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A comment on Agricultural drones are transforming rice farming in the Mekong River delta. Parent comment

Re:Agricultural drones are transforming rice farming in the ... by HeyLaughingBoy on Thursday June 20, 2024 @12:49PM (#40740722)
BLE mesh and solar power should get your BoM cost below $20, but I don't see any way that you're going to hit a sub $1 price point. Assuming your mesh can cover the entire field (reasonable if you have one monitoring point every few plants), you can have one or a small handful of LTE-M basestation points to handle the data uplinks.

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

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Re:Agricultural drones are transforming rice farming in the ... by tomhoward on Thursday June 20, 2024 @12:59PM (#40740823)
Yeah I think that's right. It's a matter of trading off the water cost savings (and produce quality/yield gains) per plant vs unit cost per device, to determine the optimal density of devices.

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.

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Re:Agricultural drones are transforming rice farming in the ... by gumby on Thursday June 20, 2024 @02:05PM (#40741449)
There's (relatively) lots of water in the Barossa Valley and it's worth growing a thirsty high value crop like grapes there. And even there the cost structure you say is unsupportable.

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!)

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