|
The world’s population is growing and with that growth we must produce more food. Due to the industrial and petrochemical revolutions, the agriculture industry has kept up in food production, but only by compromising the soil, the environment, our health, and the food production system itself. The increased production has largely come from incremental changes in technology and economies of scale, but that trend is reaching a plateau. Conventional agriculture methods are unsustainable and a paradigm shift is needed.
FarmBot is an opensource and scalable automated precision farming machine and software package designed from the ground up with today’s technologies. Similar to today’s 3D printers and CNC milling machines, FarmBot hardware employs linear guides in the X, Y, and Z directions that allow for tooling such as plows, seed injectors, watering nozzles, and sensors, to be precisely positioned and used on the plants and soil. The entire system is numerically controlled and thus fully automated from the sowing of seeds to harvest. The hardware is designed to be simple, scalable, and hackable. Using the opensource software package, the user can graphically design their farm to their desired specifications and upload numerical control code to the hardware.
|