Tag Archives: Agriculture

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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The Weedinator Returns

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We are delighted to see The Weedinator as an entry for the 2018 Hackaday Prize! Innovations in agriculture are great opportunities to build something to improve our world. [TegwynTwmffat]’s Weedinator is an autonomous, electric platform aimed at small farms to take care of cultivating, tilling, and weeding seedbeds. The cost of this kind of labor can push smaller farms out of sustainability if it has to be done by people.

Greater efficiency in agriculture is traditionally all about multiplying the work a single person can do, and usually takes the form or bigger and heavier equipment that can do more …read more

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Hyperspectral Imaging – Seeing the Unseeable

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They say that a picture is with worth a thousand words. But what is an image exactly? One way ideal would be a perfect reflection of what we see. But our view of the natural world is constrained to a bandwidth of 400 to 700 nanometers within the electromagnetic spectrum, so our cameras produce images within this same bandwidth.

For example, if I take a picture of a yellow flower with my phone, the image will look just about how I saw with my own eyes. But what if we could see the flower from a different part of the …read more

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Hackaday Prize Entry: Crop Data For Improved Yields

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As the world’s population continues to increase, more food will be needed for all the extra mouths to feed. Unfortunately, there’s not a whole lot of untapped available farmland. To produce extra food, crop yields need to increase. [Vignesh Ravichandran] is tackling this with the Farmcorder – a device for detecting crop nutrition levels.

The device centers around using spectroscopy to measure the chlorophyll content of leaves. This information can then be used to make educated decisions on the fertilizer required to maximize plant yield. In the past, this has been achieved with expensive bespoke devices, or, at the other …read more

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Hackaday Prize Entry: Crop Data For Improved Yields

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As the world’s population continues to increase, more food will be needed for all the extra mouths to feed. Unfortunately, there’s not a whole lot of untapped available farmland. To produce extra food, crop yields need to increase. [Vignesh Ravichandran] is tackling this with the Farmcorder – a device for detecting crop nutrition levels.

The device centers around using spectroscopy to measure the chlorophyll content of leaves. This information can then be used to make educated decisions on the fertilizer required to maximize plant yield. In the past, this has been achieved with expensive bespoke devices, or, at the other …read more

Continue reading Hackaday Prize Entry: Crop Data For Improved Yields→

‘Snowpiercer’ Director’s New Movie ‘Okja’ Is an Anti-Corporate Mindfuck

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The new film from Bong Joon Ho is a critique of ethical capitalism wrapped in a heartwarming animal adventure story. But it’s not coming to theaters: it premieres on Netflix June 28. Continue reading ‘Snowpiercer’ Director’s New Movie ‘Okja’ Is an Anti-Corporate Mindfuck→