Catch the latest ways makers are impacting business and technology this week. Our coverage includes hardware startups, new products, incubators, and innovators, along with technology and market trends.
The Rural Advancement Foundation International (RAFI) and Farm Hack aim to promote farmers as innovators and makers through a new project called Growing Innovation. The two organizations have launched a collaborative Kickstarter campaign to fund the creation of an open source online library of agricultural innovations and a new book documenting sustainable models developed by farmers.
We all know what drones can do in the hands of the military and law enforcement. For recreational use, they’re fun to fly around with a GoPro strapped to its belly. The commercial use of drones is in its infancy. Congress passed a law last year requiring the FAA to open the skies to wider drone flights by 2015. Once the happens, the FAA estimates that within five years there will be about 7,500 civilian drones in use. According DIY Drones’ Chris Anderson, one of the areas we’re likely see more drones is a place that doesn’t come to mind when we think about aerial robots: farms.
The 58 year-old public school teacher has a dozen chickens and ten beehives that belong to a neighborhood “honey co-op.” He has about an acre of fruit trees and veggies growing on ten vacant lots behind his house. The day I came by, his working 1960 Ford tractor was parked a few paces away from a huge pungent patch of basil. Weertz’s sister was about to go pick peaches. The slim urban farmer walked over to his tractor and looked at a gauge that reported more than 2,000 hours of use since Weertz bought it 20 years ago.
The next Make: television video highlights an InvenTeam from the Garfield-Palouse High School in Palouse, Washington. They found a need to adapt large-scale agriculture equipment for different ability levels. With the help of some skilled engineering mentors and a lot of hard work on their part, they created a simple, effective, and useful invention call […]
MIT’s CSAIL (Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Lab) is using iRobot Create systems to experiment with robotic vegetable gardeners who can tend plants teleoperatively and can deliver just the right amount of what a plant needs based on sensors attached to the plant. When the fruit is ripe, the robots can even harvest it. [Is […]
Time has a cool slideshow and interesting article about vertical farming. See the article for a focus on the now, like this experiment in El Paso: And more futurism in the slideshow. My favorite: Even if they’re not always the most efficient, you’ve gotta love those Savonius turbines on top… Please share in the comments […]
