Farmbot

[Ben]

I thought this was rather interesting. If you ignore the eco-hippie-commie vibe, the technology is pretty neat, especially from the sensor and monitoring viewpoint. The price would have to come down a lot for the average backyard gardener, but it might be cost-effective for the farmer's market sized gardener who is selling, vs eating their crops. I'd be interested in hearing giga's viewpoint. It seems like something that could be easily scaled up to commercial greenhouses.

Maybe less so to large acreage commercial farming. You'd likely have to go to self-driving individual robots, just for capacity if nothing else, and then tie irrigating into wheelines or similar.

http://www.digitaltrends.com/cool-tech/farmbot-open-source-agriculture-robot/

[41magsnub]

holy crap that's cool

[MechAg94]

Neat.  Might be good for a sizeable green house also.  I doubt it would work for larger farms unless there was some way to make it mobile.  Some of the scifi books talk about farming robots.  A mobile robot that can move along crop rows would be interesting.  Build it on those racks they use to water the fields. 

[Fly320s]

Seems like more time and effort would be spent setting up and running the bot than actually growing plants.

[Ben]

Neat.  Might be good for a sizeable green house also.  I doubt it would work for larger farms unless there was some way to make it mobile. 

That's why I was thinking more along the lines of self-driving equipment for something like a 160 acre or larger far. Heck, current ag tractors are already practically self-driving with differential GPS. The most unreliable part of a modern tractor is the $10/hr illegal alien running it. 

Make them self-driving, and you just need a mechanic with a tablet to monitor them.

Fly320s - on the complexity of setting it up, it seems like that's part of the prototyping demo in the video. I suspect the units they're selling will be fairly plug and play. As long as you decide what size plot you want, then it's just the initial setup. If you want to expand or move, then yeah, you've got a bit of extra work and calibrating to do.

[Hawkmoon]

Make them self-driving, and you just need a mechanic with a tablet to monitor them.

Tesla tractors?

[French G.]

Tractors get AI, decide to start farming humans and there we are, right in a bad Keanu Reeves movie.