Tag Archives: Agriculture

Vinduino Water-Smart Farming – Now with LoRa!

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Our five rounds of Hackaday Prize 2018 challenges have just wrapped up, and we’re looking forward to see where the chips fall in the final ranking. While we’re waiting for the winners to be announced at Hackaday Superconference, it’s fun to take a look back at one of our past winners. Watch [Reinier van der Lee] give the latest updates on his Vinduino project (video also embedded after the break) to a Hackaday Los Angeles meetup earlier this year.

Vinduino started with [Reinier]’s desire to better understand what happens to irrigation water under the surface, measuring soil moisture at different …read more

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Agro-Espionage: How China Tried to Steal U.S. Rice Research

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The case of two insiders with connections to China, accused agro-espionage, one within the USDA Dale Bumpers National Rice Research Center and the other within Ventria Bioscience, has closed its final chapter with the April sentencing of Wieqiang Zhan… Continue reading Agro-Espionage: How China Tried to Steal U.S. Rice Research→

MoAgriS: A Modular Agriculture System

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Hackaday.io user [Prof. Fartsparkle] aims to impress us again with MoAgriS, a stripped-down rig for bringing crops indoors and providing them with all they need.

This project is an evolution of their submission to last year’s Hackaday Prize, MoRaLiS — a modular lighting system on rails — integrating modules for light, water, airflow, fertilizer and their appropriate sensors. With an emphasis on low-cost, a trio of metal bars serve as the structure, power and data transmission medium with SAM D11 chips shepherding each plant.

Reinforced, angled PCBs extend rails horizontally allowing the modules to be mounted at separate heights. Light …read more

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A Proposed Database of Food Stamp Recipients Isn’t Only Cruel, It’s a Security Risk

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The House Agriculture Committee passed its version of the 2018 Farm Bill last month and it includes plans to build a massive database in order to catch food stamp participants who register in more than one state. Continue reading A Proposed Database of Food Stamp Recipients Isn’t Only Cruel, It’s a Security Risk→

Norman Borlaug Saves A Billion

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Everyone loves a hero. Save someone from a burning building, and you’ll get your fifteen minutes of fame. That’s why I’m always surprised that more people don’t know Norman Borlaug, who would have celebrated his 104th birthday on Sunday. He won the Nobel prize in 1970 and there’s good reason to think that his hacking efforts saved about a billion people from starving to death. A billion people. That’s not just a hero, that’s a superhero.

To understand why that claim is made, you have to go back to the 1970s. The population was growing and was approaching an unprecedented …read more

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