Awesome Farming

We’ve all seen those robotic vacuum cleaners. The Grain Weevil is like that, only it’s designed to safely spread out and level loose grain in silos. This hard-working little ‘bot roams around silos, zig-zagging through the grain and pushing it around with its screw drive treads and shovel. Multiple robots can also work together to maintain larger silos.

Rice is one of those ubiquitous things that we just take for granted. But in this video from professional forager Samual Thayer’s Well Fed Wild, we get a look at the traditional process of harvesting and preparing wild rice for consumption. The whole rice-dancing part is what really surprised us.

We’re not sure if we should be amazed by or terrified by Advanced.Farm’s wheeled robot that autonomously harvests apple crops. Its six mechanical arms are fitted with custom-built stereoscopic cameras to identify ready-to-pick apples, then pluck them off with their grippers. The machine can pick roughly 30 apples per minute.

We don’t know much about farming watermelons, but apparently, part of the operation includes keeping them cooled off as they go from harvest to shipment. This clever farmer takes advantage of the melons’ buoyancy not only to transport their melons but to keep them from baking in the hot sun.

Farming is a tricky business. When growing a crop like rice, it’s not easy to access the plants to apply nutrients or pesticides. This clever farmer uses a set of large balloons to suspend spray pipes over the plants, minimizing damage and keeping vehicles from getting stuck in the marsh.

When it comes to tomatoes, you generally don’t want to mix the unripe green ones with the ripe red ones. In this episode of The Henry Ford’s Innovation Nation, they visited Weco to see a machine that uses light, optics, and computers to figure out which tomatoes are which color and kicks the green ones out.

In 2014, farmer Matt Radach captured time-lapse footage of a pumpkin growing from “seed to scale.” But this is no ordinary squash. This monster was birthed from a seed from a world-record-holding giant pumpkin, and by the time it was done, it weighed in at 1223 pounds. Keep your eyes peeled for a Transformers cameo.

We always assumed that the way they got seeds out of pumpkins was to scoop out the meat for things like canned pumpkin, then separate out the seeds. But from the looks of this video, pumpkins are smashed by machine right out of the patch, simply to extract the seeds. The process seems wasteful, but it’s still interesting to watch.

Getting rid of weeds is a pain. Pluck them, and they come back. Kill them with chemicals, and the ground is poisoned for other plants. These organic corn farmers demonstrate a much more reliable, chemical-free, and downright spectacular method to clear the ground – FIRE!

After building a LEGO Technic machine that could bale hay back in 2017, The Brick Wall decided it was time to build a version that could create squared-off bales. The new machine offers impressive engineering, and is accompanied by a wagon for stacking and transporting bales.

While the traditional method of harvesting olives uses rakes to knock them off trees, we prefer this method from Afron Machinery, which involves surrounding the tree with tarps, then shaking the hell out of its trunk to release the fruit onto a sorting machine.

ecoRobotix dramatically reduces the use of herbicides with this solar robot which can identify good plants vs. bad ones, then apply chemicals in tiny amounts only to the weeds, killing them with 95% effectiveness. It would be cool if it were strong enough to yank weeds.

From the makers of Punch Club comes another potentially addictive simulator. Graveyard Keeper is like Harvest Moon or Stardew Valley, except you also manage a graveyard alongside the farming, dungeon delving, and crafting. Drops 8/15/18.

Honda’s concept autonomous ATV is designed to work like a robotic pack mule, carrying loads to work sites, and also performing tasks like plowing snow, tilling soil, or harvesting crops with attachment modules. It’s rugged, has a 4-wheel drivetrain, and runs on electric power.

Gone are the days when farmers need workers to individually pluck vegetables from the earth, instead relying on marvels of engineering, like the Dewulf GKIIISE carrot harvester, a machine that can yank carrots from the ground, and remove their leafy green tops automatically.