Has anyone seen or tried the Farm Bot?
https://farm.bot
It looks cool but a bit expensive. Also I don’t have land so it’s just a “dream”…
Not sure what the motivation behind such a machine is. I actually do have a large garden and what I personally enjoy most is the physical labor as a contrast to my work.
1 Like
This looks like a scaled up cheapt 3d printer and I am pretty sure it even runs 3d printer software. At least it uses really highend stepper drivers XD. Tehnology looks pretty plausible though maybe not quite as hands-off as it looks in the adds. And hell yeah it is open source so +10 for that.
Interresting concept but I honestly think agriculture does benefit from scale and home gardening is often done for reasons other than the product as @ElMago allready meantioned. If you want super fresh or local food you may be better off buying from the farmers market or directly from your neighbour depending on where you live.
Oh my god, who’s crazy enough to put 2,295.00 USD on a garden tool…
This removes all the benefits of home gardening:
- Cheap, not anymore
- Good for the environment, I strongly doubt it’s the case with all this crap on top of your garden and production probably in China…
- Some manual labour, not anymore…
This is just gardening for lazy, rich and dumb people…
2 Likes
Fixing ad cleaning it is also manual labour but yeah that thing will never pay for itself.
I would drop tha lazy and dumb but it is definitely a toy for rich pepole.
I won’t be so harsh. They also say that it pays for itself if you calculate the expenses on going to the market etc…
A bit of a stretch but it’s ok.
I’d say if for people with no time and no skills that tend to reason just with numbers.
I would buy it if it costed less and I had the space, but as you said. you lose all the advantages of doing the manual labor yourself, which is very relaxing
They forgot to compare manual gardening and FarmBot, it would not have been so great 
It seems, like you said, that they only try to appeal to people that want a garden but don’t want to do it 
I doubt this is even a massive help in real farming. All it seems to do is insert seeds into the ground and water it. But you still have to prepare the ground, remove weeds, remove insects, check if things are ready to harvest,… I guess you’d be better off with some automatic water sprinkler.
No, it makes a bit more than that. For example it has a weeder as well 
If this was used to grow weed It would probably pay for itself pretty quickly, as long as you avoid getting caught XD.
What is also overlooked is that thing will need maintainance put that is probably less and a different kind a labour than actual gardening.
The enviromental impact does not look that bad, pretty much all of the shelve parts and some custom injection moulded ABS (which could be made from recycled material). I’d say not much worse than a modern laptop.
If this wasn’t opensource I would have said that is some kickstarter cash grab but this being legit is actually pretty cool. I wonder if you could add an extruder and a hotend to it and make it a giant 3d printer XD.
I actually had this idea years ago, but as modular enclosed boxes (takes care of the weed, pest and scorching problem) which could be placed on a balcony or combined for larger-scale farming. The idea is obviously fresh vegetables at minimal cost and minimal carbon footprint for busy people who don’t have time for gardening. I think the Farmbot could work fine on a balcony because the weed and pest problem would be minimal. Otherwise not a huge plus over just DIYing it.
I think something like this is all ways going to get a bad review from a community of frugal, DIY-minded people. It’s certainly expensive, as others have said, but I presume that’s largely due to having poor economies of scale. It probably doesn’t do a much better job than a moderately knowledgeable human gardener. However, I think the idea and technology is neat — it’d be nice for the average person to grow things with minimal space and water and to be able to leave them unattended for some time. If it’s durable the economics might work out favorably, especially in a place where food is very expensive like Switzerland.
I can also see it being interesting to some kids, though the flip side of that is promoting the idea that absolutely everything in life needs computers and robotics and the internet.
The project has been around for quite a while and I’m reasonably sure all the software and hardware is designed for it (ie not repurposed from something else) and open sourced, which is pretty neat. Being able to replace and improve components would go a long way towards making the investment last.
If I had the space and money I’d probably buy one.
I can see how this would definitely make gardening easier, but it kind of misses the mark a little bit. Planting is something you do once, and watering is not very time consuming and can be automated with a cheap drip system and timer. The real benefit of this technology would be a weeding function and pest-detection and treatment, as those are the real time-consuming aspects of organic farming. This could be done via image recognition, for example, but obviously a lot of development needed. Personally though, I enjoy gardening to much to let a machine do it for me. But if this Farmbot got to where it was seriously labor-saving it could be a great asset to urban farming, rooftop farming, etc.
I missed the part about the weeding. If it handles weeding well then I could defnitely see how this could pay for itself and then some.
My other concerns would be build quality and the cost of repairs. I assume repairs would generally be replacements until their customer support network is established. In other countries theft would be a worry. In Switzerland vandalism is a concern. Not a worry if you have a private, enclosed garden.
This thing is made using of the shelve parts. Getting replacement parts and plans and stuff should be trivial.
Also you can probably 3d print replacements for a bunch of parts on the quick if nesecary, the files are all there.