Agri World 2016

Finding land, working a small plot or anything else countryside related
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Zasso Nouka
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Re: Agri World 2016

Post by Zasso Nouka »

I've noticed that each year a single subject seems to be in fashion and heavily dominates the show. One year nearly every stand seemed to be advocating putting solar panels over your hatake, the next year factory farming was all over the show and this year it seems to be drones.

Having said that it's interesting to see how drones have come along in the past couple of years and I'm sure they are going to get better but for small farmers I think we need good generalist robots with hands. Right now drones seem to be aimed mostly at spraying pesticides and that really isn't a job that takes up a lot of my time.

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Re: Agri World 2016

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For broad acre cropping drones make sense, there was a really cool one there designed to spread pellets and the integration systems and recording systems were also really cool but yea small scale i cant see the need. There were a few small robots on display around the place but it seemed that mostly they were power units and not much more. Some of the picking and quality control systems looked really interesting though, yanmar had a very cool tomato quality test running.

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Re: Agri World 2016

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In previous years we had a group of helicopters come around to spray the rice fields in the early summer, they would tour around the area spending a day in each town before moving onto the next. They would start really early in the morning and you'd hear them flying back and forth returning to load up on my spray and fuel.

This year they were totally replaced by drones and it seemed like a much more efficient operation. The drones fly much lower as they fly under the height of overhead power and phone cables so it looks like there's a lot less spray going everywhere but the rice. Each drone is supported by a couple of kei trucks with fuel and spray so no back and forth to base to refuel and resupply and it looked like the drones had a fair bit of autonomy so could do a lot of the work themselves.

Kind of feel sorry for the pilots loosing such a lucrative gig.

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Re: Agri World 2016

Post by Shizuman »

yea it sucks for the pilots but i gotta say the rice farmers need to catch a break, not much pay in that gig around here at least

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Re: Agri World 2016

Post by Zasso Nouka »

I have no idea if this is true or not but I suspect any savings might not be getting passed onto the farmers or they could even be getting charged more because this new technology does the job even better :lol:

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