mean by “cascading failures that put individuals at risk”?
From my perspective society and systems of it kept on going despite the large scale upheavals happening. If for anything I would cite 2020 as evidence that things are not as fragile as we suspected. But maybe you have a different perspective?
If you don't like gardening why would you spend 2k on a robot doing it for you instead of buying the produce?
I use the VH400 from Vegetronix: https://www.vegetronix.com/Products/VH400/
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.
It’s pretty rare though. They usually only do it when it rains heavily right before harvest.
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
Much has gone into studying how to best grow these crops, both at universities and research centers and on the field at farms themselves.
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.
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.
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.
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))”
US cups and metric cups are different?
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.
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.
Is this your project? Why are you so emotional over it being a shit product?
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.
The initial build will require shipping parts to a location for pickup, but this is a rare event.
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
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.
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 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.
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
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.