I am YOK in south Korea.
I am a hobby farmer of a small field around 1500 meters square and an HW/SW engineer.
I hope to join and contribute to the community projects as I can.
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Hello everyone. I hope I’m not late to the party 
My name is Adebayo and I am from Nigeria https://twitter.com/baniagribiz
I have a bachelors degree in Agricultural extension and rural development. I have been practicing agriculture since 2014 but mostly in a convectional way and small scale. I was able to get 6 acres of land where I grow vegetables, maize and cassava. I upscaled production in 2018. As an extension worker/change agent, my goal is to pass on relevant agricultural information, modern agricultural practices to farmers and rural dwellers. This is will help improve their yield and productivity.
‘My vision is to help develop rural communities through agriculture’. Agriculture is Africa, Nigeria is still very far behind when it comes to adopting new agricultural innovation.
One of my goal this year is to impact rural dwellers on digitization in agriculture. But more focus will be on primary/elementary school students and secondary/high school students.
Part of the challenges I’m having right now is this.
I am not a tech person, but I’m tech savvy.
So I’m trying to figure out how I can help this young ones with Agtech courses that can help - As regards this. I have been able to come up with a few stuffs after brainstorming with a friend of mine.
I have been able to get the module for the school kids, this will enable me to work around their existing curriculum while I include basic tech about agriculture. Things they can implement while on the field. (Practical)
Digitalization creates demand for digital skills and for people who are competent in using digital devices, understanding outputs and developing programmes and applications. This requires not only basic literacy and numeracy but also data handling and communication skills. These skills are lacking in the rural areas in Nigeria, hene, education must improve quickly; ICT is developing at an incredibly rapid pace and rates of learning must keep up. This will help prevent the issue of Digital divide
There is a need to develop a model of digital skills training aimed at rural dwellers so they can learn to assess and implement the best practices and technologies from their homes/farm businesses.
I’m in contact with a few of my friends who will be willing to volunteer as teachers to help sensitive and impact the younger generation.
I will be very happy to connect with everyone here. I have shared a link to my twitter profile. there you can see more of my work. I will be happy to share more about the project I am working on presently to whoever is interested in solving the sustainable development goals 1,2,4 and 11
Zero Hunger, No poverty, Quality Education and Sustainable cities and communities.
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Hello to the community!
I’m Avi. I’ve been lurking on here for a while and finally decided to make an account in hopes of finding a way to be useful to this project.
@taylor I’d love to get in contact and find a way to get involved. I’m especially interested in the new motor controller! Here are two examples of projects I did recently with Edge Impulse that can give you an idea of what I’m into:
If this is relevant I’m available @ avi(dot)robots(at)gmail(dot)com
Hi Taylor, Everyone,
As so kindly already expressed;-
Thank you so much for furthering organic farming science and making your robot open source! Those are important contributions to the world and I appreciate it.
I work in IT for over 20yrs, grown from engineering to Project mgt, Program management and Product Ownership. I am setting up my Permaculture regenerative farm of about 50 acres - early stages. We faced devastating bushfires a couple years back, recovering slowly. Based in Sydney, Australia and north midcoast.
I too have been researching and drafting regenerative farm automation solutions including a tractor platform to assist Permaculture and Regenerative farming small scale producers and the Permaculture global community. I’m familiar with home automation systems, networking, tech infra, cloud/big data, systems integrations, automation systems, dabble in coding, DJI drone/ODM, sketchup and general engineering. So have a good understanding of wide range of technology disciplines and architecture, but really these days I’m just a Project Manager with some good tech know how, strategy and product mgt. I’ve seen first hand how large food retailers work vertically and the insecurity small and medium farmers face. The environmental and social damage. It all must change and globally, we are out of time.
I’m a Permaculture designer and been helping farmer mates with pro-bono consultancy to help them be more self sufficient and sustainable.
Really looking forward to collaborating with you all and helping bring this together to really help bring about some security and prosperity for all, (Sarbat Dha Bhalla) in the field of progressive social Ag and communities.
Warm regards,
RajD
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Hello RajD. I have sure enjoyed learning about you and what you’re working on. I’d be happy to connect with you to further discuss about the area of permaculture. I’m working on a project presently which will be focused on teaching kids in rural areas of Nigeria how to grow food sustainably.
Hello Merlin, Nice to meet you and learn about your journey in the area of agriculture. I will be happy to learn more about you and how you successfully ran the operations of your the farm while it was active. Looking forward to hearing from you.
I’m Brian Sakurada. I’m a computer engineer turned regenerative farmer in Japan and I came across this project while searching for solutions to build my own similar thing. You can see some of the bits of land I’m dealing with on my farm website or instagram page for Shiwa GREEN Farm.
I’d like to get involved and help out and in the process, get some automation built for my farm.
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I am Jojo. A technical informatics engineer from germany.
I have been experimenting with building something similar to Acorn, but around half the size and based on 2-wheel skid-steering. I am looking forward for some exchange and co-inspiration. I guess I will post some photos in this thread: 50% scale version of Acorn?
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This might be a good way to remove weeds or a small butane flame with a circular shield to protect the crop. You may never need a chemical weedkiller again... - YouTube. This also maybe a place you could get some idea’s as to other parts which will work for driving about the field. XAG R150 made by Aerolab New Zealand. Hope this is helpful. I’m starting to work with a Aerospace engineer and a coder that is coding for Chat GPT and would like to thank you all for what you do for the small scale farming industry.
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Hi @taylor & other community members! My name is Matt. I operate a human scale regenerative farm in Vermont. I’m happy to have just recently found this amazing project. I also share the dream of building an autonomous multi function farming robot. I’ve dabbled in arduino/raspberry pi projects for farm automation but I also work for a company that specializes in large format, 6 axis, 3D printing. We also recycle our failed prints and produce our own filament. If I can be of assistance at all please let me know. I’d be more than happy to contribute in whatever way I can. Let’s build some open source robots!
Hey Folks,
My name is Simon Forman (he/him) and I’m a semi-retired computer programmer from San Francisco. I just bought twenty acres of land West of Redding, CA, on which to practice Permaculture and build robots to collect trash, etc.
It may turn out that I can’t get up there in person to work on it for a little while, and so my thoughts turn to Acorn…
But first things first, the thing about robots in agriculture… Martin Buber has a book “I and Thou”:
Buber’s main proposition is that we may address existence in two ways:
The attitude of the "I" towards an "It", towards an object that is separate in itself, which we either use or experience.
The attitude of the "I" towards "Thou", in a relationship in which the other is not separated by discrete bounds.
I don’t believe that robots in agriculture necessarily lead to an “I-It” relationship with Nature, but I’m wary. To me the root cause (no pun intended) of most of our problem lies in our divorce from Nature. If robotic ag exacerbates that problem, no good. But hopefully we can use robots to help us get back in harmony with Nature, eh?
I was raised in a weird eclectic California counter-culture (did you know there are more religions in CA than in the rest of the world combined? People from all over the world have come here bringing their own, and then people here have made thousands of new ones, mostly syncretic, but a few original. Anyway…) All this to say that I literally believe in “Nature Spirits”, I’m an animist. For me, growing food is about groking the land and living beings and harmonizing my life with theirs. “All are One.” It’s a little contradictory to interpose a remote-controlled robot in the mix, eh?
On the other hand, there’s nothing intrinsic to a robot that prevents an “I-Thou” relationship with the land and the living creatures on it and in it?
If all things have consciousness (animism) then so do robots, no? Like a shovel or an ax, they are tools, and tools have spirits too, we can have an “I-Thou” relationship with them, we can all grok together.
And here’s where I would normally start babbling about Cybernetics. But I don’t want to get into all of that too deeply on what is supposed to be an introductory post.
So, I have some land, I have motors (servos and steppers), sensors and cameras, some Pi Picos and like twenty-five ATMega328P DIP chips. (I got them before they got so expensive. Seriously the Picos come in a 3-pack for $15 and each ATMega328P goes for that last I looked. The power of hype? Arduino skewed things. The pico is a little computer, way more than a microcontroller. Anyway, if anyone here needs a ATMega328P let me know, I can spare a few.) I’ve got a BeagleBoard (I like those better than Raspberry Pi) and a bunch of other bits and bobs. I’ve also been working on a simple computer system based on the Joy programming language. (“Permacomputing”, yeah?)
Let’s make some robots and grow some food!
Hi Taylor and community,
I’m Andrew from the Southern Highlands of New South Wales, somewhere, down under in Australia.
I’m lucky enough to be living on 10 hectares of fertile rural land and I am hoping to employ a semi-autonmous land drone to do some precision mowing and slashing to get the most out of the land with the lowest environmental impact.
My day job is in IT/Cloud Infrastructure/SaaS/Kubernetes. But I have long term interests in electronics, OSS, automation, 3d printing (reprap), and generally making and fixing stuff so a project like this is right up my alley.
If someone could point me in the direction of a BoM for suitable machine, I’d build it right away, but I think it’s still early in the development for the open projects out there. So I might need to go with a commercial solution in the mean time (thinking R150, LCR or possibly FJD Dynamics - the last two don’t have commercial representation in AU).
Wishing this project the best of success - I’ll be following closely, and if there is anything I can do to help, let me know.
Cheers, Andrew
Hi Taylor, brilliant video and fantastic ethos, for sharing your ideas and developments. I am a UK arable farming, looking to develop a solar powered autonomous robot, similar to your creation. My ideas are along a regenerative route, to grow ‘everyday’ commercial crops without the use of fertilizers or sprays. I would be very interested in collaborating with your Acorn design to adapt it to be of use to every arable farmer worldwide. As a farmer of over 40 years, we are now at the most exciting times to undo, the damage we have done however, I will need your help. Kind regards H.
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Where are you in the UK? I’m near Bristol and have tentative plans to build one of these soonish: 50% scale version of Acorn? - #4 by sam_uk
Hi Sam, I am in Dorset, I am an all arable farmer, looking to build a autonomous solar powered robot to carry out activities to reduce my use of sprays and fertilizer. The idea is simple however, I need help on the electrics and communication. I am working with my son who can only supply limited amount of time. I would be very happy to come and see you to develop an idea, hopefully collaboratively?
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Good to make a UK connection. I’ll be down near Southampton with not much to do on 28th 29th Dec. I could drive over for a couple of hours if that suits?
The mounting of the forks/steering motors seems to be the main outstanding bit for 50% scale version of Acorn? - #4 by sam_uk
Then I just need to find ~£3k to put it together and find out which bits don’t work.
Hi Sam, I have one meeting on the 29th at 10am for one hour. We are building a small robot for proof of principle, with an aim to a field trial by the 1st March. At what stage are you at?
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I’ve built some small field bots to play with, worked on some software a bit.
My conclusion is that it’s worth just copying Taylors hardware & software stack rather than re-doing that work.
Good afternoon in Texas! I am currently in a design class in West Texas and I am tasked to create a soil moisture measurement robot. I am very interested in the design of Acorn. The adaptability and versatility of Acorn makes it a great platform for this project. Is there a contact that I can keep in touch with for questions over the coming months. Thank you for your pursuit in improving the farming experience for all!
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Hi to everybody,
First, a big thanks to @taylor for all the effort running the project and the community building.
I am Stefan from the north-eastern part of Germany. I live on a small project farm and maintain several workshops here.
Others run the vegetable production for ourselfs and selling.
https://www.landkombinat.org/
I am active in open source agriculture projects since more than a decade now.
I developed and built juice processing equipment, modern tools for draft horses, solar and wind systems and much more, mostly together with other people or groups.
Right now, I am diving into the Agrokruh project in Slovakia, which exists since more than 30 years now, but unfortunately it is not spreading.
https://www.agrokruh.sk/en/technologia/
I plan a visit there this year and like to build one (looking for partners right now).
Some development from Acorn can be uses there as well, especially tools with camera based plant recognition.
I am good with CAD, electronics, fabrication and repair and have manufacturing equipment for all kinds of metal work. Also a electronic workshop, 3D printing and a wobbly CNC-mill here on the farm.
At another workshop I have access to industrial turning-milling machine, 3kw laser cutting and welding and even an injection molding machine.
I see the perspective to manufacture parts for open source projects like Acorn.
Either to provide it for people but also for development and prototyping.
Let me know if I can help out with making parts or engineering details of the project.
I saw some OS agriculture projects and groups growing and shrinking, like OpenSourceEcology Germany & US, FarmHack and the German group around Agrocircle.
Some developed great, like https://www.preciousplastic.com/
I think maintaining a community is the hardest part. Without people and supporters most good ideas will disappear, especially when it is in the physical/agricultural world.
I don’t want good ideas like agrobots to vanish neither seeing it in the hands of big companies with closes sources.
I wonder how the Acorn project status is right now.
I saw you moved away from Twisted Fields Research Collective - Open Collective
For a certain reason?
It would be interesting and possible here to build one. I was busy with organic vegetable production for some years, so I can see the needs.
Some field testers are needed and a active making & testing community.
If any interested people from my area read this: please contact me.
All the Best
Stefan
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