NASA's Space for Agriculture

In progress.

NASA'a  Space for Agriculture Tele Conference

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YxdY20NuhBE

I am attending, and is being recorded, Available on UTube. 

Have some ideas in the space, contact us.

Farmers Markets

Have followed farmers markets for some time, reinvention needed?  Good discussion.

Do farmers markets need to be reinvented for the digital age?  in Retailwire,   Good discussion.

Small and medium-sized independent farms have discovered online selling in recent years with the arrival of numerous farm-to-door delivery apps, possibly threatening the popularity of farmers markets. 

Many farmers markets were already struggling due to over-saturation prior to the pandemic. A March 2019 article from NPR noted that the number of farmers markets exploded from 2,000 in 1994 to more than 8,600 in 2019. Crowds were heading to the bigger markets for variety and one-stop shopping, forcing scores of smaller ones to fold.

Newer competition has been coming as well from subscription-driven community-supported agriculture (CSA) programs and home delivery options from Amazon.com, Instacart and Blue Apron.

With the pandemic, the temporary closing of farmers markets and restaurants forced farms to pivot online to capitalize on the resurgence in home cooking. In many cases, the pandemic accelerated the use of local, direct-to-consumer food systems, such as Barn2Door, Farm to People, Our Harvest, Harvie and WhatsGood, that were already gaining traction. A number of farmers markets set up their own online shops.

Going online can help farms tap directly into the broader growth in online grocery in addition to reaching customers who can’t frequent farmers markets. Online, farms can offer a wider variety of products versus their farmers market stall while avoiding waking up well before dawn and spending the day in inclement weather.   .... '

Automated Vertical Farming

General description without details, but interesting application.   Was involved with some farming applications and it seems some of these can be readily automated with such systems.  Note posts regarding 'agriculture' here.

Robots Take Vertical Farming to New Heights    in ACM By Governing, July 1, 2021

Fifth Season, a vertical farm in Braddock, PA, uses robots to grow greens indoors, from seed to harvest.

Co-founder Austin Webb said, "What we have built is the industry first, and industry only, end-to-end automated platform."Plastic trays with unique IDs are stacked throughout the 60,000-square-foot facility, and every plant can be traced from any point in the growing process.

Proprietary software directs the robots to stack and remove trays of plants.   LEDs are used to replicate sunlight, and sensors are used to monitor the nutrient mix, carbon dioxide levels, and light spectrum.

Compared to conventional farming, Fifth Season uses up to 95% less water, 98% less land, and no herbicides or pesticides.

Moreover, a half-acre indoors is equivalent to almost 100 acres of farmland in terms of production.

From Governing  ... 

Farm Automation Advances

More picks on my agriculture and botany advances.     Some good related statistics.

Automating the Farm, By Esther Shein, Commissioned by CACM Staff 

 Step inside the cab of the John Deere 8RX Tractor, and you may be surprised at how it resembles an airplane cockpit, with systems and maps that produce lots of data (and a comfortable seat, to boot). Attached to that cab is a planter equipped with 300 sensors and 140 controllers that methodically and precisely deliver seed to the soil in near-perfect rows.

Farming is often an inexact science. As global demands on agriculture continue to grow, Deere and others are looking to change that with precision agriculture technology.

The human population of the world is expected to climb from an estimated 7.8 billion in 2020 to 9.7 billion by 2050 and 11.2 billion by 2100, according to the United Nations World Population Prospects reports. As the population grows, demands on farmers also are growing; they are tasked with feeding the world, but with increasingly less land and fewer resources, while facing the impacts of climate change.

Companies like John Deere and startup EarthSense are looking to address those challenges. Increasingly, robotics, GPS controls, computer vision, and sensors embedded with machine learning are being added to farm equipment to do things like plant seeds, identify weeds so herbicide can be sprayed in the right places, and even pick strawberries.

This is expected to advance the deployment of smart and autonomous farm machinery, according to market research firm McKinsey. "Increasing the autonomy of machinery through better connectivity could create $50 billion to $60 billion of additional value by 2030," the firm said.

In 2018, some 10% to 15% of U.S. farmers were using Internet of Things (IoT) systems across 3.1 billion acres and 250,000 farms, and were collectively spending about $960 million.

Almost 230 million acres were covered by John Deere technology alone in 2020 across more   .... '

Spot Herding Sheep and other Farm Tasks

Intrigued by the use of robotics for agricultural and other classic farming  applications.  Here the use of the Boston Dynamics Spot ... and a link to a video of it herding sheep in New Zealand.  And doing other farming tasks.   Even working with others in teams.    So robots can be used for 'imprecise' tasks that require nimble action and reaction.  At least at this time these would appear to be tele-operated as opposed to autonomous.  For problems like herding animals, or even us?

Watch a Boston Dynamics robot herd sheep in New Zealand 
Robotics company Rocos  https://www.rocos.io/   shows how Spot might advance precision agriculture.

Christine Fisher, @cfisherwrites in Engadget

In addition to herding sheep, Spot robots might also harvest crops, inspect yields or create real-time maps, Rocos says. These capabilities are all possible now that Spot is more nimble, can handle rugged terrain and can carry infrared and LiDAR cameras. Rocos hopes to use its tech to remotely design and edit missions and collect sensor data. In other words, users might be able to herd sheep in New Zealand from anywhere in the world.  .. " 

Arable: Data Driven Farming

Interesting development, maps with my background in this area.   Could have used this in forestry and vineyard applications. 

Arable launches a new generation of IoT tools for data-driven farming  By  Dean Takahashi

Arable is moving agriculture tech forward today with a new generation of internet of things (IoT) tools that enable farmers to take advantage of advanced sensors, wireless networks, and machine learning recommendations to improve crop growth.

The company has come up with a new Mark 2 sensor, a new mobile app, a sensor-integrating bridge device, and Arable Open, a customizable applications programming interface that partners can use.  ... "

See their blog for a number of good examples.

Kroger to Farm in Store

Still early, but should make an interesting and appealing display, as shown in the article.    I wonder about the labor need and cost for doing that effectively.

Kroger Brings Farming to Its Stores in Push to Get Greener (and Sell More Kale)   The grocery-store giant makes a bet on farm-to-aisle, trying to win back shoppers.

By Deena Shanker and Matthew Boylein in Bloomberg

Visitors to Seattle-area Kroger supermarkets next week will be able to walk out with fresh parsley, cilantro and other greens grown in the store, the latest example of grocers bringing the farm right to their aisles.  

Kroger’s deal with German startup Infarm includes two stores with plans for 13 more to come online by March of next year. It’s part of a broader push by the nation’s biggest traditional supermarket chain to improve sluggish sales by amping up its fresh-food offering, while also enhancing its environmental cred. The greens—including crystal lettuce and Nero Di Toscana kale—only need tending once or twice a week and will sell for no more than Kroger’s existing store-brand organic produce, according to Suzy Monford, Kroger’s group vice president of fresh.    .... " 

John Deere Labs

So true, been involved in several related projects.   See my agriculture tag posts.  Good to see Deere involved and the emergence of their lab.

Want a Really Hard Machine Learning Problem? Try Agriculture, Says John Deere Labs

John Deere, the nearly 200-year-old tractor manufacturer, now considers itself a software company
By Tekla S. Perry in IEEE Spectrum

What’s the world’s hardest machine learning problem? Autonomous vehicles? Robots that can walk? Cancer detection?

Nope, says Julian Sanchez. It’s agriculture.

Sanchez might be a little biased. He is the director of precision agriculture for John Deere, and is in charge of adding intelligence to traditional farm vehicles. But he does have a little perspective, having spent time working on software for both medical devices and air traffic control systems.

I met with Sanchez and Alexey Rostapshov, head of digital innovation at John Deere Labs, at the organization’s San Francisco offices last month. Labs launched in 2017 to take advantage of the area’s tech expertise, both to apply machine learning to in-house agricultural problems and to work with partners to build technologies that play nicely with Deere’s big green machines. Deere’s neighbors in San Francisco’s tech-heavy South of Market are LinkedIn, Salesforce, and Planet Labs, which puts it in a good position for recruiting.

“We’ve literally had folks knock on the door and say, ‘What are you doing here?’” says Rostapshov, and some return to drop off resumes.   .... " 

Cyber Agriculture

My own strong interest and background in botany makes me consider this closely, consider the implications.  In particular have been experimenting with basil flavors for years.   While the smells of basils can be considerable, they often do not perform as distinctly in dishes.   Can we program in robust flavors?  Following.

MIT’s ‘cyber-agriculture’ optimizes basil flavors   By Devin Coldewey @techcrunch

The days when you could simply grow a basil plant from a seed by placing it on your windowsill and watering it regularly are gone — there’s no point now that machine learning-optimized hydroponic “cyber-agriculture” has produced a superior plant with more robust flavors. The future of pesto is here.

This research didn’t come out of a desire to improve sauces, however. It’s a study from MIT’s Media Lab and the University of Texas at Austin aimed at understanding how to both improve and automate farming.

In the study, published today in PLOS ONE, the question being asked was whether a growing environment could find and execute a growing strategy that resulted in a given goal — in this case, basil with stronger flavors.

Such a task is one with numerous variables to modify — soil type, plant characteristics, watering frequency and volume, lighting and so on — and a measurable outcome: concentration of flavor-producing molecules. That means it’s a natural fit for a machine learning model, which from that variety of inputs can make a prediction as to which will produce the best output.

“We’re really interested in building networked tools that can take a plant’s experience, its phenotype, the set of stresses it encounters, and its genetics, and digitize that to allow us to understand the plant-environment interaction,” explained MIT’s Caleb Harper in a news release. The better you understand those interactions, the better you can design the plant’s lifecycle, perhaps increasing yield, improving flavor or reducing waste.  .... " 

Efficiency of Urban Farming

A topic of my interest, still following

Urban farms could be incredibly efficient—but aren’t yet
Casual farmers overwork, buy fertilizer, and use municipal water.
   By John Timmer  in Ars Technica ....

The Farm is the Grid

Intriguing partnership for data.  Need more of this.   Metadata and data.   Data has value.

Airbus, John Deere connect tractors, satellite data
By Lawrence Specker | lspecker@al.com

Flying tractors may not be in the cards just yet, but the seemingly odd-couple pairing of Airbus and John Deere has jointly won a major European agriculture innovation award.

In conjunction with the upcoming 2019 SIMA agriculture industry show in Paris, the two companies have received a silver medal for their Live NBalance program, which Airbus describes as “a service merging satellite and tractor data to monitor intra-field nitrogen balance even more precisely during the growing season.”

Tractor data? So much for the dream of going back to the farm to get off the grid. Apparently now the farm is the grid.   ... "

Automated Farms

More progress in automated, robotic farming.  Lots of good images at the link.

Leafy greens are grown by machines at new, automated Silicon Valley farm in Digitaltrends

Did you hear the one about the Google software engineer who packed it all in to start a farm? No, it’s not the setup for a joke. Nor is it the premise for some quirky Sundance comedy, probably telling the story of a stressed-out programmer who rediscovers their happiness by moving to the country. It’s a real, honest-to-goodness farm, which just opened in San Carlos, around 20 miles outside San Francisco. Called Iron Ox, the farm aims to produce leafy greens — romaine, butterhead, and kale, alongside various herbs — at a rate of roughly 26,000 heads per year. Oh yes, and it’s staffed almost exclusively by robots.

“This is a fundamentally different way of approaching farming,” CEO and co-founder Brandon Alexander, 33, told Digital Trends. “Traditionally, the farming process means that you seed, you wait a few months, you come back, you harvest, and you distribute. That hasn’t changed a whole lot in hundreds, if not thousands, of years.” Until now, at least.

“This is a fundamentally different way of approaching farming”
Iron Ox’s indoor farm measures around 8,000-square-feet. That makes it paltry compared to the thousands of acres occupied by many traditional farms, but, through the use of some smart technology, it promises a production output that’s more in line with an outdoor farm five times its size. To achieve this, it has a few tricks up its sleeve. For starters, Iron Ox is a hydroponics farm, a method of growing plants without soil, using mineral nutrient solutions in a water solvent. Unlike a regular farm, hydroponic farms grow their produce in vertical and horizontal stacks; every element minutely controlled through the use of glowing LED lights and jets of water to affect the crops’ size, texture, and other characteristics.

In place of a farmer, Iron Ox employs a giant, 1,000 pound robot called Angus. It’s Angus’ job to move the heavy 800 pound, water-filled tubs of fresh produce without spilling them. A robot arm is used to tend the crops, making this the agricultural equivalent of Elon Musk’s automated Tesla factory in Fremont, CA.... " 

Facial Recognition Beyond the Human

Will this work for any animal?  Plants?  What are the needed characteristics of something living that would allow this to consistently work over a period of growth?

Got A.I? Facial recognition now works on cows for better milk
By Hillary Grigonis  In DigitalTrend

Facial recognition is good for more than security features on Facebook and organizing your photo albums — the artificial intelligence-based technology could soon help ensure that milk in your fridge came from a well-fed cow. That’s right, facial recognition now works on cows. This week, agricultural company Cargill and machine-vision company Cainthus announced a partnership that will create an A.I. system for dairy farmers.

The image-recognition system is able to recognize a cow using both the animal’s pattern of spots and the cow’s actual face. The system takes a few seconds to recognize an individual cow, the companies said. ..... " 

Jobs and Technologies

Seems an odd premise, is it the underlying responsibility of companies to create jobs?   Or allow the market to do that?  Starting in the 60s, many jobs have been replaced by technologies.    In the HBR:

As Machines Take Jobs, Companies Need to Get Creative About Making New Ones
by Darlene Damm

Jobs in retail, transportation, manufacturing, and agriculture are highly vulnerable to technological change. Retailers such as Macy’s and The Limited are closing hundreds of stores and cutting tens of thousands of jobs as people buy more and more products online, and others are testing robotic assistants or planning for autonomous stores. Over 33 companies are now working on autonomous vehicles, which will soon replace transport jobs. Robots have probably taken about 85% of the 5 million manufacturing jobs that have disappeared from the United States since 2000. Automated farming is also quickly advancing.

While our first instinct might be to help employees find new jobs, what we really need to do is help companies shift into new markets focused on human services and adopt new business models that will allow employees, customers, and communities to benefit from technological change. ... " 

Target Tests Vertical Farms in/on Stores

Interesting play that uses existing real estate footprints.  Attract new consumers.  Place to test other technologies like drones and robotics to test sensor and labor alternatives?

Target to test vertical farms in stores  Retailwire, discussion. by Tom Ryan

Target is looking to shorten the distance from farm to plate with a planned test of vertical farms, an agricultural technique that involves growing plants and vegetables indoors in climatized conditions.

The initiative, to take place within select U.S. stores, is part of ongoing research and development being pursued by Target’s Food + Future CoLab, a collaboration with the MIT Media Lab and Ideo launched last November that has been exploring urban farming, food transparency and food innovation.

According to Business Insider, tests of the vertical farms could begin in spring 2017. If the trials succeed, Target’s stores will likely be filled with growing leafy greens, the most common stock for vertical farming at present. Potatoes, beetroot and zucchini could potentially be made available as well. MIT could give Target access to ancient seeds for rare tomatoes or peppers. .... " 

Looking at Target's Future Lab

Continue to be a student of spaces devoted to innovation.  See my tag links below for years of looking into the space, including a decade plus of my work in CPG and retail spaces.  Contact me for more, glad to participate.    The space below collaborates with groups we also worked with.

In Retailwire:
In its collaboration with global design firm IDEO and MIT Media Lab, Target's Food + Future coLab last week unveiled its first two innovations with a focus on food transparency.

Opened in January near MIT's campus in Cambridge, MA, "the bustling lab full of bioengineers, students, nutritionists and farmers [are] hard at work testing big ideas about the future of food," Target said on its Bullseye View blog. The multi-year collaboration, first unveiled last November, is concentrating efforts on urban farming, food transparency and authenticity, supply chain and health.

The first of the two ideas developed by the team focused on food labeling. The line, Good & Gather, displays ingredients on the front of packaging rather than in fine print on the back. .... " 

About the End of Work

In Kurzweil:   Podcast and text.  Kurzweil and company discuss the dilemma of no labor force.

" ... The jobless economy: a fully automated, engineered, robotic system that doesn’t need you, or me either. Anything we can do, machines can do better — surgery, warfare, farming, finance. What’s to do? Shall we smash the machines, or go to the beach, or finally learn to play the piano? ... "