Me and my Engineering friends wants to automate the Agriculture industry, but we dont know where to start. the team so far has 2 computer engineer, 1 mechanical engineer and a computer scientist.
Our goal is total automation, at first we thought about cannabis but later discover theres more money in other crop/foods.
Chem E here.
You have to start with a process flow.
Till → plant → water and feed → weed/spray-> harvest → dry → process
Then you will find what equipment you can automate to complete the tasks.
Well, maybe add someone with agricultural experience to your team.
Interesting, the challenge with this is that every crop is different, will be difficult to come up with a solution for a base case.
What type of agricultural background?
graduated in 2019, Been working in hemp since then! I was working in post processing and process development to start. Now i’m with an agricultural handling company, we specialize in drying.
So right now my process focus is harvest thru storage.
Yes every crop can have special requirements but a lot of times equipment and processes overlap.
My background and education is in animal agriculture. Automating agriculture is not as straight cut as you might think. You must consider that development of automation equipment takes years of crop volume and field time to test. You are gonna spend a lot of money developing equipment and even more money marketing towards farmers who are very resistant toward change before you even have a saleable product. Don’t let scope creep mess up your plans, you need to specialize from the get-go.
There is some awesome stuff out there. We were working with some people who were working on detecting sex via drone for large outdoor grows.
You mean spying on their wooks that were out for a quick shag?
Ironically I think this would be way easier to automate than sexing cannabis.
This wasn’t the company, but it’s the same tech
Multispectral analysis would be a good one for op to look into, it’s not automation per say but it has tons and tons of useful scenarios in many ag industries. I shopped around precisionhawk’s lineup last year just out of curiosity and it’s actually pretty affordable for larger producers + it generates a lot of useful data.
automation tends to require data input, and drones carrying sensors seems like a valuable tool in your toolkit for large scale ag automation
This is actually pretty damn affordable. I want one
my doctorate is in chemical sensor design, I fucking love toys
I was just watching a video about this
This thread is getting me all hot and bothered. Methane mapping of pastures with drones? That’s so fucking cool
I would love to see more data from plant sap, like a simple EC reading via some probes in the stems of the plants. PH and brix data via sap would be awesome also.
I’ve been watching the developments in harvesting biomass. The Germans have this nifty tractor-run contraption: https://www.google.com/amp/s/hemptoday.net/german-technology-proves-its-mettle-in-marijuana-harvesting/amp/
https://henryshempharvester.com/ is the original. Obligatory fuck google.