Fully Automated Farming? What If We Fused These Techs?
Farming...
One of mankind's greatest achievements was farming! Farming produces endless amounts of food, year after year. In the past, it enabled humans to settle in different places and create communities, create villages, create cities, create civilization as we know it! We even feed our cattle vegetables. We, humans, owe a lot to farming...
Nowadays most of us don't farm anymore, we have large farms that produce huge amounts of food that feed the population and the cattle.. we pay a premium every time we buy vegetables for this convenience. But what if all of this could be over?
Today I'm going to talk about two projects that I would love to do and connect them if I had more space in my backyard...
HomeBioGas
Yesterday I was reading @apshamilton 's blog about HomeBioGas, the concept is incredible! Produce your own BioGas at home with what is left of your food, just throw your leftovers to the bacteria and let the gas accumulate. It's simple and effective! For a small price of $650, one could have a lifetime worth of gas to cook food and heat the house. And it even produces fertilizer to fertilize any garden you have at home. Allowing your garden to really grow big and strong.
FarmBot
FarmBot is an incredible open-source bot that automates the whole gardening process. There are instructions to do one yourself by buying the different parts in your local stores, but to have a top-grade custom one made by the team the prices go from $1,795 up to $2,295, the most expensive one is able to produce lots of food!
It comes with a cool app that allows you to set watering times, the places where you want to plant the different plants, the places to water, it kills all weeds by pressing them into the soil while they are still young, etc... and since the project is open source, one could even automate more things like harvesting and fertilizing! Everything automated, you could be a farmer while watching TV by allowing the bot to do everything.
Webpage
Github
Yield Curve
Return On Investment
Carbon Footprint
Now, with these two things in mind, what if we joined them together?
Tech can sometimes be around for years before someone remembers to fuse a couple of them together to make something revolutionary and world-changing! Look at blockchain technology, encryption has been around for decades, chains of blocks have been around for decades too, peer to peer networks have also been around for a while, but only when Satoshi Nakamoto decided to join them all together did Bitcoin appear!
If we fused both HomeBioGas and FarmBot could we have something great? Yes, we could...
HomeBioGas produces gas that can be used to produce electricity, by routing the gas to an electric generator we could produce energy that would power FarmBot. HomeBioGas also produces fertilizer. Since the FarmBot is open source and easily customizable, we could make some sort of gadget, probably with a hose that would spread the fertilizer through the soil! And even without programming skills, the community around FarmBot is quite devoted to the project, I'm sure the community would help out with anything.
With all of this in place, we would get a fully automated fertilized garden powered by renewable energy! And let's not forget that the garden will grow vegetables that can be used as fuel for the bacteria inside the HomeBioGas.
By doing this we would be able to eat vegetables all year round for almost nothing. Vegetables have lots of vitamins, most people need more vitamins in their diets, this system would improve everyone's health!
I don't have enough space in my house to do this, but I send it out to the whole Steem community, maybe one of you wants a cool project to have some fun.
Images Free Source - 1, 2,3,4,5,6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 20, 21, 22, 23, 24, 25, 26, 27 - Tradingview snapshots too.
Question of the day: Are you interested in getting any of these? Do you think we could fuse both technologies and make something better?!
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This is really interesting. The HomeBioGas fertilizer can just be automatically added to the irrigation feed. I’m planning to do this anyway.
Using the gas to make electricity is interesting but I haven’t found an efficient generator for this fairly small amount of power (max 4.4 kWh per day of gas).
Also in Israel retail gas is more expensive than retail electricity (which is due to gas monopoly).
Posted using Partiko iOS
Won't the irrigation feed get clogged because of the fertilizer? Or is the fertilizer that liquid?
Damn countries and their monopolies, in my country EDP has the monopoly of all energy related stuff, a few years ago the population started using less and less energy from them, probably because of solar pannels,etc... so they decided to raise the energy costs to keep their profits stable, our electricity is one of the most expansive ones in the world now...
Yeah, I searched around and couldn't find one either... Probably because natural gas is much less calorific than propane so there aren't any small generators efficient enough to really use BioGas :(
The fertilizer is completely liquid. I am planning to use it in a drip irrigation system so the Farm Bot shower irrigation will be no problem.
Thanks so much for letting me know about this. I’m seriously considering getting a Farm Bot.
Posted using Partiko iOS
i have just started to look into aquaponics. grow some trout and vegies at same time.
That's a full meal right there xD Never looked much into aquaponics but I'll look into them in the future, the weather over here is probably too hot for it, the water would turn into steam in no time with these 40C temperatures.
yep meat and veg! i'm looking to balance some of my steam (steem) time with other obsessions and aquaponics came up :)
Been reading on aquaponics, it seems that it's quite expensive to mount the system, do you have anything in mind or it's just an idea so far? It does look quite awesome as a project and would provide really good content for STEEM xD If you were able to automate the whole thing it would be even better! I wonder if FarmBot could be programmed for that. Harvesting would probably be easier since no dirt would be in the way.
you now no more then me on the subject. Went to a fair the other day, picked up a brochure, have'nt read it yet. Automation, solar, etc etc. figured it would be expensive. Looking for something a little more active and outdoors -flow!
edit. then write about it on steem:)
I'll try to look some info about aquaponics for a possible future post :) Always glad to learn something new!
cool rather read it here and vote on it:)
This is a really great idea. I have often thought about how this could be done. I'm not sure if I'm enough of a tinkerer to put together the farm bot from open source but that sure would be fun to have. Maybe if some of my investments go back up I can put that on my "to purchase" list. I think I need a greenhouse too in my climate to make it work well.
!trdo
Yeah, it's on my "to purchase list" too, I would love to tinker with that robot, it would be such a cool project! The only things the bot still doesn't do is harvesting and cutting, at least it didn't the last time I checked (I've been following the project for a while), but all the other things it does automatically and you can have many different types of seed! IT's so awesome!
My Childlike imagination started to go crazy as soon as I saw FarmBot, I would love to have giant greenhouse with a giant farmbot that would do everything farm related for me! It reminds me of the times I played minecraft and did item farms where my character stood in place and items dropped on me ahahah
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