The large scale farmbot might be perfect for zero gravity environments. Put a hoop house over the bed and modify the gantry to move inside it. Run a fan at one end to encourage low speed air flow. Then agitate the air flow as it enters the entrance. On the exaust end a low speed centrifugal setup will aide in the gas seperation so oxygen can be removed and carbon diozide can be injected at the entrance. This is all high level of course but can be refined as all the processes can be done with off the shelf components. This assumes a humanless interaction is desired. Just a thought.
outer space is quite a tricky environment, it took around 54k USD to bring 1 kilo of load to outer space in the space shuttle program, it is cheaper now and the average price is 10K USD/kilo.. spacex is even cheaper at around 2.8K USD/ kilo but we'll have to wait and see if they progressed with their 'rapid disassembly' landing style.. so every drop of water put to outer space is quite precious and this form of gardening would actually fit to NASA's needs because of its precision, it has still room for improvement like a more accurate robot gun for firing water at the roots of the plants rather than at the leaves etc.. BUT the idea of precision watering is already good most space stations are nuclear and solar powered so these robot machines are perfect 24/7 gardeners i think the best way to build a garden in outer space is like the space station in SPACE ODYSSEY, a rotating space station which would generate artificial gravity, because plants need gravity to direct them where to grow this is a necessity in the space program because if gardening in space becomes feasible, then a manned journey to Mars would be possible like i said, a drip system or hydroponics system would outdo this type of gardening here on earth, ok i will admit to that in a heartbeat.. a solar powered system for this type of gardening would make it more efficient, i'm afraid the skeptics here have not seen the good possibilities of this type of technology
@@pihermoso11 excellent points all around. I even considered a wicking type growth medium setup which would remove the robot watering except in critical deficiencies alltogether. The plant medium whether it be conditioned soil or anything else will emmit a small but strong enough magnetic field to hold the water I would think due to mass of the growth medium.and proximity in zero gravity. It's not wicking as we know it on terra firma but it should be viable. Artificial gravity would indeed be ideal but zero gravity physics should be workable with a little imagination. I am very excited about what NASA is doing as these are the challanges that will make long term space travel possible. Suspended animation (a.k.a. cryosleep) for humans is simply not a viable option that has been tested enough to be reliable yet regrettably.
@@pihermoso11, so if we solve the artificial gravity problem/challenge, thereby making a manned mission possible, then isn't the weight to work ratio improved with one human being doing all the work of this bot? Improvements on water delivery with a drip line and having the human do the weeding, planting, harvesting, etc. would make a bot unnecessary, wouldn't it? Exploring the simplest alternatives. Finally, without a manned mission, the demand or necessity for this technology would be much greater; send the spacecraft into the void and have it farm, compost, and build more soil along the way to Mars. A year or two later, follow the robot mission with a mission of humans and have them land on Mars to an acre of prime six inch layer of topsoil. Now, that would be cool.
@@Reciprocity_Soils I'll quote parts of your comment and give you something logical to think about ' isn't the weight to work ratio improved with one human being doing all the work of this bot? ' ' having the human do the weeding, planting, harvesting, etc. would make a bit unnecessary, wouldn't it? ' You have to factor in at least 2 things in space travel and exploration. Satellites and space stations are powered primarily by 2 sources, nuclear and solar. You can make the bot lighter by making it out of aluminium and carbon fiber so the only heavy part would be it's batteries. The good thing about this is that the power source is almost unlimited, aircraft carriers have a 20 year span before refueling their nuclear source, with the nuclear and solar source, a bot in outer space can do the work more efficiently than any human can do. A human would require a minimum amount of water and food to function properly everyday. Do you know how much it costs to put 1 kilo of anything into space? That's why they don't wash their clothes in space, it would waste water too much, so in the long run, a bot would perform better and efficiently than a human just because it only requires electricity which is plentiful in any space station and satellite, and the weight to keep alive a single human would be more than the entire bot plus batteries, picture one year of human food and water consumed Vs total bot weight plus batteries, electricity comes free. When electricity, food and water is factored in, the bot wins in efficiency
I can't stop thinking about the fact that the video opens with a visit to NASA where nothing happens and it's never mentioned again for the rest of the video.
"There's definitely a mismatch between the things that people _say_ they want online and the things they _actually_ want in real life and that they are willing to pay for." Wisdom 4.0 ;)
I agree with you and Rory's quote, it's very easy to forget all is not won/lost in some hours/days if your goal is something solid and long-term. We may come back to this video some time from now and some of those who mock CNC farming will praise it. The eternal return of product signaling.
I learned this 30+ years ago "There is a mismatch between what people say they want and what they actually want" when I was the lead advance arcade game tester for CAPCOM. I would ask what they want to see in the game and they would say something like "More time , more lives , easier this , ect. Then I said , Sounds like you want it to cost 1 quarter and to be able to finish it in one try. I then would ask them , after you beat it would you ever play it again and the answer was always no. So I said , Is that what you really want? So I realized the question was a fail. It's not what you want , its what you need. For my application it was , What would make the game more fun?. What will bring you back? I learned so much about human nature and games that when I was asked to go to the San Antonio game show I accurately predicted what games would be git and which ones fails. But more. I predicted how much each game would generate in income for a 3 month 6 month and 1 year period. I then stated what the equity in the game (Game value) at the same intervals. I even predicter novelty games value specific to certain locations. I was 100% correct. For my efforts the Area manager got a 30% raise. The VP Got a 30% raise. James Goddard got promoted to head Game Tester and I got transferred to Palm Desert an abandoned. I guess at 1 point in time I had all these titles. Lead Game Tester , Area Head Tech. and Store manager. They then failed to give me the store in Las Vegas I was promised and left in the desert to be forgotten. I have never had an idea or input that wasn't stolen or got someone else a raise. I even had a game design for a game system (mind you over 30 years ago) that was so revolutionary that to this day only 15% has been implemented by game companies. It would have revolutionized the game industry. But CAPCOM didn't want to pay me for it , not even 1 nickel per unit sold. They wrote a contract to rip me off. Basically stated that they own all ideas all their employees have , for life. Sorry , not signing that , so the system died with me and I deprived that gamers out there the funniest most interactive games they could never even imagine. Sometimes I feel guilty about that then I realize that I would have made games so addictive that nobody would ever leave their house. Probably for the best that I will take that 85% that nobody has ever hit on , to the grave with me. I literally could have tripled Hasbro's income with MTG. Same with Blizzard and CCP (The makers of EVE) but all wanted my ideas up front with no contract , lol. Always a greedy manager or employee wanted to steal my input and claim it as their own. At least the open source here is a community thing and not a unique one of a kind idea that apparently only 1 person came up with or could gave. Call me the never was Tesla of Gaming.
What direction technology is telling everyone they want is to be multiplanetary at the cost of helping protect this planet, which is what they need, a better functioning planet earth. Sometimes people can be so smart and calculating in building their models & constructing their algorithms they get disconnected from the reality of who they are trying to help. We've 20 years to solve this planets problems or there will be tremendous suffering. Good to see that this is a secondary concern by NASA, Space X and the other disconnected billionaires whose children my get to leave when the time comes....
8:00 MAN IS IT REFRESHING to hear the truth from the maker of the product!! Seriously, most often people will lie and tone down the "failure" but this guy is keeping it real. Street respect from Denmark.
Most of the time it isn't. Now imagine you can't be on top of soil, weeds, adjustments, etc. By the end of the video there's somebody using it in an off-grid situation. When water & nutrients are scarce, you may need to do precision farming. I'd like to see how it handles a totally remote situation.
You have to put the drip watering in place. It is fiddly and time consuming and I have to check that all my drippers are working. On a large garden that's a lot of work?
I remember watching the original farmbot video and thinking that although it was very damn cool, it was more a science project than something to actually help with household food production. Happy to see this new product adressed those problems!
Maybe the intention down the line is to have a robot "thing" that you just mark off via software space in a growing area, a yard, field or just a planter. And then this thing will prepare the soil by getting rid of present vegetation, then it will seed and water the area, and keep the weeds down much like a human gardener. I would think that's the ultimate goal. That way you could have gardens tended in places where you don't want human gardeners. (for whatever reason) If you're dubious, it seems like once again trying to remove humans from the equation except as the consumers of the vegetation that is produced.
You know,I grew weed for decades. I have done all kinds of growing, indoor, outdoor....hydroponic, with all the fancy liquid additives, raw fish, bat guano, everything under the sun. A machine can only give you information on the questions you ask it. Bad idea. Since not very much is really understood about how plants pull information(nutrition), the robots aren’t going to tell you much. I started growing mushrooms, and I threw some of my weed seeds in the mycelium. You know those plants grew to 16 feet, larger than the peach tree, and every tree, accept the palm trees in the yard. I grow mushrooms, and throw away the substrate, add a little blood and bone meal, and Epsom salts. My seeds I threw out in last years mulch look to be headed toward 20 feet, if the gophers don’t ruin them.......I don’t have time to attend to them this year, so what ever happens happens. Soil, plants are electric, and that is the biggest problem with modern agriculture, it doesn’t even bother spending one thought on the electric quality of soil. Mycelium is about ph, and breaking down everything, even rock, and metal. Oysters grow well on petroleum waste.....how? Because electricity is the only thing that can break down those kinds of elements, Tesla covered that quite a bit......his material for making a spark would disappear, so he had to find something that would not degrade over time. It’s about charge, you could grow a plant on water, and only a sliver of nutrition, if the water is charged correctly.
@@zneusenrunus7395 I make my own tinctures.....one guy was dying from “Covid”. Ventilator, the whole nine yards. Somehow he got some of my maitake tincture....he bought me out the next day. Same with this lady who had some lifelong viral thing....she never said what it was from which she suffered, but she bought me out the next day after taking he maitake. Same with my lions mane.....I make my tincture so strong,you can’t see liquid while it’s in the alcohol bath, and I do dual extraction from lions mane. I haven’t been sick in years, and I learned more in he last five years, than my whole life before.....maybe it was just an accident?
I would love to know more about this. Do you have any sources I can look at? Or can you share some more info here? I work in agriculture and do a lot of gardening at home and I'm trying to become more aware of all of the factors in plant health/growth for happy plants - elements, moisture, respiration, ph, etc. I'm a novice for the electrical phenomena in this case though. When you say properly charged what does that refer to? Like is this a magnetic property, voltage, etc. What's the desired conditions and how can it be measured? And I'm sure it will differ between plant types? And if there are also any fundamental things that have nothing to do with the electrical side of things. Maybe there's still more for me to learn on topics I've already skimmed across.
@@stickmanbrains victor schuaberger, and dr gerrold pollack are great places to start. Stamets speaks on how mushroom mycelium is one of the best filters known, and the water is healing after being run through mushroommycelium I have first hand knowledge....I will follow up with a facebook link so you can see the difference
I remember when these guys started out, I'm glad they're finding success in this market I didn't think would exist sufficiently to overcome cost expenditures. wow good work
A special garden hose for economical watering, a pump, a timer. A fraction of the cost, just as effective, hardly any wearing parts. That makes it much safer, easier to use, and more durable.
@@-whackd The short video claims that the FarmBot can do everything without any problems. Except for the irrigation, I think it's a rumor. Only 10 minutes of work to plant the seeds, nobody need a FarmBot for that. The camera only sees from above, so it is useless. And in the event of a pest infestation, someone has to come to fix it anyway. Let me tell you, no machine will last without continuous maintenance. But nice that you just ignore my other arguments.
The drip tubing would have to be put in place. Or, if the nozzle used drip feed it would be very slow. But I agree that method of watering seems slightly wasteful. Also, in some environments you wouldn't want to wet the foliage (e.g tomatoes when there is a risk of blight about).
@@greenhouseautomation2709 Again, watch the video. See how they place different plant types in proximity of one another which can be changed on the fly and in any location depending on what type of food or herb is required. You do not have the same type of flexibility with static drip hoses.
a gantry system is just a motion system. the point is flexibility, you can water, plant, kill weeds, harvest, apply nutrients, take sensor readings, anything you could want as long as you have the right tool to put on the end of the gantry...
Any gardener will tell you - a mix of plants all with different growth rates and needs wouldn't look this tidy, I think they transplant a set into each bed before anyone comes to look so it looks nice. How much of this is actually viable and how much just for show.
I'm pretty sure they can learn something from this and likely apply it to vertical farms in the city or in space but in a backyard? That would take away all the fun of actually growing your food yourself
I have two friends in wheelchairs that have a service dog to bring them their socks and they have struggled with their garden table. I've thought this over and have sent them the link. The bot guy is right; there will be a market. It seems mining intensive to go this route but what isn't these days? I have a pickup truck ...
I like their collaborative spirit. I'm wondering what a more radical solution than adding a Bot to a raised bed garden would be? Re-envision "garden" from scratch, incorporating a Bot as an integral part, not an addon. An Aeroponics Bot, rotating itself to control light and heat, monitoring the irrigation solutions as it recirculates and adjusts? a growing media would have a transport to orbit cost associated with it. Planting is such a brief moment in the garden but a lot of the FarmBot's structure is geared to that event. FarmBot's formfactor doesn't seem to accommodate very tall plants like tomatoes. However critiques aside, they have creatively solved lots of problems, refining their design. Thanks for the video.
@@nstl440 Funny you should write this today; my wife brought home two tomato plants! Growing low and wide might take up realestate used for other plants. The growth habit of tomatoes is a central stem from which the offshoots make fruit. The stem usually grows up. Some growing systems hang, and the stem grows down. For tomatoes growing up, apparently cages of some sort are a good idea, to support the plan as it climbs. My mom had stakes, which never seemed to work that well, only providing a single axis of support.
The farmbot is the most interesting thing in this video. Unfortunately the engineer didn't quite get the message when people said can you make it bigger & less expensive. What he should have understood from the feedback is that people want a system that is less expensive & better able to do it's tasks over a larger area. That of course means making a vehicle that traverses the ground properly & still allows the farm bot to do it's tasks--hence the system has to have on ground locomotion (i.e. tracks or wheels/tires--not fixed rails), water tanks that can be refilled at the end of long rows, seed bins, etc...
How about using drones then size/shape don't matter -- like a Roomba. Certainly for seeding and weeding. Maybe for watering but it'd have to refill for each spurt which shouldn't be a problem.
@@joemachine4714 I doubt that would be practical as plants are rather fragile & prop wash could damage them. But they could be used to restock landrovers for large growers.
The problem is that it's based on cnc technology. Cnc is great because it know the exact place of the toolhead over the garden bed. Also the height is computer controlled. So the rails and toothed belt make it possible that the bot know exactly where it needs to travel to do a certain task. A bot with wheels would be great. There are already developments. But that needs a huge amount of sensors and software compared to the tech that farmbot uses. Also, farmbot is connected to water and power and uses the frame for that. A wheeled robot would need power and water supply. And less expensive, it's not that expensive if you make it yourself.
@@-whackd to having little time to properly take care of a vegetable garden. This allows me to grow our own vegetables without having to be a full time gardener.
@@Limozo I think you’re overestimating the time savings. I have a large vegetable garden and it really takes less than 15 minutes a day of upkeep. You still have all the work of constructing a container, building the robot, trouble-shooting it’s associated problems, getting the right soil conditions for what you want grow, dealing with pests, etc. If you don’t live in a temperate climate you will need to winterize and store the thing at the end of the growing season. Humankind has been growing food for millennia without the need for a pricey toy robot that only does the easy stuff (watering and planting seeds). Kudos to you for wanting to grow your own food - it’s very satisfying and the end product is superior to what you find at the grocery store. But it takes some work and knowledge and this machine won’t get you around that.
You can make this much bigger and much cheaper, it's called a sprinkler. They don't plant the seeds for you, but that would take a few hours a year at most.
I can't say I enjoy the thought of growing plants this way personally, and the extrapolation of this method to larger scale is equally abhorrent to my mind. I just don't see it enabling anything to do with growing plants and the human interaction with that. It does make sense in space, but really, why, before we've sorted out the massive problems we've caused here on earth?
As a person who gardens, it's my opinion that FarmBot is simply over engineered. The true value of gardening is not the end result but the journey. The curating process is part of that journey and being able to watch your efforts mature while you tend garden is the point for most people. Sure, on a large commercial scale something like this is an incredible idea (especially in space) but trying to automate gardening for the average homeowner and make it a pushbutton appliance kind of defeats the purpose doesn't it?
Only if you want to take a journey. As you are a gardener it is natural to romanticize your efforts. Not everyone is a green thumb. There are those who don't get a thrill from being hands on with nature. This may be for them.
@@zaniq23 Seems to me if someone is to lazy to bother growing their own fruit and veg they may as well go ahead and hit the grocery store? There may be some a few folks out there with more money than common sense but I doubt there are enough to support a capital heavy business model. Wonder what the shark tankers would do?
@@chadharrod5246 - Of course. Same with making your own mayonnaise or rolling cigarettes. However, I was just being contrary. If you had extoled the virtues of bot-farming I might have made your argument about 'the journey' and against romanticizing tech. However, the day may come when having your own garden may be a must have (insert reason x) and being a lazy bum this (or equivalent) might prove to be the ticket :)
I don't think that being able to grow plants without any own knowledge, only through the crowd knowledge, should be a goal. As a very novice home gardener but strong defendant of permaculture, my belief is that the advertised future upgrades of this glorified watering can is a further step into industrialized agriculture, in the wrong way, and this time for the smaller scale productions. How can this work towards diversification of crops and plants (the biodiversity we have been losing so quickly in the past decades), or towards being able to work correctly with your soil and climate? Each garden is different. Hate to be that negative guy, because I usually am all for innovation and technology, but I'm overly sceptical about farmbot and similar projects. While there are some good ideas, it should be a duty to all of us to keep only the very best ones and be wary of the bad impact other seemingly inoffensive propositions have. I am already seeing tons of people thinking "well I can't do it but this robot will", then being limited by a handful of varieties (because those are the ones the bot or the crowd knows), then buying industrial products to achieve the right balance of minerals in the soil, then not really doing the right maintenance and finishing by discarding new electronic trash that we already have too much of...
I think it is a totally absurd tool for this scale of production of food, except it will satisfy a technical person in being involved in atomization but from a growing perspective and sustainability it is absurd. And you don't communicate with the plants who are giving you there fruits, would you be more involved personally in stead of having machines do it for you their harvest would be bigger and stronger plants.
Remote growing...I can see something like this paired with aero ponics, or that vertical container growing towers to maximize the plant growth in less of a foot print, maybe for roof top growing or smaller farm growing. Very cool. Thx for going out and shooting this!
Ooh, imagine an aged relation that still wants to be independent and grow there own food but can't manage everything on their own. They could be helped out remotely and still grow and eat freshly home grown produce.
@@johnkerr6466 There does seem to be an impetus with games like farmville, stardew valley, animal crossing horizons, where people will take to sim farming but are stopped by participation in IRL farming/gardening due to lack of space, or any number of other reasons. So working with the software, they could "play" a sim that's not a sim, they would just be remote managing a farm/garden. It's very meta.
Air circulation is important in any closed grow room. The heat disapation and having the right mix of co2 and o2 seems like a bigger concern. The robot is cool. They probably wouldnt use soil though. In space they would use some type of inorganic grow medium, unless they are composting astronauts poop.
@@stumpyplank6092 I guess because this is just a model. If we consider the average surface of a garden, then this infrastructure could save a lot of time. I'm not saying it worths since I don't know how affordable it would be. But still, technology is evolving so rapidly.
@@stumpyplank6092 Even though I live in the countryside and even though farming is our main source of income here, I still believe there will always be two or more points of view. Because I thought that this video is referring to a potential solution for even another planet. That's why I adore technology. I'm not trying to change your mind. However, thank you for this conversation, kind sir or madam. I think this is the point of such videos that present something new.
This is a great stepping stone, for practicality and cost effectiveness it is currently terrible. ~3500$ will buy a complete 30ft stainless steel hoop house. That includes 300ft of drainpipe for NFT with all the bits n pieces. Next step I would look into is developing a mobile platform with a hanging tether system for the electrics and water.
With utilizing farm bot a good way to implement a system using this type of concept would be to run a hydroponics system underneath for watering needs, the farm or system can be used to plant the seeds, do soil diagnostics and keep out weeds. You could also use a fan system to push the air into an intake, using a centrifuge or another type of filtration to separate the oxygen from the carbon dioxide. The carbon dioxide admitted from the cabin in space could also be extracted and combined with this to be reintroduced into the atmospheric container used for growing the crops. The oxygen given off by the plants that is captured could be combined with the hydrogen found in space and used to create water. Thus you create a self sustaining system for the plants and for people. If you can create a system large enough you can even use the oxygen from these plants to help replenish supplies of water and oxygen for not only plants but for humans to breathe and drink.
A wireless self-contained unit plus a base-station would be nice to remove the need to wire up the length of your plant bed and so remove any bed size constraint. And eventually transition into a wheeled railless design where the gantry can move between multiple plantings rows.
How about using drones then size/shape don't matter -- like a Roomba. Certainly for seeding and weeding. Maybe for watering but it'd have to refill for each spurt which shouldn't be a problem.
I think the main issue with a big farmbot is... well, people WANT that but they don't necessarily have the money or space to afford it. I remember when this project begun and I still don't have my own place with space for it.
The reason the big one didnt succeed is because for commercial scale isnt just too inefficient and expensive. Its what he said, a great learning experience for kids and hobbyists, not for growing lots of produce for families.
It would be great if the house he was living at the time kept receiving some of the prototypes so the garden was bountiful. So many people forget to acknowledge where they came from.
I can’t wait until there’s more accessible bots. I imagine in the future the crowd sourcing element and recipes can be used with other bots. Like if you don’t own a place but have small plants and a walking bot that could have these attachments. Probably need much more of an industry but it sounds cool
I've been tracking them for awhile now. I didn't realize the FarmBot interface was Internet based which is really inconvenient -- somebody might want to set this up out in the middle of nowhere with solar and w/o Internet access.
There are solutions to that, like StarLink or other satellite internet. The code is customisable so an offline version is probably possible, but I don't see how you would remotely control it without some sort of network access. You could set up a local network if you're constantly near the FarmBot, or use internet once, download a schedule of events to the Raspberry Pi, and hope that's all you need to set and forget... In reality it's not sufficiently autonomous yet, so you'll need to interact regularly for now, which requires internet access.
@@BodyDestruction The issue is not just Internet access. What if FarmBot, the company, goes out of business? Their servers will go offline much to the chagrin and annoyance of FarmBot users. Same thing if FarmBot is bought out by a multinational corporation to kill off the company for their own for-profit product to dominate the market. And I'm not just picking on FarmBot. When Adobe abandoned packaged versions of their software for an endless online subscription model it annoyed everyone. Glowforge laser cutter is another example where a multiple thousand dollar piece of hardware only works using a bespoke web based application.
@@SoCalFreelance good point. FarmBot says they're 100% open source, and you can download the code to develop plugins and such. I don't know if you have access to the entire program (the "100%" surely implies it) or just the front end. Pretty sure there's open source software alternatives to control these open source hardware parts. But yeah, it would be a bunch of extra work to convert the entire OS of the farm.
Farmbot has its own official YT channel, and it has all comments disabled, so it is not possible to read comments from early adopters that had purchased a robot from them
I didn't hear a word about how this could help disabled people. Because it could. The expenses would be shifted to setup and possibly harvest and avoid the daily or weekly care. My biggest questions revolve around continuous harvesting to benefit fresh food year round. THAT might give me pause to spend that amount of money if I still need to go to a market a substantial portion of the year. Btw, I didn't see corn stalks. Eating fresh corn in December would be nice. But it grows much taller than most other plants that come to mind. How is that addressed? Separate garden? If so, that's a knock against because of expense.
This is mostly a watering tool, as planting seeds is done maybe 2-3 times per year (and many people use seedlings, not seeds). I would think that an automated drip irrigation system is cheaper, as convenient to use and uses less water and electricity.
I am soo happy to see Farmbot that was such a cutting edge video at the time, WOW!! Congratulations Rory! Perseverance! I love the small version. I am not a fan of robots though.
Would have been neat to have the guy from Meandu of Kijani Grows from your realier video working with them. He's grown in some REALLY toxis spaces. Closer to home, having one in my Grams raised bed would allow me to spy on her to ensure she was able to keep her garden growing.
I really like the intersection of robotics and agriculture but I think there are simpler ways to accomplish the same things this gantry is doing. Also be said online software. SASS is a big no no in my book. I don't want to be tethered by any subscriptions.
this product makes complete sense in the upside down, totally insane world in which we find ourselves living. developing a hypercomplex, expensive and high-tech solution (da farm bot bro!) for watering one's garden when a simple and cheap solution (a $3.00 watering can) already exists is complete lunacy. gardening isn't about watering man. it's about reconnecting to nature. the future is about simple, local and low tech solutions that rely on people, not machines. Wake up.
Well, you don't need to water and control weed yourself to connect with nature. This not is just a help for the most boring daily tasks. Having this will give you more time for other things, in or outside gardening. Btw the parts for this are actually very cheap. It's the aluminium rails etc that make it expensive. Make that from wood and this can be built really cheap. Let's say your time is worth only 10 an hour. Even then such a home built cnc will pay for itself very quickly. I do think farmbot like it is now is kind of l limited still.
The whole system should be built on a portable gantry instead of moving on rails. People don't want it "bigger", they want it scalable. He stubbornly and maliciously made it bigger without thinking outside the box.
When i look at projects like this, I like to imagine cost per sq. ft. to determine viability. This project is a good learning experience and another step towards automated farming. But its not any kind of solution to anything.
the fact that it's programmable means you can tailor it to different conditions, i could in theory connect a weather api to it, if there isn't one already, or load nutrient profiles for each plant, and adjust npk values for each plant therefore allowing many differen't types of plants to flourish, i think a bigger problem would be pests and maintenance of the machine
PEOPLE'S PARK (Berkeley) is gonna have a new 17-story dorm built. that could translate into 34-51 stories of FARMBOT gardens/racks just outside the south-facing dorm windows! that's a 'far side' bigger than the existing garden!!!
Very creative enterprise. I realize you could put this device in a plant tunnel to protect it from rain etc. but otherwise it appears you would have to always watch the weather forecast and have a place that you can roll the bed under cover or cover it another way temporarily. I would be great in vertical farming operations and space travel, but agree with others that this may be a bit of over engineering for most backyard applications. To each their own :)
This is great for taking away some basic care for you but people still have to know info about specific plants to understand pruning, pests, and how to germinate some seeds. I like Farmbot though, I hope it gets people to garden more :)
Hydroponics is so much easier and so much more water wise as it reuses water. Also a lot of plants do not do well with overhead watering as it causes many mildew and fungus issues.
I wonder why they didn't go for under-canopy watering? I've always found that pests and diseases were likelier if you water from above vs. watering at soil level.
Ok so this is just a randome thought, so dont cruisify me. But what if NASA adopted a more earthship mentality to how to survive on mars? For example we could collect out dated satellites orbiting the earth and use them for spare parts on mars. Mars has a ground made of soil and rocks similar to earth, couldn't they then be used in sand bags, and the other mixes of organic material to build houses. There would have to be the main domes and living arrangements to begina with but to branch out. I would rather live under a dome that had homes with eathership qualities. They use water so many times. And it directly allows the sewage to be used for oxygen producing plants.
7:26 "Farm Bot... is to expensive" no shit? If you do manual planting and use irrigation tape, you can lower your cost and if broken, it can be fixed in a second. Irrigation tape and 5gall bucket: 100$ easy to scale up or down. FarmBot: I would guess above 10 000$ for the same surface. And for the NASA, please, ditch the soil, go hydroponic and save again. Quite easy.
Not here to talk about things I haven't seen, but I've actually seen an early FarmBot successfully weeding; it's on our previous video visit with Rory. Back then, there was another sentiment about experimenting. It should concern some the allergy against tinkering it's been shown in these early comments. Ingenuity is going to be necessary for the coming few decades. I'm with Rory. czcams.com/video/BqYrAWssrrY/video.html
The large scale farmbot might be perfect for zero gravity environments. Put a hoop house over the bed and modify the gantry to move inside it. Run a fan at one end to encourage low speed air flow. Then agitate the air flow as it enters the entrance. On the exaust end a low speed centrifugal setup will aide in the gas seperation so oxygen can be removed and carbon diozide can be injected at the entrance. This is all high level of course but can be refined as all the processes can be done with off the shelf components. This assumes a humanless interaction is desired. Just a thought.
outer space is quite a tricky environment, it took around 54k USD to bring 1 kilo of load to outer space in the space shuttle program, it is cheaper now and the average price is 10K USD/kilo.. spacex is even cheaper at around 2.8K USD/ kilo but we'll have to wait and see if they progressed with their 'rapid disassembly' landing style..
so every drop of water put to outer space is quite precious and this form of gardening would actually fit to NASA's needs because of its precision, it has still room for improvement like a more accurate robot gun for firing water at the roots of the plants rather than at the leaves etc.. BUT the idea of precision watering is already good
most space stations are nuclear and solar powered so these robot machines are perfect 24/7 gardeners
i think the best way to build a garden in outer space is like the space station in SPACE ODYSSEY, a rotating space station which would generate artificial gravity, because plants need gravity to direct them where to grow
this is a necessity in the space program because if gardening in space becomes feasible, then a manned journey to Mars would be possible
like i said, a drip system or hydroponics system would outdo this type of gardening here on earth, ok i will admit to that in a heartbeat.. a solar powered system for this type of gardening would make it more efficient, i'm afraid the skeptics here have not seen the good possibilities of this type of technology
@@pihermoso11 excellent points all around. I even considered a wicking type growth medium setup which would remove the robot watering except in critical deficiencies alltogether. The plant medium whether it be conditioned soil or anything else will emmit a small but strong enough magnetic field to hold the water I would think due to mass of the growth medium.and proximity in zero gravity. It's not wicking as we know it on terra firma but it should be viable.
Artificial gravity would indeed be ideal but zero gravity physics should be workable with a little imagination. I am very excited about what NASA is doing as these are the challanges that will make long term space travel possible. Suspended animation (a.k.a. cryosleep) for humans is simply not a viable option that has been tested enough to be reliable yet regrettably.
Cut out all this space farming nonsense. Just let the astronauts eat algae, you know that's what they want anyway.
@@pihermoso11, so if we solve the artificial gravity problem/challenge, thereby making a manned mission possible, then isn't the weight to work ratio improved with one human being doing all the work of this bot? Improvements on water delivery with a drip line and having the human do the weeding, planting, harvesting, etc. would make a bot unnecessary, wouldn't it? Exploring the simplest alternatives. Finally, without a manned mission, the demand or necessity for this technology would be much greater; send the spacecraft into the void and have it farm, compost, and build more soil along the way to Mars. A year or two later, follow the robot mission with a mission of humans and have them land on Mars to an acre of prime six inch layer of topsoil. Now, that would be cool.
@@Reciprocity_Soils I'll quote parts of your comment and give you something logical to think about
' isn't the weight to work ratio improved with one human being doing all the work of this bot? '
' having the human do the weeding, planting, harvesting, etc. would make a bit unnecessary, wouldn't it? '
You have to factor in at least 2 things in space travel and exploration. Satellites and space stations are powered primarily by 2 sources, nuclear and solar. You can make the bot lighter by making it out of aluminium and carbon fiber so the only heavy part would be it's batteries. The good thing about this is that the power source is almost unlimited, aircraft carriers have a 20 year span before refueling their nuclear source, with the nuclear and solar source, a bot in outer space can do the work more efficiently than any human can do. A human would require a minimum amount of water and food to function properly everyday. Do you know how much it costs to put 1 kilo of anything into space? That's why they don't wash their clothes in space, it would waste water too much, so in the long run, a bot would perform better and efficiently than a human just because it only requires electricity which is plentiful in any space station and satellite, and the weight to keep alive a single human would be more than the entire bot plus batteries, picture one year of human food and water consumed Vs total bot weight plus batteries, electricity comes free.
When electricity, food and water is factored in, the bot wins in efficiency
Thank you to both FairCompanies and FarmBot for the persistent efforts towards manifesting worthy intentions. May the roads rise to meet you all.
I can't stop thinking about the fact that the video opens with a visit to NASA where nothing happens and it's never mentioned again for the rest of the video.
Good point. Wait. Let's have a meeting about that. hahaha
"There's definitely a mismatch between the things that people _say_ they want online and the things they _actually_ want in real life and that they are willing to pay for." Wisdom 4.0 ;)
7:26
I agree with you and Rory's quote, it's very easy to forget all is not won/lost in some hours/days if your goal is something solid and long-term. We may come back to this video some time from now and some of those who mock CNC farming will praise it. The eternal return of product signaling.
I learned this 30+ years ago "There is a mismatch between what people say they want and what they actually want" when I was the lead advance arcade game tester for CAPCOM. I would ask what they want to see in the game and they would say something like "More time , more lives , easier this , ect. Then I said , Sounds like you want it to cost 1 quarter and to be able to finish it in one try. I then would ask them , after you beat it would you ever play it again and the answer was always no. So I said , Is that what you really want? So I realized the question was a fail. It's not what you want , its what you need. For my application it was , What would make the game more fun?. What will bring you back? I learned so much about human nature and games that when I was asked to go to the San Antonio game show I accurately predicted what games would be git and which ones fails. But more. I predicted how much each game would generate in income for a 3 month 6 month and 1 year period. I then stated what the equity in the game (Game value) at the same intervals. I even predicter novelty games value specific to certain locations. I was 100% correct. For my efforts the Area manager got a 30% raise. The VP Got a 30% raise. James Goddard got promoted to head Game Tester and I got transferred to Palm Desert an abandoned. I guess at 1 point in time I had all these titles. Lead Game Tester , Area Head Tech. and Store manager. They then failed to give me the store in Las Vegas I was promised and left in the desert to be forgotten. I have never had an idea or input that wasn't stolen or got someone else a raise. I even had a game design for a game system (mind you over 30 years ago) that was so revolutionary that to this day only 15% has been implemented by game companies. It would have revolutionized the game industry. But CAPCOM didn't want to pay me for it , not even 1 nickel per unit sold. They wrote a contract to rip me off. Basically stated that they own all ideas all their employees have , for life. Sorry , not signing that , so the system died with me and I deprived that gamers out there the funniest most interactive games they could never even imagine. Sometimes I feel guilty about that then I realize that I would have made games so addictive that nobody would ever leave their house. Probably for the best that I will take that 85% that nobody has ever hit on , to the grave with me. I literally could have tripled Hasbro's income with MTG. Same with Blizzard and CCP (The makers of EVE) but all wanted my ideas up front with no contract , lol. Always a greedy manager or employee wanted to steal my input and claim it as their own. At least the open source here is a community thing and not a unique one of a kind idea that apparently only 1 person came up with or could gave. Call me the never was Tesla of Gaming.
What direction technology is telling everyone they want is to be multiplanetary at the cost of helping protect this planet, which is what they need, a better functioning planet earth. Sometimes people can be so smart and calculating in building their models & constructing their algorithms they get disconnected from the reality of who they are trying to help. We've 20 years to solve this planets problems or there will be tremendous suffering. Good to see that this is a secondary concern by NASA, Space X and the other disconnected billionaires whose children my get to leave when the time comes....
8:00 MAN IS IT REFRESHING to hear the truth from the maker of the product!! Seriously, most often people will lie and tone down the "failure" but this guy is keeping it real.
Street respect from Denmark.
I don't understand why this is better than a drip watering system with a timer?
Most of the time it isn't. Now imagine you can't be on top of soil, weeds, adjustments, etc. By the end of the video there's somebody using it in an off-grid situation. When water & nutrients are scarce, you may need to do precision farming. I'd like to see how it handles a totally remote situation.
You have to put the drip watering in place. It is fiddly and time consuming and I have to check that all my drippers are working. On a large garden that's a lot of work?
I remember watching the original farmbot video and thinking that although it was very damn cool, it was more a science project than something to actually help with household food production. Happy to see this new product adressed those problems!
why wouldn't you do this on a drip with sensors rather than all that mechanics
i completely agree with you.... maybe hes not aware of drip technology..
Maybe the intention down the line is to have a robot "thing" that you just mark off via software space in a growing area, a yard, field or just a planter. And then this thing will prepare the soil by getting rid of present vegetation, then it will seed and water the area, and keep the weeds down much like a human gardener. I would think that's the ultimate goal. That way you could have gardens tended in places where you don't want human gardeners. (for whatever reason) If you're dubious, it seems like once again trying to remove humans from the equation except as the consumers of the vegetation that is produced.
You know,I grew weed for decades. I have done all kinds of growing, indoor, outdoor....hydroponic, with all the fancy liquid additives, raw fish, bat guano, everything under the sun.
A machine can only give you information on the questions you ask it. Bad idea.
Since not very much is really understood about how plants pull information(nutrition), the robots aren’t going to tell you much.
I started growing mushrooms, and I threw some of my weed seeds in the mycelium.
You know those plants grew to 16 feet, larger than the peach tree, and every tree, accept the palm trees in the yard.
I grow mushrooms, and throw away the substrate, add a little blood and bone meal, and Epsom salts. My seeds I threw out in last years mulch look to be headed toward 20 feet, if the gophers don’t ruin them.......I don’t have time to attend to them this year, so what ever happens happens.
Soil, plants are electric, and that is the biggest problem with modern agriculture, it doesn’t even bother spending one thought on the electric quality of soil.
Mycelium is about ph, and breaking down everything, even rock, and metal. Oysters grow well on petroleum waste.....how? Because electricity is the only thing that can break down those kinds of elements, Tesla covered that quite a bit......his material for making a spark would disappear, so he had to find something that would not degrade over time.
It’s about charge, you could grow a plant on water, and only a sliver of nutrition, if the water is charged correctly.
@@zneusenrunus7395 I make my own tinctures.....one guy was dying from “Covid”. Ventilator, the whole nine yards. Somehow he got some of my maitake tincture....he bought me out the next day. Same with this lady who had some lifelong viral thing....she never said what it was from which she suffered, but she bought me out the next day after taking he maitake.
Same with my lions mane.....I make my tincture so strong,you can’t see liquid while it’s in the alcohol bath, and I do dual extraction from lions mane.
I haven’t been sick in years, and I learned more in he last five years, than my whole life before.....maybe it was just an accident?
I would love to know more about this. Do you have any sources I can look at? Or can you share some more info here? I work in agriculture and do a lot of gardening at home and I'm trying to become more aware of all of the factors in plant health/growth for happy plants - elements, moisture, respiration, ph, etc. I'm a novice for the electrical phenomena in this case though. When you say properly charged what does that refer to? Like is this a magnetic property, voltage, etc. What's the desired conditions and how can it be measured? And I'm sure it will differ between plant types? And if there are also any fundamental things that have nothing to do with the electrical side of things. Maybe there's still more for me to learn on topics I've already skimmed across.
@@stickmanbrains victor schuaberger, and dr gerrold pollack are great places to start. Stamets speaks on how mushroom mycelium is one of the best filters known, and the water is healing after being run through mushroommycelium
I have first hand knowledge....I will follow up with a facebook link so you can see the difference
I remember when these guys started out, I'm glad they're finding success in this market I didn't think would exist sufficiently to overcome cost expenditures. wow good work
A special garden hose for economical watering, a pump, a timer.
A fraction of the cost, just as effective, hardly any wearing parts. That makes it much safer, easier to use, and more durable.
@@-whackd The short video claims that the FarmBot can do everything without any problems. Except for the irrigation, I think it's a rumor. Only 10 minutes of work to plant the seeds, nobody need a FarmBot for that. The camera only sees from above, so it is useless. And in the event of a pest infestation, someone has to come to fix it anyway.
Let me tell you, no machine will last without continuous maintenance.
But nice that you just ignore my other arguments.
Seems like a huge waste to water the plants via the gantry, why not just use drip tubing?
Rewatch the video. This allows different plant types to get different amounts of water.
The drip tubing would have to be put in place. Or, if the nozzle used drip feed it would be very slow. But I agree that method of watering seems slightly wasteful. Also, in some environments you wouldn't want to wet the foliage (e.g tomatoes when there is a risk of blight about).
@@SoCalFreelance drip emitters allow for different flow rates
@@greenhouseautomation2709 Again, watch the video. See how they place different plant types in proximity of one another which can be changed on the fly and in any location depending on what type of food or herb is required. You do not have the same type of flexibility with static drip hoses.
a gantry system is just a motion system. the point is flexibility, you can water, plant, kill weeds, harvest, apply nutrients, take sensor readings, anything you could want as long as you have the right tool to put on the end of the gantry...
Any gardener will tell you - a mix of plants all with different growth rates and needs wouldn't look this tidy, I think they transplant a set into each bed before anyone comes to look so it looks nice. How much of this is actually viable and how much just for show.
So this is how to make a real
Expensive less efficient raised bed lol.
exactly my thought. From a sustainable/efficiency perspective this has no benefits.
but wait the watering system sucks as well !
Typical of NASA to make something relatively simple and straightforward complicated and overpriced
I'm pretty sure they can learn something from this and likely apply it to vertical farms in the city or in space but in a backyard? That would take away all the fun of actually growing your food yourself
What if you don't think growing food for yourself is fun? What then? :)
@@zaniq23 Then you can go to the grocery store and buy all your produce :)
@@kristie7146 What?! and miss out on the "Journey"!?! :)
I have two friends in wheelchairs that have a service dog to bring them their socks and they have struggled with their garden table. I've thought this over and have sent them the link. The bot guy is right; there will be a market. It seems mining intensive to go this route but what isn't these days? I have a pickup truck ...
@@risasb Things find their place.
I like their collaborative spirit. I'm wondering what a more radical solution than adding a Bot to a raised bed garden would be? Re-envision "garden" from scratch, incorporating a Bot as an integral part, not an addon. An Aeroponics Bot, rotating itself to control light and heat, monitoring the irrigation solutions as it recirculates and adjusts? a growing media would have a transport to orbit cost associated with it.
Planting is such a brief moment in the garden but a lot of the FarmBot's structure is geared to that event. FarmBot's formfactor doesn't seem to accommodate very tall plants like tomatoes. However critiques aside, they have creatively solved lots of problems, refining their design. Thanks for the video.
Isnt it possible to grow tomatoes just how you like? Even low and wide instead of high?
@@nstl440 Funny you should write this today; my wife brought home two tomato plants! Growing low and wide might take up realestate used for other plants. The growth habit of tomatoes is a central stem from which the offshoots make fruit. The stem usually grows up. Some growing systems hang, and the stem grows down. For tomatoes growing up, apparently cages of some sort are a good idea, to support the plan as it climbs. My mom had stakes, which never seemed to work that well, only providing a single axis of support.
The farmbot is the most interesting thing in this video. Unfortunately the engineer didn't quite get the message when people said can you make it bigger & less expensive. What he should have understood from the feedback is that people want a system that is less expensive & better able to do it's tasks over a larger area. That of course means making a vehicle that traverses the ground properly & still allows the farm bot to do it's tasks--hence the system has to have on ground locomotion (i.e. tracks or wheels/tires--not fixed rails), water tanks that can be refilled at the end of long rows, seed bins, etc...
How about using drones then size/shape don't matter -- like a Roomba. Certainly for seeding and weeding. Maybe for watering but it'd have to refill for each spurt which shouldn't be a problem.
@@joemachine4714 I doubt that would be practical as plants are rather fragile & prop wash could damage them. But they could be used to restock landrovers for large growers.
The problem is that it's based on cnc technology. Cnc is great because it know the exact place of the toolhead over the garden bed. Also the height is computer controlled.
So the rails and toothed belt make it possible that the bot know exactly where it needs to travel to do a certain task.
A bot with wheels would be great. There are already developments. But that needs a huge amount of sensors and software compared to the tech that farmbot uses.
Also, farmbot is connected to water and power and uses the frame for that.
A wheeled robot would need power and water supply.
And less expensive, it's not that expensive if you make it yourself.
Does it have a laser gun for Aphids and slugs ?
I’m really considering getting my own farmbot, it is a real solution! Great piece guys! 🙌
@@-whackd to having little time to properly take care of a vegetable garden. This allows me to grow our own vegetables without having to be a full time gardener.
@@Limozo I think you’re overestimating the time savings. I have a large vegetable garden and it really takes less than 15 minutes a day of upkeep. You still have all the work of constructing a container, building the robot, trouble-shooting it’s associated problems, getting the right soil conditions for what you want grow, dealing with pests, etc. If you don’t live in a temperate climate you will need to winterize and store the thing at the end of the growing season.
Humankind has been growing food for millennia without the need for a pricey toy robot that only does the easy stuff (watering and planting seeds). Kudos to you for wanting to grow your own food - it’s very satisfying and the end product is superior to what you find at the grocery store. But it takes some work and knowledge and this machine won’t get you around that.
You can make this much bigger and much cheaper, it's called a sprinkler.
They don't plant the seeds for you, but that would take a few hours a year at most.
I can't say I enjoy the thought of growing plants this way personally, and the extrapolation of this method to larger scale is equally abhorrent to my mind. I just don't see it enabling anything to do with growing plants and the human interaction with that. It does make sense in space, but really, why, before we've sorted out the massive problems we've caused here on earth?
i feel like this is really good for people that are disabled and cant do the farming themselves but still want a garden
About 30-40% of produced food supply is thrown away every day, but hey lets invest billions in growin food on the moon... i love this world...
Real gardeners get joy out of planting, watering, weeding and harvesting. You are taking away the connection with the soil.
As a person who gardens, it's my opinion that FarmBot is simply over engineered. The true value of gardening is not the end result but the journey. The curating process is part of that journey and being able to watch your efforts mature while you tend garden is the point for most people. Sure, on a large commercial scale something like this is an incredible idea (especially in space) but trying to automate gardening for the average homeowner and make it a pushbutton appliance kind of defeats the purpose doesn't it?
Only if you want to take a journey. As you are a gardener it is natural to romanticize your efforts. Not everyone is a green thumb. There are those who don't get a thrill from being hands on with nature. This may be for them.
@@zaniq23 Seems to me if someone is to lazy to bother growing their own fruit and veg they may as well go ahead and hit the grocery store? There may be some a few folks out there with more money than common sense but I doubt there are enough to support a capital heavy business model. Wonder what the shark tankers would do?
@@chadharrod5246 - Of course. Same with making your own mayonnaise or rolling cigarettes. However, I was just being contrary. If you had extoled the virtues of bot-farming I might have made your argument about 'the journey' and against romanticizing tech. However, the day may come when having your own garden may be a must have (insert reason x) and being a lazy bum this (or equivalent) might prove to be the ticket :)
I don’t see this technology leading towards ‘real’ food
Nope Just GMOs = GMO zombies to be controlled.
I don't think that being able to grow plants without any own knowledge, only through the crowd knowledge, should be a goal.
As a very novice home gardener but strong defendant of permaculture, my belief is that the advertised future upgrades of this glorified watering can is a further step into industrialized agriculture, in the wrong way, and this time for the smaller scale productions. How can this work towards diversification of crops and plants (the biodiversity we have been losing so quickly in the past decades), or towards being able to work correctly with your soil and climate? Each garden is different.
Hate to be that negative guy, because I usually am all for innovation and technology, but I'm overly sceptical about farmbot and similar projects. While there are some good ideas, it should be a duty to all of us to keep only the very best ones and be wary of the bad impact other seemingly inoffensive propositions have. I am already seeing tons of people thinking "well I can't do it but this robot will", then being limited by a handful of varieties (because those are the ones the bot or the crowd knows), then buying industrial products to achieve the right balance of minerals in the soil, then not really doing the right maintenance and finishing by discarding new electronic trash that we already have too much of...
We hope technology would not be too cost restrictive...
I think it is a totally absurd tool for this scale of production of food, except it will satisfy a technical person in being involved in atomization but from a growing perspective and sustainability it is absurd. And you don't communicate with the plants who are giving you there fruits, would you be more involved personally in stead of having machines do it for you their harvest would be bigger and stronger plants.
Remote growing...I can see something like this paired with aero ponics, or that vertical container growing towers to maximize the plant growth in less of a foot print, maybe for roof top growing or smaller farm growing. Very cool. Thx for going out and shooting this!
Ooh, imagine an aged relation that still wants to be independent and grow there own food but can't manage everything on their own. They could be helped out remotely and still grow and eat freshly home grown produce.
@@johnkerr6466 There does seem to be an impetus with games like farmville, stardew valley, animal crossing horizons, where people will take to sim farming but are stopped by participation in IRL farming/gardening due to lack of space, or any number of other reasons. So working with the software, they could "play" a sim that's not a sim, they would just be remote managing a farm/garden. It's very meta.
Air circulation is important in any closed grow room. The heat disapation and having the right mix of co2 and o2 seems like a bigger concern. The robot is cool. They probably wouldnt use soil though. In space they would use some type of inorganic grow medium, unless they are composting astronauts poop.
This is a proven open-source process/product that can benefit any community, neighborhood, etc.!
yet no one was able to figure out to use drip irrigation lol
@@davidakerlund3551 Farmbot incorporates drip-irrigation.
This system is time and life saver!
@@stumpyplank6092 I guess because this is just a model. If we consider the average surface of a garden, then this infrastructure could save a lot of time. I'm not saying it worths since I don't know how affordable it would be. But still, technology is evolving so rapidly.
@@stumpyplank6092 Even though I live in the countryside and even though farming is our main source of income here, I still believe there will always be two or more points of view. Because I thought that this video is referring to a potential solution for even another planet. That's why I adore technology. I'm not trying to change your mind. However, thank you for this conversation, kind sir or madam. I think this is the point of such videos that present something new.
You can't be serious...
This is a great stepping stone, for practicality and cost effectiveness it is currently terrible.
~3500$ will buy a complete 30ft stainless steel hoop house. That includes 300ft of drainpipe for NFT with all the bits n pieces.
Next step I would look into is developing a mobile platform with a hanging tether system for the electrics and water.
With utilizing farm bot a good way to implement a system using this type of concept would be to run a hydroponics system underneath for watering needs, the farm or system can be used to plant the seeds, do soil diagnostics and keep out weeds. You could also use a fan system to push the air into an intake, using a centrifuge or another type of filtration to separate the oxygen from the carbon dioxide. The carbon dioxide admitted from the cabin in space could also be extracted and combined with this to be reintroduced into the atmospheric container used for growing the crops. The oxygen given off by the plants that is captured could be combined with the hydrogen found in space and used to create water. Thus you create a self sustaining system for the plants and for people. If you can create a system large enough you can even use the oxygen from these plants to help replenish supplies of water and oxygen for not only plants but for humans to breathe and drink.
Jeez. It really could use some quieter stepper drivers. Trinamic perhaps?
A wireless self-contained unit plus a base-station would be nice to remove the need to wire up the length of your plant bed and so remove any bed size constraint. And eventually transition into a wheeled railless design where the gantry can move between multiple plantings rows.
How about using drones then size/shape don't matter -- like a Roomba. Certainly for seeding and weeding. Maybe for watering but it'd have to refill for each spurt which shouldn't be a problem.
I think the main issue with a big farmbot is... well, people WANT that but they don't necessarily have the money or space to afford it.
I remember when this project begun and I still don't have my own place with space for it.
Very cool machine! How long do these $3,295 machines last outdoors? Lots of exposed electronic gear for an outdoor product
True. Totally not practical.
The reason the big one didnt succeed is because for commercial scale isnt just too inefficient and expensive. Its what he said, a great learning experience for kids and hobbyists, not for growing lots of produce for families.
It would be great if the house he was living at the time kept receiving some of the prototypes so the garden was bountiful. So many people forget to acknowledge where they came from.
2014 or 2017? The clock in the NASA Boardroom at 0:52 says 07/12/17.
If you thought that modern farming techniques were bad for jobs just wait until these are everywhere.
The ‘home appliance’ model is so much smarter than you’d think. That view opens a whole new market...
I can’t wait until there’s more accessible bots. I imagine in the future the crowd sourcing element and recipes can be used with other bots. Like if you don’t own a place but have small plants and a walking bot that could have these attachments. Probably need much more of an industry but it sounds cool
I think you will like 'The Great Reset'. I find it terrifying. We need to be careful about what we wish.
I've been tracking them for awhile now. I didn't realize the FarmBot interface was Internet based which is really inconvenient -- somebody might want to set this up out in the middle of nowhere with solar and w/o Internet access.
There are solutions to that, like StarLink or other satellite internet. The code is customisable so an offline version is probably possible, but I don't see how you would remotely control it without some sort of network access. You could set up a local network if you're constantly near the FarmBot, or use internet once, download a schedule of events to the Raspberry Pi, and hope that's all you need to set and forget... In reality it's not sufficiently autonomous yet, so you'll need to interact regularly for now, which requires internet access.
@@BodyDestruction The issue is not just Internet access. What if FarmBot, the company, goes out of business? Their servers will go offline much to the chagrin and annoyance of FarmBot users. Same thing if FarmBot is bought out by a multinational corporation to kill off the company for their own for-profit product to dominate the market. And I'm not just picking on FarmBot. When Adobe abandoned packaged versions of their software for an endless online subscription model it annoyed everyone. Glowforge laser cutter is another example where a multiple thousand dollar piece of hardware only works using a bespoke web based application.
@@SoCalFreelance good point. FarmBot says they're 100% open source, and you can download the code to develop plugins and such. I don't know if you have access to the entire program (the "100%" surely implies it) or just the front end. Pretty sure there's open source software alternatives to control these open source hardware parts. But yeah, it would be a bunch of extra work to convert the entire OS of the farm.
I hope they won't get any mold issues with their tomato plants spraying water on it like that lol
DRIP LINES are confusing though lol
Farmbot has its own official YT channel, and it has all comments disabled, so it is not possible to read comments from early adopters that had purchased a robot from them
This is amazing!! My grandmother would put a curse on me, but, she's dead so I'm safe.
I don't understand why an average home gardener would want this.
I didn't hear a word about how this could help disabled people. Because it could. The expenses would be shifted to setup and possibly harvest and avoid the daily or weekly care. My biggest questions revolve around continuous harvesting to benefit fresh food year round. THAT might give me pause to spend that amount of money if I still need to go to a market a substantial portion of the year. Btw, I didn't see corn stalks. Eating fresh corn in December would be nice. But it grows much taller than most other plants that come to mind. How is that addressed? Separate garden? If so, that's a knock against because of expense.
Hopefully these ideas will also make it back out into better ways of growing food on earth.
For a large scale commercial farmbot use a polar coordinate system instead of X Y.
Instead of going into space, why can't we take better care of the planet we have?
L’enfer c’est les autres.
This is mostly a watering tool, as planting seeds is done maybe 2-3 times per year (and many people use seedlings, not seeds).
I would think that an automated drip irrigation system is cheaper, as convenient to use and uses less water and electricity.
How do we grow weed in space?
I don’t think any lesson is a failure yet a success in the right direction for a net sustained green future
I am soo happy to see Farmbot that was such a cutting edge video at the time, WOW!! Congratulations Rory! Perseverance! I love the small version. I am not a fan of robots though.
Would have been neat to have the guy from Meandu of Kijani Grows from your realier video working with them. He's grown in some REALLY toxis spaces. Closer to home, having one in my Grams raised bed would allow me to spy on her to ensure she was able to keep her garden growing.
Wouldn't you need more water to soak the soil. It's way too short when watering the little plants.
Uses sensors to detect soil moisture. Probably waters multiple times on watering days
I really like the intersection of robotics and agriculture but I think there are simpler ways to accomplish the same things this gantry is doing.
Also be said online software. SASS is a big no no in my book. I don't want to be tethered by any subscriptions.
that is cool, are these on the market yet? they look like they would save a lot of time and labor
what a joke
Farmbot, making a process more convoluted than it should be 🤣 you would have more success selling a machine that wipes your ass
Wait, they're JUST NOW trying to figure this shit out? Lol.
this product makes complete sense in the upside down, totally insane world in which we find ourselves living. developing a hypercomplex, expensive and high-tech solution (da farm bot bro!) for watering one's garden when a simple and cheap solution (a $3.00 watering can) already exists is complete lunacy. gardening isn't about watering man. it's about reconnecting to nature. the future is about simple, local and low tech solutions that rely on people, not machines. Wake up.
Well, you don't need to water and control weed yourself to connect with nature.
This not is just a help for the most boring daily tasks. Having this will give you more time for other things, in or outside gardening.
Btw the parts for this are actually very cheap. It's the aluminium rails etc that make it expensive. Make that from wood and this can be built really cheap.
Let's say your time is worth only 10 an hour. Even then such a home built cnc will pay for itself very quickly.
I do think farmbot like it is now is kind of l limited still.
The whole system should be built on a portable gantry instead of moving on rails.
People don't want it "bigger", they want it scalable. He stubbornly and maliciously made it bigger without thinking outside the box.
You could set it up to do A/B testing for different growing regimens too.
I’m gonna need one for a restaurant salad bar lettuce bed. The big one is for markets, small farms, stores, not home gardeners.
combine this with an ez-gro tower and water recycling system, and power it with their wind turbine/solar power unit and i'm sold
All the plants have leaf curl and look kinda sad. Why can't farm bot see that and fix it.
Great, but what about weeding the area.
When i look at projects like this, I like to imagine cost per sq. ft. to determine viability. This project is a good learning experience and another step towards automated farming. But its not any kind of solution to anything.
the fact that it's programmable means you can tailor it to different conditions, i could in theory connect a weather api to it, if there isn't one already, or load nutrient profiles for each plant, and adjust npk values for each plant therefore allowing many differen't types of plants to flourish, i think a bigger problem would be pests and maintenance of the machine
PEOPLE'S PARK (Berkeley) is gonna have a new 17-story dorm built. that could translate into 34-51 stories of FARMBOT gardens/racks just outside the south-facing dorm windows! that's a 'far side' bigger than the existing garden!!!
Very innovative but nothing takes the “therapy” out of gardening like a robot. Great application though.
Glad to see you use soil!
Buy some starter plants and set an automatic sprinkler and you have accomplished 90% of what this thing does...
Cool for sure
Why is there so little testimonies of people actually using them on CZcams?
Very creative enterprise. I realize you could put this device in a plant tunnel to protect it from rain etc. but otherwise it appears you would have to always watch the weather forecast and have a place that you can roll the bed under cover or cover it another way temporarily. I would be great in vertical farming operations and space travel, but agree with others that this may be a bit of over engineering for most backyard applications. To each their own :)
Great video, thank you.
Oh cool, I was in a Maker Space with this guy
This is great for taking away some basic care for you but people still have to know info about specific plants to understand pruning, pests, and how to germinate some seeds. I like Farmbot though, I hope it gets people to garden more :)
That farmbot line is a joke and what's a bigger joke is those who actually buy them ffs 🤣🤣.
Imagine spending several grand to produce $150 worth of vegetables.
Hydroponics is so much easier and so much more water wise as it reuses water. Also a lot of plants do not do well with overhead watering as it causes many mildew and fungus issues.
exactly these guys are cell phone app makers not farmers lol
I wonder why they didn't go for under-canopy watering? I've always found that pests and diseases were likelier if you water from above vs. watering at soil level.
Indoor Marijuana growers are 70 years ahead of all these people.
If Farmbot can spray rabbits, birds, and mice, I’d invest. Scarecrow/turret mode activate.
Ok so this is just a randome thought, so dont cruisify me. But what if NASA adopted a more earthship mentality to how to survive on mars? For example we could collect out dated satellites orbiting the earth and use them for spare parts on mars. Mars has a ground made of soil and rocks similar to earth, couldn't they then be used in sand bags, and the other mixes of organic material to build houses. There would have to be the main domes and living arrangements to begina with but to branch out. I would rather live under a dome that had homes with eathership qualities. They use water so many times. And it directly allows the sewage to be used for oxygen producing plants.
This is amazing! Love your videos!
One side natural agriculture and one side automatic agriculture machineries Jai Kisan
Good one !
Look at the crops at 6:36, if it was so great why are 90% of them dead
Thai basil at 2:33 for space curry?
7:26 "Farm Bot... is to expensive" no shit?
If you do manual planting and use irrigation tape, you can lower your cost and if broken, it can be fixed in a second.
Irrigation tape and 5gall bucket: 100$ easy to scale up or down.
FarmBot: I would guess above 10 000$ for the same surface.
And for the NASA, please, ditch the soil, go hydroponic and save again. Quite easy.
I think the real innovation in farming will be reducing water, soil/fertilizer and pesticides. This is a nice approach to traditional farming.
so no till market gardens and hydroponics.........
Ar 8:01 you have a frame that changes from the drone to the ground camera.
They should make a growbed that has curves so more space can be used at home
Can the farmbot be in the Sun and rain ALL the time?
NASA needs to incorporate a worm composting set up. You need to be able to cycle nutrient into a plant ready solution
Amazing but I doubt it can weed... I'd have loved some clips of it weeding. Amazing stuff really. ❤️
Not here to talk about things I haven't seen, but I've actually seen an early FarmBot successfully weeding; it's on our previous video visit with Rory. Back then, there was another sentiment about experimenting. It should concern some the allergy against tinkering it's been shown in these early comments. Ingenuity is going to be necessary for the coming few decades. I'm with Rory. czcams.com/video/BqYrAWssrrY/video.html
What are the dimensions for the garden bed?
Would the larger sale better if it could be made to expand over time. This would been people could change and pay over time.