Re:The Farm Automation Breakthrough
by hirundo on Sunday July 28, 2019 @07:02PM
(#20550308)
This tech seems to have the potential to decentralize farming somewhat. The same machine with a few attachments and software options could also cultivate, plant, irrigate, debug (organically with frikin' laser beams), and harvest. Since software is the most expensive part of the problem it could be turned into a small retail device in not too many years. Buy a gardenbot like you now buy a lawnmower. Add seeds, compost, power and water, let it loose in the backyard and just wait for it to stack vegetables in a bin.
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Machinery is pretty expensive in its own right. Also tractors already have the ability to pull multiple different implements behind them. The only thing novel about this is that it's somewhat autonomous. Even that isn't terribly novel since most large scale farming uses GPS guided steering at this point. Ag is very very high-tech already.
Re:The Farm Automation Breakthrough
by unimployed on Monday July 29, 2019 @12:03AM
(#20551427)
The automated equipment is still so expensive hardly any of it is owned or used by family farms. The thing was that 10+ years ago the automated equipment was owned by very large ventures (large cooperatives and bigger) that shared or sold service only, traveling the region with the equipment to sell that service. Pretty sure that case has hardly changed. Travel the country and you see that most farms don't have the latest equipment rolling or sitting on their land.
what leads you to think that SW is the most expensive part?
IMHO it depends on scaling- as SW scales extremely well it might be, that SW is by far the cheapest component in this mechatronic system.
especially if you factor in maintenance and operating costs.