<<I work for a high-tech electronics firm that is looking for ideas for
new products for agriculture. We make sensors, actuators and "smarts"
that could be attached to or embedded within farming & processing equipment.
What electronic devices do YOU THINK would make a contribution toward
sustainable agriculture?
Allow yourself to imagine things that are not quite possible today...
For example, a weeding device that would merely look at a weed and remove
it mechanically (rather than chemically).
Give your imagination free range over
quality monitors,
production equipment,
harvesting equipment,
preserving equipment,
transportation stuff,
efficiency enhancers,
any other categories.
Reply privately, or on the mail group here so we might stimulate each other.
Don't filter your ideas too heavily... let us techno nerds decide how
ambitious we can afford to be.
sj
===================================================================
Dr. J. S. Judd
Siemens Corporate Research, telephone: (609) 734-6573
755 College Rd, East fax: (609) 734-6565
Princeton, NJ USA 08540 email: judd@scr.siemens.com>>
In a message dated 11/21/96 10:52:06 PM, you wrote:
<<I work for a high-tech electronics firm that is looking for ideas for
new products for agriculture. We make sensors, actuators and "smarts"
that could be attached to or embedded within farming & processing equipment.
What electronic devices do YOU THINK would make a contribution toward
sustainable agriculture?
Allow yourself to imagine things that are not quite possible today...
For example, a weeding device that would merely look at a weed and remove
it mechanically (rather than chemically).
Give your imagination free range over
quality monitors,
production equipment,
harvesting equipment,
preserving equipment,
transportation stuff,
efficiency enhancers,
any other categories.
Reply privately, or on the mail group here so we might stimulate each other.
Don't filter your ideas too heavily... let us techno nerds decide how
ambitious we can afford to be.
sj
===================================================================
Dr. J. S. Judd
Siemens Corporate Research, telephone: (609) 734-6573
755 College Rd, East fax: (609) 734-6565
Princeton, NJ USA 08540 email: judd@scr.siemens.com>>
Well, when I taught permaculture at a prison some years ago, my students
worked for some months--a few of them quite brilliant guys--to come up with a
chicken coop that closes itself at night with no external wiring. The trick
is to let the chickens out in a forage yard during the day, but to secure a
door at night so that predators can't get in. That would permit the person
responsible to catch dinner and a movie in midsummer, when darkness comes
late, without worrying about the hens. Otherwise, they'll go in and later
nocturnal predators will follow.
We figured that some sort of light detection device, maybe with fresnel
collection to make it more sensitive, would work but we never fleshed it out.
Certainly it will be easy to adjust to the correct light level with fresnels
or neutral density filters if the basic device can be invented. It needs to
be cheap or made from scrounged components and absolutely fail safe. One
failure in 100 is too much as the chickens will be just as dead as if the
device failed every night.
Just now, thinking about this, I've thought of a solution we never
considered, a waterclock. A balast that will shut the coop can be triggered
transferring water from one container to another. After a specific interval,
the weight of the water (or the buoyancy of the emptied container) will shut
the coop hatch. The problem with this approach is that it needs to be
started at a specific number of hours before dusk. The time of day when it
needs to be started will vary daily and the liklihood that this will coincide
with other plans is slim. The problem with photodetectors is that they could
close the coop prematurely on cloudy days, stranding chickens outside where
they would be doomed. Anything connected to the grid is subject to random
failure and such an arrangement is most needed in remote sites where,
perhaps, the chicken tractor method of cultivating is being used our poultry
are being moved around in an integrated poultury/orchard management system.
Those readers not in North America need to know that we have a remarkably
intelligent predator called the racoon that can climb, swim, fight like a
tiger, open latches since it has fingers and the smarts, and which likes to
kill every chicken in sight just for the fun of it. They can work in teams,
function mostly at night, and require absolute and perpetual security on the
part of the poultry raiser. Racoons have been known to kill dogs many times
their size and pet racoons (not a recommended association) have driven away
human intruders. We also have the usual dogs, cats, weasels, lynxes, hawks,
owls, coyotes, foxes, sometimes bigger predators (wolves, cougers, bears) but
altogether they are not 1 percent the amount of trouble in raising poultry as
racoons. Skunks also follow racoons around and fill in when the racoons take
the night off. Usually, they just steal eggs, but they learn to kill poultry
from watching racoons. (No animal interferes with a skunk.) The situation
is worse with waterfowl than with chickens because racoons like them even
better. It is hard enough to design a night shelter that a racoon can't
break into and just pointless to have chickens, ducks, and/or geese if one
does not secure them faithfully EVERY night. See, another reason to be glad
you aren't here.
For Mother Earth, Dan Hemenway, Yankee Permaculture Publications (since
1982), Elfin Permaculture workshops, lectures, Permaculture Design Courses,
consulting and permaculture designs (since 1981), and now permaculture
correspondence training with an email classroom. Copyright, 1996, Dan &
Cynthia Hemenway, P.O. Box 2052, Ocala FL 34478 2052. YankeePerm@aol.com
If its not in our food chain, we're not thinking.