Robots for TechTuesday! Bots in the farms is pretty interesting in itself coz, well, they’re robots. Apparently commercial farmers are enamored with robots because they help address the farmers’ perennial problem of labor costs and labor availability. But you have to wonder though the sense of this as world population continues to increase which means an increase also in human labor pool- do we really need robots to work the farms when there’s so much human labor available?

When it comes to farm robots, fruit gets all the attention. But it looks like trees and shrubs could win the prize for first significant agricultural market for small mobile robots.

Massachusetts startup Harvest Automation is beta testing a small mobile robot that it’s pitching to nurseries as the solution to their most pressing problem: a volatile labor market.

Continue reading the farmbots increasing presence in agriculture in Wired Mag…

1. Check/monitor the temperature of drying air, air static pressure at the plenum, and grain depth when operating the dryer.
2. When drying palay for seed purposes, the temperature should not exceed 43oC.  For commercial purposes (milled rice), a higher temperature of  up to 52oC can be used.

Continue reading the rest of the guidelines in using the Philrice dryer here

Farmers can soon cut on fuel expenses as the Philippine Rice Research Institute (PhilRice) tests the efficiency of its developed biofuel on machines.

The plan is an offshoot of a recent lecture by Dr. Rico O. Cruz, an expert on biofuel from Oregon, USA, who promoted Cruzesterification, a process of producing biodiesel from used vegetable oils. “Producing biodiesel using Cruzesterification makes the production of biodiesel as “easy as making coffee, in which the catalyst is the coffee, alcohol as the sugar and oil as the hot water. Blend the three ingredients and you a have a coffee or a biodiesel in minutes,” Cruz said.

continue reading “PhilRice machines to test biodiesel”over at PhilRice….

So you live in a fairly remote farming area where the good graces of the telco seldom if ever makes it presence known. What to do? well, TechTuesday says set up your own telco! MobileActive will show you how:

The Village Base Station is built around voice and low-bandwidth data transmissions. It is an economical solution for rural residents who are outside of typical network coverage or power access, or for people living in situations where network outages occur. In a white paper presenting the VBTS, Heimerl and co-author Eric Brewer describe the project as, “essentially an outdoor PC with a software-defined radio that implements a low-power low-capacity GSM base station. Long-distance WiFi provides ‘backhaul’ into the carrier.” Below are images of elements of the Village Base Station and screenshots from our ‘hackday’ in a large American city when we demo’ed VBTS with Heimerl. (Warning: If you try this at home, be aware of your local regulator’s potential licensing and other restrictions for setting up such network/connecting to it)

continue reading building your own GSM network….

Here’s another take on the fair trade issue which of late has been under criticism for its less than convincing performance in helping out poor farmers

Today, on World Fair Trade Day, we have something else to feel guilty about. That fair-trade cup of coffee we savour may not only fail to ease the lot of poor farmers, it may actually help to impoverish them, according to a study out recently from Germany’s University of Hohenheim.

The study, which followed hundreds of Nicaraguan coffee farmers over a decade, concluded that farmers producing for the fair-trade market “are more often found below the absolute poverty line than conventional producers.

“Over a period of 10 years, our analysis shows that organic and organic-fair trade farmers have become poorer relative to conventional producers.”

continue reading fixing the fair trade coffee here….

Say you have a thousand head pig farm going, and you’re alone to do all the work. How would you herd your pigs from one place to another? Enter canadian pig farmer Mary Haugh. She came up with “The Longarm”, “a roller that dispenses a swath of red cloth–a sort of farm version of the retractable lane guides that movie theaters or banks use to guide the pigs. Pretty nifty invention! It already won several Agri Awards in North America. Yup its FarmFriday!

visit their website to view the video and learn more about this farm invention…

Learn how to setup the Legowo System here….

Read the feature article in The Atlantic here…

Visit their website here….

“On Polyface, it’s the pigs that best embody Salatin’s ideas of creative disturbance, as well as his holistic, waste-not-want-not management approach. As Salatin sees it, pigs have a plough at the end of their noses and a sign on their foreheads that reads “will work for corn”

read the full howto on Building a Biogas Plant to Supply a Farm Household at the FFTC archive….

Contact Info:

Department of Agriculture and Forestry Extension,
Ministry of Agriculture and Rural Development, Vietnam
Fax: (84 4) 823 6403, 2002-07-01