Pieter's background is in algorithms and cryptography, he's not a networking engineer. The other people you mentioned are solid but their involvement in development is fairly peripheral, with only a handful of commits between them combined.
It doesn't take anything away from my argument that bitcoin's netcode is archaic and remains a major hurdle to scaling, and there is way too much political cruft to move things along.
>It doesn't take anything away from my argument that bitcoin's netcode is archaic and remains a major hurdle to scaling, and there is way too much political cruft to move things along.
1. The Bitcoin-devs rewrote the netcode quiet recently moving from a polling model to an event driven model.
2. Look at all the changes in net_processing [0].
3. There has been a long term project to refactor and improve the netcode which has been ongoing for several years and has made massive changes to the netcode. How do I know? Over the last two years I have had to rewrite pull requests several times because the netcode has been rapidly changing.
There are sensors designed for broadacre cropping that will pick weeds out of crop.[0]
As well as sensors that will pickup weeds from dirt.[1]
This would be in the middle of those two problems. There isn't a dense crop to pick the weeds out of, but it's probably slightly too dense to just pick them up from the dirt.
Precision agriculture is all about controlling variability. When you have a small plot of all the same soil, under the same weather conditions, your really not going to have much, if any variability, and probably won't actually need any precision agriculture. As opposed to a 400ha paddock where you can have 3 different soil types and different weather at either end of the field.
As for this technology being used on a larger scale, I'd be really interested to see the cost for a similar setup over a few thousand hectares, and what sort of efficiencies might be gained compared to our current system. However I'm not convinced it'll replace our machinery any time soon.
The other interesting use for this would be, if it gained a large enough user base, the sharing of different planting setups and rotations for nutrient replacement. i.e planting crop x and y in rotation, or interrow with crops a and b.
> i.e planting crop x and y in rotation, or interrow with crops a and b.
I think this will be the real win of this technology eventually. Most if not all first world farmers understand that over the lifetime of their farm doing proper crop rotation increases yields but there is still a very reasonable instinctual reluctance to give up the short term profit of a high yield crop in order to plant a rotation crop of less profitable plants to keep the soil up correctly. Evening out that profit per field would probably be a great boon to operations that are too small to rotate entire fields.
It would also probably be an excellent way to get non farmers involved in the food production chain, especially in semi-rural areas. I grew up just in front of a community pasture which served as a grazing ground for three or four different farmer's herds and a couple of people who kept a couple of milk cows for local cheese making and stuff like that. Extending that concept to plants would be great, a giant community garden where people could plant crops that they are interested in and receive the yields at the end of the growing period. Larger farming outfits could plant around the regular people and ultimately keep costs down because of subsidy. Round out five or six gardens with some cash crops like wheat, soy or corn while locals use some of the field to grow their own grocery vegetables.
> Extending that concept to plants would be great, a giant community garden where people could plant crops that they are interested in and receive the yields at the end of the growing period.
> Round out five or six gardens with some cash crops like wheat, soy or corn while locals use some of the field to grow their own grocery vegetables.
Sort of except instead of one person being responsible for each of their plots all of the plots are tended by a small number of farmers with electronic assistance.
Local farmer groups are already a thing, where farmers get together to share research, look at properties with trials running on them etc. [1]
The question your have to answer before trying to sell any of this "info", is who, other than the farmers themselves is going to find it valuable enough to buy?
What I think is going to be most interesting is companies/banks/insurances agencies being able to gleam information without going through the farmers at all. Not by subverting them and going to the machinery manufacturers, which is already happening, but just by using other sources of information, such as satellite imagery.
It's already possible to predict yield potential through biomass/NDVI monitoring via satellite, and given that imagery from a source such as LandSat is freely available, or something like Planet isn't that expensive once your a bank/insurance agency I'm certain they must already be using.
Once you can predict yields reliably via satellite, you can start to predict supply for certain types of grain in different regions, or to a lesser extent, countries as a whole. This data is useful to investment banks and insurers, as well as organisations such as CBH[1], that handle the entirety of Western Australia's grain export. They currently determine potential yield by sending out a grower survey, and asking the farmers to predict yields themselves.
I think the idea of anyone "stealing" our data is overrated. The data from our farm[2] is specific to our farm, and as long as where not farming in such a way that is detrimental to our partners (such as banks/suppliers), such that we were trying to lie about yield potential, or resource usage, I'm not sure what value could be stolen by anyone with our info. In fact we openly share all the trial work we do, so that everyone in the community can learn and benefit.
Could you expand a bit more on what you'd like to see in a whole-systems redesign? I'm currently trying to work out what is going to be the next "evolution" in our farms operation (~10000acres in Western Australia).
In regards to your 4th point, our cropping systems in Australia are a bit different to the states. We already grow crops in a rotation, Wheat, Lupins (Nitrogen fixing) and Canola. Depending on where your farming your might also be growing cover/summer crops.
Great to see some folks from WA on here. I know that a university consortium (possibly spearheaded by CSIRO) advertised recently for a new precision ag initiative there. I know one person who applied, who, if he is awarded the project, will undoubtedly implement some interesting projects in your region.
For a whole-systems re-design, I think that beyond just tailoring genetics, nutrition, and herbicides to site-specific conditions, we need to be thinking about all of the interspecific interactions, spatial designs, and other natural processes that we can be harnessing. For example, we're currently constrained to operate farm machinery in a grid, or perhaps on contours. One way to improve that would be to start adding complexity to the grid. On a simple level, you could have one row of grains and one row of pulses as a means of breaking up pest migration. Slightly more complex would be to use intercropping or to perhaps co-locate crops that provide pollination services, moisture storage, or other benefits to each other. More complex would be to start using trap crops more frequently or taking advantage of natural seed predators with interspersed natural vegetation. Even more would be to incorporate trees (agroforestry) not only on the edges of the field but also within the field. Finally, once machinery is sufficiently sophisticated and the logistical hurdles are surmounted, you could break away from the grid pattern and start experimenting with other configurations such as concencentric circles or other shapes - the possibilities are endless.
We do grow crops in rotation in the states, although more in some locations than in others (about 15% of farmers where I'm from in Montana use pulses rotated with grains). Cover crops are a great option, though of course in dryland semi-arid regions early termination to prevent moisture losses is always an issue.
Can you link to any of the work you've done, or any articles that explore similar ideas? I'm interested in reading more.
We've been using variable rate to tailor nutrient applications for a few years now[0], and have started contracting with a WeedIt to do spot spraying(major reduction in chemical application).
We've definitely discussed "reforming" some of our paddock structures to improve yield, or mitigate weed potential (sowing east-west vs north south). Although if you were going to commit to major production changes like that, you'd probably want to bundle them together. Changing sowing direction would mean restarting CTF, so you'd be best of doing another operation such as deep ripping at the same time.
We've experimented with wetting agents, as we have quite bad non-wetting soil, and the results have been quite good. It's amazing to watch the before and after[1]
Do you think we're going to need a shift in machinery before we can break out of conventional cropping patterns/methods? I'm still somewhat skeptical that a swarm farm type setup would work in our broad-acre situation, but I think a downsizing of machinery (1 * 60m bar -> 3 * 20m bar), could work if they also move to fully autonomous & electric drive. Although, automation for field operations is still quite "simple" compared to the logistics of managing seed/fert refils.
If you haven't already, you may wish to review Joel Salatin's work - he's based in the US, does a combination of broadacre and intensive farming, and has written many books. Some could be described as popular, rather than text, book style - I'm sorry I can't provide specific examples that may be appropriate, as I've only read a couple of his books and seen some interviews. He gained a fair bit of fame from featuring in Michael Pollan's 'The Omnivore's Dilemma' a few years back.
Do you use / have you used a Yeomans' plough, and/or investigated keyline? These are well suited to broadacre remediation and improvement (compared to, say, the details around inner zone planning of permaculture). I've seen evidence of these techniques around the Hunter, near Yeomans' original property, and the methods tend to be highly regarded.
I actually work as an engineer/designer for a small business based in Queensland who build ploughs, including non-inversion deep rippers (somewhat in competition with Yeoman). We have in the last ~8 months sold a heap of rippers into WA in partnership with a local manufacturer, targeting clay pan breakup, pH remediation, etc. with a lot of success. It's interesting the way deep tillage and other mechanical soil management ideas are experiencing something of a renaissance out west at the moment.
In Australia, there's a far greater yield benefit to be gained from farmers buying a deep-ripper/mulboard plough(break the hard pan and allow root growth), switching to CTF(prevent a hard pan from happening again), switch to a no/minimum till system, spreading lime(correct soil pH) and maybe spreading clay (mitigate soil erosion).
All of these practises are also "low-tech". You'd want to use VR maps to spread your lime[0], and possibly clay (although it's fair easier to pick out soil erosion by eye as opposed to varying pH), so it's probably not needed.
Once you've sorted out the fundamentals, then it makes sense to start more precision ag. There's no point trying to grow a 5t crop when your roots can't even get down to the soil moisture.
I work for a company where we sell lots of Ag monitoring stuff. We are based in NZ, but sell into Australia and are now also moving into the Central Valley. Many get a lot of benefit from managing their water.
"..have to borrow before every planting"
This is not limited to just small farms. In Western Australia, farm debt has been growing 8% per annum since 2000. The average farm size here is ~3500ha (8650acres).
I'm curious if Australia is a special case because of the drought [1]. It began in earnest in 1995 and was named record setting by 2003 so I can imagine the farms had to do a lot more borrowing and refinancing at unfavorable terms in order to make it through more than a decade and a half of very low rainfall. According to [2] the Australian government provided $4.5 billion in exceptional circumstance assistance which included monetary payments and interest rate subsidies. Even with that assistance I would imagine that the drought hit Australian farmers really hard. I tried looking at the agriculture.gov.au site for import statistics but couldn't easily figure out if agricultural imports grew during that time period, and whether that hurt the domestic farms as well.
It'll be interesting to see if California farms' debt balloons like this too as they have to borrow more and more to pay for water rights and infrastructure like wells. California is basically the US's fertile crescent so maybe there will be a lot more subsidies and federal assistance just to maintain food security as a national strategic goal.
Refactoring of the core networking code has been ongoing for quite some time. See https://github.com/bitcoin/bitcoin/projects/4.
"Can you name anybody with a good background in networking? You can't point to a list of 100 odd names and assert that certain skills must be present"
sipa? He worked as an SRE at Google before starting work on bitcoin. [1]
rustyrussell? He has done extensive work on the linux kernels networking subsystems. [2]
cdecker? He did a phd at the Distributed Computing Group in Zurich which included work on scaling bitcoin. [3]
gwillen? Also a SRE at Google before bitcoin, and worked on Dapper[1].
[1] https://www.linkedin.com/in/pieterwuille
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rusty_Russell
[3] https://disco.ethz.ch/alumni/cdecker
[4] https://static.googleusercontent.com/media/research.google.c...