It sill looks like the software is written by people who don't know how to care for plants. You don't spray water on leaves as shown in the video; you'll just end up with fungus infestation. You water the soil and nourish the microorganisms that facilitate nutrient absorption in roots. But, I don't see any reason the technology can't be adapted to do the right thing.
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.
Yes, but as GP said that doesn't scale. I live in an agriculture heavy community in the desert (mountain-west USA), and drip irrigation is only really used for small gardens and landscaping. Anyone with an acre or more of crops is not using drip.
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.
But drip irrigation doesn’t scale because you would need to lay + connect + pressurize + maintain hundreds of miles of hoses. It’s high-CapEx.
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.
What is the scale you are talking about here? Because at any significant scale the hard part is not where and how you spray the water but how you get the water there. Are you imagining a robot with a tank? How much water can that carry?
For non precision watering, we have existing options.
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.
Fair point, the robot could lower its nozzle to the ground and jet the water there, much like a human would, with probably not a lot of changes required. That does seem like it would be a good optimization.
Isn't it better to mist plants, especially if you can't delay watering due to full sun?
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,
There is a shift underway from ubiquitous tilling to lower and no till options. Tilling solves certain problems in a field - for a while - but causes others, and is relatively expensive. Buried lines do not coexist with tilling.
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.
> * 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.
> 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.
more tricky frequently because you need to measure the moisture for each plant as maintainance is difficult without, but this is generally the most efficient low cost method in very arid regions from what I have seen (dad is prof in the field, so exposure is years of unpaid labour as a child and student)
If you are concerned about plastic you could substitute terracotta half-round channel pipes and do a micro-canal / channel irrigation. More expensive than plastic irrigation pipes but worth it if you’re determined to avoid plastic. Wood would be a cheaper alternative but requires a lot more maintenance and replacement. We’re talking small scale agriculture with these robots anyways so either option is practical especially compared to the cost of the robot.
You seem like you very much actually know what you’re talking about. Do you have any recommendations for books for laypeople for understanding modern agriculture?
The best way to water a garden is drip irrigation. You do have to manually lay the tubing and then in the fall roll it up. But there are farmers doing it in large fields so a small garden should be possible. Once everything is hooked up it can be pretty well automated. Home Depot now in some stores has drip irrigation supplies.
you don't need anything fancy for drip, a small hole in the pipe and a timer on your pump is is generally enough. If you really want to go fancy you can isolate the system and use moisture sensors, which are cheap.
Moisture sensors that measure conductivity are pretty useless unless frequently recalibrated but time domain reflectometry sensors are much better and more accurate.
A few years ago I saw on a tropical island some open ended poly tunnels growing salads and things that, in my own open air garden, are very heavily predated. They had a simple but very effective solution: they ran misters for a few minutes every hour. This made an environment that the plants thrived and insects left alone. And they lost very little water (on an island where fresh water was conserved generally) even though the tunnels were not closed at the ends. Fungus wasn’t mentioned when I asked about them. It was very simple tech level but I was struck by the smarts and knowledge behind it.
Part of the problem is water composition. Water which contians fertilizers, surfactants etc is going to damage the protective waxy layer on leaves, while rain water will do so less. Next, when watering youre doing so as frequently as the plants can make use of, to encourage maximal growth rates. It would never rain that frequently. finally, the size of droplets is different. Rain drops tend to be big and fat and roll off the waxy leaves while smaller dropplets sit on / stick to the surface where they create a nice wet and likely to rot environment.
Here's a wild thing: at many of the high end vineyards they'll do low-level helicopter flights over the vines every time it rains to blow the water off the leaves and fruit specifically to prevent infection and rot.
Yep. I recently visited some high end vineyards in Arizona, and the grapes really thrive because of how dry it is. They are able to irrigate carefully to avoid wetting the tops of the plants.
I could certainly be wrong about the timing. I’m definitely not a grape growing expert by any means, I mostly know about it from being in the UAV world and having had some discussions about replacing the helicopters with drones for getting the water off.
having worked at a cargo drone company, that is one thing that our platform would have excelled at. although ours had a tendency to simply flatten vegetation when "cornering" at low altitude.
Yes and that's a problem. Many modern plants aren't selected to grow in natural conditions. They're breed for properties like high yields, large fruit and often other characteristics are traded off to achieve that because the farmers can change the environment to deal with those problems with greenhouses, chemicals, fertilizers, irrigation etc.
I think it’s the difference in frequency. There’s likely other factors too, I’d suppose rain purges mold spores from the air for example, as it does with particulate pollution.
I agree with all of your examples. But his sentence misses the crucial to be part to be correct. I'm just wondering whether this is deliberate and just a way of speaking informal english, or just the person doesn't know it's incorrect
I'm a native English speaker, and if I'd spoken what they said out loud then I would've said "there's" precisely because "there're" is more difficult to pronounce. It's also how I'd write it, even though I know "there is" is not correct; it's just an evolution of the language, like "ain't".
Yep. The thoughts are evolving during the speech process. The speaker might start the sentence thinking about one factor, but decides to make it plural after the first words have already started.
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
These are all things people can do, but might not be in the natural flow. Any it depends how the person is speaking. To use a car analogy, a driver can either be looking far ahead and flowing smoothly or looking only a short distance ahead and having to make lots of awkward adjustments. I personally go back and edit things most of the time, but that takes more time for only "style points" in most cases.
hell, I'd argue that it should be fine for formal writing as well. Ideally, the gap between written and spoken language is as narrow as possible, since ideally a written text communicates with the reader directly, with as little hurdles to parsing the content as possible. Having to maintain a secondary vocabulary is exhausting and creates barriers. There is a limit to how permissive I am with this personally though, generally I'd only be happy with changes that are semantically near identical, or introduce words which represent genuinely novel concepts rather than slang that re-brands existing concepts.
The point is it shouldn't be spoken like this. It's just wrong. I'm wondering whether the person is unaware or is this some slang I don't know about. I've seen a bunch of people speak like this, I'm trying to understand the reason
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.
Nature isn't perfect and has disadvantages compared to us.
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.
> Nature isn't perfect and has disadvantages compared to us.
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.
> Hey and you were wrong. You are pretty bad at understanding what other people are saying.
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.
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.
I've clearly stated what my interpretation was, with an explanation of how i got there.
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.
Saying something like rain serves a purpose is backwards. Plants have evolved to survive in conditions that include rain, rain has not been deployed to serve a purpose for plants. There may be other conditions that are easier for plants to thrive in.
Nor are we perfect and we've been wrong about much in nature more often than we've been right over the past many millennia. The previous poster didn't imply either case regardless. The post simply pointed out an assumption being made.
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.
> Nature isn't perfect and has disadvantages compared to us.
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.
How can nature be perfect when it is constantly changing? We alter our environment out of necessity, we would only be able to survive in a very small number of climates on Earth if we did nothing to change our surroundings. Lucky you if you happen to be somewhere with year round fruit to pluck from the vine and temperate climate in the winters but that leaves the other 8 billion people to die of starvation and exposure.
I'm sincerely fascinated by your perspective. I haven't heard this viewpoint before.
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.
> Something that immediately comes to mind for me is all the death and suffering that is abundant through nature
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.
If modern farming protocols are to water at the soil, I would be strongly willing to bet that is the best way to water, at least for our particular situation of growing the crops we grow on the farms we grow them on.
Much has gone into studying how to best grow these crops, both at universities and research centers and on the field at farms themselves.
Yes, and rain fall causes the spread of fungal infestation as said above and it is why we farmers use drip irrigation when possible. FarmBot defenitly has a great marketing video, 3d animation and logo though!
in the wild, plants compete for space and resources and the leaves act as a funnel to direct water (including dew) to the roots that might not otherwise be captured. the leaves can also serve as a shield to prevent the soil around the roots from being eroded by rainfall.
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.
Just a mild pruning: in natural/wild environments (I.e. not the sterile labs of monocultural agronomy), plants actually cooperate in the resources department, because each species and stage of maturity has different needs and resource extractive capacities. They’ll “use” their root systems and mycorrhizal connections (which are only reliably present in wild soil) as a medium of exchange.
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.
Reminds me of when I got into electric skateboarding only to realise late in the game every around me had never had a skateboard when they were younger, they were all engineers. This was back in the day when it was only affordable to make your own. Not disrespecting anyone I just found it funny and surprising.
You seriously think they haven't thought of that? I have no association with this project but it has been going for many years, has sold to many customers and institutions and the pictures certainly look like many healthy plants. Probably there is a cost/benefit trade-off to engineering watering at the soil level. Perhaps leaves would get damaged by the hardware.
I had the same thoughts when watching this. Cucumbers either require twine, in which case they grow quite tall), or each plant will take up half that raised bed. Tomatoes are not planted directly from a seed, you first need to grow seedlings, a very laborious process that’s hard to automate. Tomatoes can also get quite tall, with some plants exceeding 5 feet. You don’t need such elaborate setups for irrigation either - this is trivially solved with drip irrigation stuff available at any Home Depot. And so on and so forth. I grew up on a farm and will probably retire on a farm. The most labor intensive part was weeding and pest control. If you want to do something real, automate that, without making any unwarranted assumptions on how the various crops are planted.
Growing tomatoes as starts that are transplanted is not required if your frost free season is long enough. The benefit of using starts is you can give plants a head start and only plant the strongest.
I can’t emphasize this enough. I mean, I’m using the GardenGrid watering system and an Orbit automated timer to water my 8 raised bed. So the intensive watering problem is solved.
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.
I get maybe 50 or so tomato plants in about 1 square meter in my garden, just from the seeds that are left in the ground from last year's tomatoes. (Of course I don't let all 50 grow and instead give most away.)
Those are not going to bear impressive fruit. People who grow tomatoes for sale almost exclusively plant hybrids. Making hybrid seeds is even more involved, and they cost more, but the crop is much larger, so it’s worth the hassle.
I think the idea is that using the CNC style design for everything makes it a simpler system? Watering from the soil may be better, but harder to automate to such an extreme? Automating the setup of irrigation lines with a CNC head seems like a pretty cool project though.
Drip irrigation is a once and done setup and also automated. I feel like this project is insanely cool, but ultimately not practically useful at the pricepoint.
Watering is definitely a solved problem in agriculture. There is absolutely no scenario where two plants growing right next to each other would need drastically different amounts of water. The project, founders and company are utterly useless.
This is 99% urban legend. You can just barely create it in a lab with just the right plant (with thick hydrophobic trichromes) under just the right light with no wind... but that's not what happens in nature.
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.
I believe watering at night will generally lead to more fungal rot problems. Better to water early morning, when the water will have a chance to sink into the soil, but will be pulled up into the plant by evaporation of water from the leaves (the leaves’ own water, not water you applied)
Shove some Bravo once in a while in the solution and your fungus worry is gone. If you're going with a chemical solution with fertilizer, etc, you might as well use other chemicals like fungicides and pesticides.
Yes it is. Water freezes and provides protection from freezing cold as funny as it might sound. Of course watering systems for huge gardens or orchards are expensive even if you have access to enough water.
There's a thing called foliar spraying, where you do spray water and nutrients on the leaves. You don't do it in the sunshine though because the water droplets will magnify the light and burn the leaves.
Thanks for busting that myth. Foliar isn't about hydration state, it has chemicals and surfactants and it's recommended to do it in morning/night. according to this AL extension office, it can causes a phytotoxicity (leaf burn) at high leaf temps (probably because higher uptake rate of the chemicals) https://www.aces.edu/blog/topics/lawn-garden/foliar-feeding-...
