Farming robotically, or just farmbots
Nowadays, we are used to hear about how everything is transformed by technology. From fintech to virtual assistant, there are plenty of opportunities to enhance our day to day lives with technological interventions.
However, in our social and collective mindset, we tend to connect those technology breakthroughs to a particular way of living. Unconsciously, we think of tech ventures in an urban setting. For some reason, tech is associated with cities and urban lives.
In fact, we do not even realize how innovative technology transforms other substantial areas of society. We want to introduce you FarmBots, a robot-assisted way of farming.
Farming is one of the oldest productive activities in humankind. However, due to the dynamic economic system in which we are immersed, this activity has remained on a secondary level due to the need for human labor to carry it out. Nonetheless, innovation in robotics is allowing for the creation of Farmbots, or cultivation process automation.
First FarmBot project: Genesis
The first FarmBot was Genesis, created and designed in 2011 by Rory Aronson, an engineering student. It was a revolutionary attempt to challenge the farming paradigm. Genesis is rail machinery that can easily handle planting, watering, fertilizing and applying pesticides to plants.
As with any other new technology, Genesis works under programming control through a mobile or a computer device, which allows to manage farming remotely, without even touching the farm. Genesis is part of an open-source project, which means that we can collaboratively modify hardware and software to make improvements and share them with the community.
More than bots in farms
Task automation has always been welcome from an efficiency standpoint. That is a clear benefit worth noting. Besides that, there are many other aspects for consideration.
With FarmBots we can build our own little farm at home, or a communal one by working together with our neighbours. This farming system offers many facilities like scalability, local production, autonomous farming tasks and the possibility of programming them all.
If it’s implemented as a community project for the neighbourhood, the project will not only transform the way of farming, it will also change what people eat — because they could program and select which vegetables or fruits farmbots farm — or give people the opportunity to eat healthier by avoiding manufactured food chains.
Farmbots will increasingly represent a total paradigm shift, combining technology and nature through farming process automation. This merge is a great example that helps explain how technology is a key enabler to really improve people’s lives.
We believe that farmbots offer freedom and autonomy to people by giving them the chance to produce their own food. Of course the collective application of large-scale farmbots today is a complex challenge due to its cost, amongst other aspects, but we see a tremendous potential in the near term future.
