This California Greenhouse is Run by Robots - ExtremeTech:
Northern California-based Iron Ox was born from the realization that conventional American agriculture negatively impacts the environment in a multitude of ways. The type of farming most of us are familiar with uses as much as 70 percent of the world's fresh water supply and produces up to 1.19 gigatons of greenhouse gasses every year. [...]
Iron Ox uses two house-designed, AI-supported robots to perform most repetitive farming tasks and ensure resources are used efficiently. The first of these, called Grover, makes up the brawn of Iron Ox's robotic crew. Able to lift more than 1,000 pounds, Grover helps move plant "modules" (i.e. planter boxes) around the greenhouse. Grover also helps water and harvest crops in tandem with Phil, the company's brainier robot farmer. Phil monitors and delivers each module's water, nutrient mix, and pH levels to maximize crop yield and quality while making sure resources aren't overused.
[...] As with any other setting, the integration of robots into agriculture raises concerns regarding job displacement. Conventional farming has long presented employment opportunities for lower-income communities and immigrants; [...] The company says farming is facing a labor crisis as young workers turn away from grueling, environmentally detrimental work, and that its technology may very well present a more positive alternative.
"Agriculture is long overdue for a technology update," Hedayat said. "By introducing technology to farming, we can not only increase efficiency, become more sustainable, but also we can equip workers with tech skills that are highly beneficial in a digital world." Whether Iron Ox elects to support such career transitions via internships, training programs, or other means is something we'll have to wait to find out.
(Score: -1, Offtopic) by Anonymous Coward on Friday May 06 2022, @06:27AM (1 child)
nat portman grits
sharks with lasers
what else am I missing?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday May 06 2022, @02:32PM
A Beowulf cluster of Natalie Portmans heating shark grits with frickin' lasers!
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday May 06 2022, @07:15AM (13 children)
Greenhouse agriculture is expensive (because you have to build the greenhouses) and labor intensive, but it saves a tremendous amount of water and better for the soil.
This is going to be a big win. Agriculture already is mostly mechanized. And we need better environmental stewardship in all areas.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday May 06 2022, @07:25AM (5 children)
Mechanization is effectively exploitation of energy slaves, which cannot function without abundant and sustainable energy sources. These energy sources are not entirely sorted out yet, and, until they are, any additional deployments of mechanization will be harmful to our environment.
It is something like getting addicted to Russian hydrocarbons - it will not end well.
(Score: 2, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Friday May 06 2022, @08:43AM (4 children)
You could not be more wrong.
Greenhouse agriculture saves water. Not only is water scarce itself, it takes energy to pump it (though not very much). Water seems like a renewable resource, but it isn't. Most agricultural water comes from aquifers that replenish only on very slow timescales.
It needs less pesticides. Farmers control the insects, more pollinators, less pests.
It needs a lot of fertilizer, but you don't have uncontrolled runoff into the water cycle. The byproducts can be treated or recovered rather than dumped into the ocean.
It can be done anywhere, so crops can be grown closer to where they are needed. Locally grown is a sham right now, but not with greenhouses.
It is more productive, meaning less land needed for the amount of food produced. Less land means less energy used by farm equipment, almost all of which is fossil fuel.
And to top it all off, robots do not even consume very much energy.
(Score: 1, Touché) by Anonymous Coward on Friday May 06 2022, @09:36AM
GP's real concern is "what are the peasants going to do if we don't keep them slaving in the fields"?
(Score: 2) by HiThere on Friday May 06 2022, @03:14PM (2 children)
You've got a lot of good points, but how certain are you about the overall energy requirements? Some of these high-tech greenhouses sound good, but some sure leave me doubting. (E.g. the one that uses solar cells to collect energy so that led lights can make the photosynthesis work. I've got the strong feeling that they're actually supplementing with the public electric system.) This one's (at least in the summary) too scant on details for me to form an opinion.
Javascript is what you use to allow unknown third parties to run software you have no idea about on your computer.
(Score: 2) by deimtee on Saturday May 07 2022, @01:57AM (1 child)
At high latitudes that could make sense to supplement sunlight. The light would mostly come in the sides and the shadow of the solar cells would fall on the space next door. It might also make it easier to insulate the greenhouse to grow crops out of their regular climate. Even if they have to use some grid power the increase in reliability and control from using the LEDs might be worth it.
No problem is insoluble, but at Ksp = 2.943×10−25 Mercury Sulphide comes close.
(Score: 2) by HiThere on Saturday May 07 2022, @03:05AM
They were talking about using the leds to replace sunlight. It made a bit of sense, because they were doing it in a highrise in a major city, and land was expensive. It let them get high value merchandise quickly to customers. But it hardly looked efficient.
Javascript is what you use to allow unknown third parties to run software you have no idea about on your computer.
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Friday May 06 2022, @03:01PM (6 children)
This is so wrong I hardly know where to begin.
The only part that it got right is that greenhouses are expensive - and they are, very expensive, in a number of ways (energy, materials etc.) but they're also expensive to run because you have to do all sorts of things around pumping air and water and internal movement of crops. Where are greenhouses most used, and most useful? High dollar crops such as herbs, vegetables that are either difficult to grow or expensive to ship, or things with strong year-round demand such as cut flowers. Greenhouse wheat and maize are financially broken, as concepts go.
Greenhouses only save water under very specific circumstances. In relatively humid areas they're a huge headache because they can turn into huge fungus farms if you're not careful. How do you combat those? Fungicides, of course, and disinfectants, and isolation protocols, all of which are fiddly, expensive, and distribute toxins. In arid areas they can (kind of) save water by keeping the loop a bit more closed, or at least reducing losses to transpiration by maintaining higher ambient humidity, but even here there's no free lunch because your reduction of transpiration reduces local ambient moisture, as well as return to the soil/aquifer/surface waters. Try doing that in an area where people are anxious about river fish maintenance (trout and salmon, for example) and you'll see how many permitting problems you find.
Better for the soil? Better than what? Nuclear annihilation? Sure. Greenhouses are dense, high traffic areas. Where they sit is a compaction hotspot, unless your definition of greenhouse is simply a hoophouse over a field. They aren't friendly to soil biota, they exclude burrowing animals as a rule, and in the fully isolated cases they are basically as bad for the soil as plonking building foundations down. These heavily-automated greenhouses are almost a worst-case scenario because not only do you have your robots rolling over the same footprint over and over, transporting your trays of plants, but their humid, jungle-like environment needs to be kept clear of pests otherwise not only are your crops under threat, but so is your machinery.
As for the list of problems it doesn't solve, it does utterly nothing for low margin row crops. Unimportant? Of course it's unimportant, we're only talking about the staples that keep us alive, such as wheat, rice, maize, sorghum and soy. You'd need decades of bumper crops in tight markets to even begin to justify the investment and maintenance costs involved in running this show.
As for the mechanisation of agriculture, this is completely missing the point of why it is mechanised the way that it already is. It wasn't mechanised because horses weren't capable, or because of a John Deere deal with the devil or anything like that. It was mechanised because labour was ultimately much too expensive, especially when the effects of two world wars combined with the green revolution took hold, and agriculture was a marginal bulk commodity game compared to everything else in the market. Farmers get excited over a saving of $100/acre, when what they're planting gets them a couple of tons/acre. That's a dime a pound, roughly. Now you want to load up on greenhouse expenses to make that work out?
(Score: 2) by HiThere on Friday May 06 2022, @03:20PM (2 children)
Most of your objections *can* be answered, it's just that they usually aren't (and the answering would take a lot of development). The one that can't be answered is the one about "only useful for high value crops". And that implies that the things aren't cheaper than conventional farming methods, but are only for use in niche areas.
It's hard to imagine a development of this that would be useful for cotton, alfalfa, or wheat.
Javascript is what you use to allow unknown third parties to run software you have no idea about on your computer.
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Friday May 06 2022, @05:01PM
Sure. Pick one. Better for the soil, let's do that.
How would the footprint of a greenhouse result in healthier soil than, say, a conservation tillage field? Or pasture cropping? Or conventional fallow rotation agriculture? Sure, if your approach is total chemical warfare courtesy of Monsanto, with a double dose of subsoiling and harrowing to wreck any remaining structures then greenhouses aren't worse for the soil, but you'd do even better working the soil with a mattock and a mule, so that's a very artificial standard of comparison.
Greenhouses work because they are controlled environments with managed energy and water budgets, and aggressive pest control (starting with exclusion, but going on from there because everything from weed seeds to blight will be happy in a greenhouse). Locking biota out and annihilating biodiversity is not good for the soil. It's a way of managing an artificial growth environment.
(Score: 2) by deimtee on Saturday May 07 2022, @02:13AM
One of the main differentiators is going to be storage life. Grains can be stored for years at low cost, and moved by slow cheap transports. Greenhouses won't be cost effective for wheat, oats, rice, barley, etc. until we run out of land.
The best way to judge is probably to look at what greenhouses provide and how much the alternatives cost. They provide temperature and humidity control, protection from animals and some insects, protection from inclement weather, control over watering.
Three out of four of those can be mitigated just by growing crops in a suitable location. Is it cheaper to build a greenhouse or just plant extra and accept the losses from animals and insects?
No problem is insoluble, but at Ksp = 2.943×10−25 Mercury Sulphide comes close.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday May 07 2022, @10:59AM (2 children)
That is what the robots are for. The whole point of the article.
Maybe.
First, as you mentioned, there are lots of crops we don't grow as staples because they are too fussy to grow. We don't grow corn because of its great nutritional value and its low environmental impact. We grow it because it is not very labor intensive which makes it cheap. Now take "labor intensive" out of the equation. Why do we need corn then?
Second, you're looking at this pretty much from the perspective of growing the most productive crops in the most fertile regions. That's not where this is most useful, certainly not where it starts. No new technology gets started by displacing existing technology in the environment best suited to the existing technology. PCs didn't take over because they were better than mainframes at doing data warehousing, they took over because everyone could do spreadsheets without leaving their desk. Don't think corn in Nebraska, think bananas in Algeria, or winter crops almost anywhere, or any kind of crops at all on Mars.
But corn growers in Nebraska will be happy to have it anyway when the aquifer runs dry. Fruit growers in Utah will be happy too, when Lake Mead is empty.
Note that "better for the soil" is not one of the benefits I claimed. But it increases productivity, which means we don't need so much cropland, which is better for is the Amazon jungle and any other land that's undeveloped and should stay that way. Or for land that is currently used for agriculture that could be returned to nature or to indigenous people.
If what you're growing needs any irrigation at all, you're losing water. Most of it evaporates, very little ends up in the aquifer. You are much, much better off drawing it out once and then keeping it in a closed system.
Double the productivity, lower recurring costs, but pay a bunch of capital costs up front? That's how every economic advance for the last 200 years has happened.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday May 07 2022, @11:02AM
Oh, I see. OP mentioned better for the soil, I didn't. Perils of AC posting!
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday May 09 2022, @03:25AM
The robots are still expensive to run, and in this context greenhouse automation tools such as self-running ventilation and watering systems are robots, just stationary ones. They're cheaper than some bucolic in a straw hat wandering around with a watering can, but they're expensive to buy, expensive to install and expensive to maintain. Agriculture isn't quite as hostile an environment for machinery as the marine environment, but it's still very hostile. Something as simple as moving over a rough, gritty or muddy surface exacts a significant toll. Compared to machinery assistance for human workers, the additional layer of automated control adds hefty maintenance and capital costs. None of this makes greenhouses cheap. In fact, a large part of the problem is simply covering acre after acre of land in something transparent enough not to significantly inhibit plant growth, but strong enough to withstand the slings and arrows of outrageous nature. Glass is fragile, plastic deteriorates, insulation gives way ... compared to an unimproved field, a greenhouse is a moneypit. These days every farmer is at least ten percent mechanic, because they're constantly fixing everything from tractors to pipelines - automated greenhouses just pile it higher and deeper.
We don't need corn, specifically, any more than we need rice, or wheat, or sesame, or triticale. We do however need large quantities of staple crops whether they're turnips or potatoes. Corn is, acre for acre, actually pretty productive of various nutrients, but feel free to pick your own favourite quinoa/teff blend for your calculations; low margin, low cost bulk crops simply cannot financially support high overhead growth systems. Also, you forget that while corn agriculture is highly mechanised today, as recently as a hundred years ago it was largely hand-managed. Labour has become more expensive, rather than less, but that doesn't mean that the sky is the limit on the cost of mechanised growth systems. What you're ignoring is that when you can have one fairly well-educated dude clearing maybe $80K/year farming two hundred acres with the help of under $1M in machinery, your machinery is fairly easy to amortise. Cover 200 acres in even basic hoop structures, and your amortisation goes insane.
This gets worse because even if you're running three growing seasons a year owing to your greenhouse system, you're either running with the natural nutrient cycle or availability rates, or you have to spend even more to drive your cycles even harder. If you're running things the extreme monocrop fashion, annihilating everything with toxins, and treating your soil as a largely sterile growth medium that you constantly replenish with nutrients before using the crops to strip-mine the nutrients back out, then this may not seem like a big change but for pretty much every other kind of farming this is a massive increase in the recurring costs of doing business. The cut flower industry is so far beyond sustainable ordinary practice that charging their greenhouses with CO2 is standard practice.
Water is a red herring here, because what we're dealing with is a confusion between water throughput, and a broken water cycle. If you're shipping any crop out of your robotfarm, you're shipping water with it and if you're not collecting water at least as fast as you're shipping it out, you're losing. However, if you're retaining water like a fiend and somehow making it work by scavenging water from your environment you're mostly creating a bubble of high water content, while impoverishing the environment around you. This is actively bad for the environment. If on the other hand there's enough ambient water to maintain your farm, your greenhouse buys you nothing on that front. Actively slowing down the water cycle is a problem.
As far as putting greenhouses on a par with the best environments, that's a fair comparison for low, low margin crops. They're simply not viable outside their home range precisely because of their limitations, and the financial circumstances don't support the creation of massive production infrastructure. Let's say you wanted to plant corn in the northern Yukon, using a robotic greenhouse system. Even assuming magic happens with regard to sufficient light, heat and all the rest of it, you're still trying to amortise your monumental capital investment against the comparatively minute costs of long range bulk shipping - the last mile doesn't count, because the greenhouse doesn't solve that problem anyway. However, magic isn't real and the further your environment is from an ideal one, the more heavy lifting your robotic, powered, heated, ventilated, self-watering greenhouse will have to do. This translates directly into money and/or energy (which is, in context, effectively a subset of money).
As mentioned above, there is no closed system. If your system is truly closed, you're not extracting any produce, at which point you have a museum, or a botanical garden. If you're delivering only what your local environment could support, you're not losing ground but your greenhouse has to take in what you ship out. You could maybe run recapture systems (more money) to retain the water, thus somewhat amping up what you could produce in water terms, but if you're retaining more than open agriculture would give up, you're still a net negative.
Not true. It depends upon the return, and depends upon the industry. Additional efficiencies have offered us major advances as well, including in improved (i.e. lower) capital investments to make things possible. One case in point was Toyota's development of lean manufacturing precisely to reduce the amount of capital tied up in inactive stockpiles, especially when there was a risk that those stockpiles would be obsoleted. This applies to running capital as well as up-front investments in storage and management systems. There are additional risks and vulnerabilities to supply chain interruptions, as recent world events have displayed, but to take another element, greenhouses do not incur lower recurring costs. Their very maintenance in the first place is a new recurring cost that farmers currently don't have. The isn't speculative; we know a lot about greenhouse economics. If you want to look into it, the dutch are the world leaders on greenhouse agriculture but they're the first to document how high cost they are. The reason for the dutch greenhouse agriculture industry is a combination of a cool, wet climate, with small land area, dense population and a bias for high value crops.
Another example of reducing capital investment that's specifically related to agricultural outcomes is the new zealanders who came to the upper Midwest to do dairy farming, and did it in a much lower capital way, thereby reducing their risk exposure and increasing their ROI. They ended up doing very well for themselves precisely because many of the capital investments proposed by conventional wisdom turned out not to be worth it, and even more so in the increasingly expensive, low return, consolidated field of american dairy.
(Score: 2) by weeds on Friday May 06 2022, @12:53PM (1 child)
“Silent Running”
Get money out of politics! [mayday.us]
(Score: 2) by hubie on Friday May 06 2022, @07:06PM
I didn't know if anyone would get the reference. ;)
I saw it in 1975 in a theater, which it must have been on a second run. That movie really stuck in my brain, though I don't know if I've seen the whole thing since. I should watch it again. I think the ending was what really made an impression on my very youthful psyche.
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Friday May 06 2022, @03:43PM (1 child)
This argument always sets me off. We should not be protecting low-skill, low-productivity, low-paying jobs. We should be displacing them with more efficient and productive processes and helping the displaced workers find more valuable ways to contribute to the economy.
At this point in the argument, someone usually points out that picking fruit or driving a car creates real meaningful value, while more highly paid occupations like bankers and lawyers are just parasites. This is misleading. I'm not saying that the fruit should go unpicked, or the cars should go un-driven. I'm saying that if these activities were automated, the human potential currently being invested in them could be diverted to other activities that are more rewarding for everybody.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday May 09 2022, @02:45AM
In the future everyone's job will be replaced by a machine..
(Score: 2) by krishnoid on Friday May 06 2022, @06:01PM
I'll just leave the farmer's daughters [youtu.be] joke to your imagination.
(Score: 2) by Phoenix666 on Friday May 06 2022, @08:54PM (2 children)
Agriculture is the foundation of human civilization. Does anyone really think that agriculture is not already a renewable resource?
Washington DC delenda est.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday May 06 2022, @09:00PM (1 child)
Modern agriculture is heavily dependent on fossil fuels both for vehicles and for fertilizer. Therefore, although it has the potential to be sustainable, it is not sustainable as practiced now.
(Score: 2) by Phoenix666 on Friday May 06 2022, @11:22PM
So, presumably all those seeds that are planted are not themselves grown, but are in fact assembled molecule by molecule in a secret lab somewhere? Or perhaps there is a non-renewable seed bank full of a finite amount of seed that we're running out of?
It is false on its face to say that agriculture is not sustainable or renewable. If you have ever grown vegetables or fruit from the seeds contained in store-bought produce, you have experienced that first hand.
There are organic farmers who farm sustainably now, too. All they do is farm the way people always farmed before factory farms came along. That is, farming is inherently and by definition sustainable.
It is the factory farms that have brought fossil-fuel intensive practices to part of the agricultural industry. But that is changing. The trucks that haul produce are beginning to become EVs, and it stands to reason the farm equipment will too.
My over all point is that sustainability in farming is not a flashy new hip idea. Rather, it is a very old idea.
Washington DC delenda est.
(Score: 2) by Phoenix666 on Friday May 06 2022, @09:00PM
Is it really cheaper to run a greenhouse operation with robots instead of farm laborers? We'd need to examine the numbers. Yes, you don't have humans doing dirty, repetitive work, but then you have to buy and maintain expensive robots using a relatively expensive human.
As for the greenhouse part of it, there are lots of parts of the world where they grow their vegetables in them, but with humans doing the labor. The ones I have seen have relatively arid climates with chances for frosts that the greenhouses protect against. So this venture isn't innovating there.
Washington DC delenda est.