Unit 5, Listening 1, Improving Farming with Flying Robots


Improving Farming with Flying Robots

Chris Anderson: It’s a bit of a cliché[1] but, William Gibson’s famous quote, “The future is already here, it’s just unevenly distributed.” We have seen the future of aviation. We have seen the future of food. We have seen the future of robotics. Right now, it’s too hard. It’s not reliable enough. It’s too expensive. But as we work on that, as we make it cheaper and easier and more ubiquitous[2], then it becomes more evenly distributed. Then regular people can have these powerful tools and we can see what they’ll do with it. So, we’ve already seen robots can fly; the question is how do we make it so that everybody can see that?

We know that we’ve got to feed more people, and we have to lower the chemical load in our, in agriculture and use less water. How are we going to do that? Well, the answer is going to be essentially technology, that where farms are becoming increasingly automated—robotic tractors, robotic milking machines, et cetera—and farms are increasingly becoming a big data opportunity. We realize that the more you know about the farm, the better you can manage it, and the better you can optimize[3] your yield[4] and decrease your chemical load.

How are we going to get big data? How are we going to measure our farms? And the answer is you can either, you know, scatter sensors[5] like seed, which is hard and we don’t know how to do that, or you can just take the sensors to the farm, which is what drones can do.

So the irony of this whole thing is that when I got started in this whole thing, I thought, you know, autonomy—drones—are the future of flight. In reality, they may in fact be the future in of food. It’s been a long time since farming was dominated by the, you know, the family plots and the small holdings. Today, farms are huge. There’s—the farms are getting bigger and bigger with consolidation[6] in big ag[7], and there’s fewer and fewer people on them. And they’re, and as the sort of demands for productivity go up, they’re being scientifically managed by what’s called precision agriculture. So a tractor today typically drives itself, GPS-guided, within centimeters’ precision to exactly know where things are planted. They can also pick, you know, crops that same way. The farmer sitting in that cab is probably watching a movie, not driving the tractor. Cows, when they want to be milked, cows go into the milking shed and the robots then milk them.

You know, this is, this sort of robotic, you know, revolution in agriculture, you know, 300 years after the original mechanization of agriculture, is going to be the way we get to that next level of productivity that feeds the planet.

I think we’re right there with drones, which is to say our job, as technologists, is to make them cheap and easy and ubiquitous, and then ultimately the users figure out what the application is for. And farming is a perfect example of that. It was farmers who told us that these things were fantastic crop survey, you know, devices and we didn’t realize that crop surveys were important until we started talking to farmers and they explained that agriculture is the biggest industry in the world, that right now because farms are so big, the farmers can’t walk their fields anymore. They don’t actually know what’s going on, and as a result, they use more chemicals and more water than they need to simply because they’re suffering from ignorance. They can’t afford the cost of a disease/infection, so they overspray.

If they could get, you know, a sensor, by this I mean a simple camera, to just fly every day and say, here’s what’s going on with your crops today, maybe they wouldn’t be spraying those chemicals. Maybe we could lower the chemical load in our food and our environment.

And so it’s not only the biggest industry in the world with the highest economic potential of bringing this sort of data, big data approach to crop management, but it’s also the safest place to be using things because there’s no people there. It doesn’t, it’s not over your backyard, it doesn’t trigger[8] privacy issues. It’s private land, it’s under 400 feet. You know, if we do our job right, today you think of drones as military weapons; tomorrow you’ll think of drones as farm equipment. You’ll just, there’ll be these things buzzing over crops as you drive through the countryside.


[1] cliché: noun a phrase or an idea that has been used so often that it no longer has much meaning and is not interesting

[2] ubiquitous: adjective very common

[3] optimize: verb to make something as good as it can be; to use something in the best possible way

[4] yield: noun the total amount of crops, profits, etc. that are produced

[5] sensor: noun a device that can react to light, heat, pressure, etc. in order to make a machine, etc. do something or show something

[6] consolidation: noun making a position of power or success stronger so that it is more likely to continue

[7] ag: noun abbreviation for agriculture

[8] trigger: verb to make something happen suddenly

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Unit 5, Listening 1, Part 1: Urban Settlements

Part 1: Urban Settlements Narrator:        Almost 180,000 people move into cities each day. And now, for the first time in human history, the majority of the world’s population live in urban settlements . Urban settlements can be as large as megacities like Tokyo in Japan, with 35 million inhabitants . . . or as small as the city of Canterbury in the United Kingdom, home to little more than 40,000 residents. And yet, they have many similarities. Every urban settlement has a central business district in its historic core . This trading district is always situated where several main roads meet, and is the primary location for shops, offices, restaurants, and entertainment. High land value means few people live here. This is the main difference between the central business district and other urban zones. During the Industrial Revolution, many towns experienced a massive [1] influx of industry workers. These workers and their families ne...
Read more

Unit 7, Listening 2, Change Is in the Making

Change Is in the Making Kevan Gilbert: Welcome to Change is in the Making , Domain7’s podcast where we explore all things digital through the lens of purposeful change. I’m Kevan Gilbert. Veronica Collins: And I’m Veronica Collins, and together, we’ll be discussing themes of connection making and culture shaping. We’ll be delving into [1] how to create meaningful change from a business standpoint and a human perspective. Gilbert:           Today, we’re looking at the exploding reality of quote, unquote “digital transformation.” . . . Collins:           But I saw somebody call it a digital revolution the other day instead of digital transformation, and that really seems to ring true, that we’re living through, in the same way that the Industrial Revolution [2] completely reorganized people’s lives. We’re living through a digital transformation in that way— Gilbert:   ...
Read more

Unit 6, Listening 2, America’s Magnet for Innovation and Investments

America’s Magnet for Innovation and Investments Renee Montagne, Host: Think of the most technologically innovative companies of the last 50 years—Intel, Apple, Google, Facebook, Twitter. Each one has a Silicon Valley address, and each one got backing from venture capitalists . Over the last decade, more than a third of the nation’s venture capital has gone into Silicon Valley, and much of it has come from there, as well. In our series on the history of Silicon Valley, NPR’s Laura Sydell has this story on how venture capital and high tech grew up together. Sydell, byline: When tech entrepreneurs go looking for money, they can easily end up here: University Avenue in downtown Palo Alto, with its clean brick sidewalks and high-end boutiques. Bill Reichert is a venture capitalist. Reichert:       Within five blocks of here, there are probably between 30 and 40 venture capital firms. And there are probably also about 30 or 40 start-up companies that have b...
Read more