What parts of farming actually need automation?

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Hi all,

I come from a software background so lack a lot of farming knowledge beyond what I get from working in my garden.

When I first started working on electronics projects for my garden I realized that plants don’t actually need a lot of constant care and a lot of what they do need they can get themselves. From this I found it really interesting thinking through what practices actually need automation and I was hoping to get some more experienced peoples views on this?

In my mind things that could be worth automating are:

  • weeding
  • pruning
  • harvesting
  • seeding/planting

Watering would depend on your location, I’m in Britain so watering is done naturally by our weather pretty often.

What things do people think are their biggest time-sinks, what are people wanting to automate?

Its worth noting a lot of things that could be automated, also have natural solutions, for instance pest control through having natural animal diversity around is something I’ve been reading about recently. (simple example, having trees and bushes around gives birds places to live and birds often help reduce pests). With these, is automation still a good call? Can we do both?

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This is a book that has considerably changed my thinking. I first started programming BASIC on a teletype in 1974.

Automated plant recognition systems that can work with polycultures is what seems most useful to me. I feel a lot of energy is dissipated attempting to maintain monocultures for high profit marketability .

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oo! Ill give the book a look, even just the summary on that site makes it sounds really interesting.

If you’re interested in robots interacting with polycultures, I’ve been looking at this project recently that aims to help automate aspects of that.