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Farming At Your Fingertips: How Technology is Modifying Agriculture Work

April 20, 2022 Audrey

About five yrs back, David Wallace expended the summer months on his family’s potato farm in the Skagit Valley place of Washington State. Wallace experienced grown up on the farm, but he remaining to go after chemistry, sooner or later doing the job as a facts scientist. But he often felt a pull back again to his roots.

During his pay a visit to, Wallace listened as his father complained about the farm’s irrigation techniques. They ended up prone to mistakes, losing enormous amounts of drinking water and time. Every single time there was an situation with the movement amount or the center line, the crew would have to generate around the subject to obtain the correct stage of difficulties and then determine out how to repair it. The most important issue, the elder Wallace explained to his son, was that there was no way to see what was going on with the irrigation system remotely. Following a swift research, Wallace identified that there was not a enough checking and manage program obtainable on the market. So, he designed a single. And just like that, FarmHQ was born.

The smaller unit attaches to a central level on the irrigation system and makes use of cloud-based software program to keep track of irrigation reels and pumps. Wallace spent months tinkering with his code before testing it out across his farm and with a several buddies. Rapidly, phrase distribute, and other farms desired in on the time-conserving product. Now, FarmHQ is in its 3rd calendar year of development and utilized on about 30 farms across the Pacific Northwest, with ideas to develop tenfold this 12 months. Wallace in no way returned to his previous knowledge scientist task.

Technological know-how this sort of as FarmHQ aims to enable farmers turn out to be a lot more economical, conserving time and funds. Wallace statements implementing his process can web up to a 1,500-percent return on financial investment about a time. “These devices pump wherever from 250 to 400 gallons of drinking water for each minute over a incredibly smaller location of land,” he claims. “We can work out specifically how much pumping time and how a lot h2o is saved as a end result of having our technique on board. We also know incredibly accurately how significantly driving time we’re conserving farmers, due to the fact we know the place of every 1 of their parts of machines, and we know wherever their home base is. So each and every time they open up up that app to check out on that piece of tools, we’ve basically saved them a vacation to the area.”

[RELATED: At This Farm, Data Is the Most Important Crop]

Some of the technology embraced by farmers has a bodily component, like FarmHQ. Other people are only software and apps that aid acquire the multitude of data that arrives from farming, and it makes the procedure more collaborative. One particular these types of merchandise is Agworld, basically a

Battlefield 2042 players are joining XP farming servers only to find out that they are the crops

November 18, 2021 Audrey

Update: DICE quickly disabled XP in customized Battlefield Portal servers before the weekend, so the XP farms have largely disappeared for now. (I did see 1 nevertheless going, even even though no one’s getting any XP from it.)

First tale: Battlefield Portal is a tool for generating, internet hosting, and getting tailor made recreation modes in Battlefield 2042. You can make silly stuff, like 1v64 or knives-only modes, or elaborate deathmatch variants, or basic Battlefield throwbacks—or you can do what anyone who’s at this time hogging all the Portal server capability is accomplishing and make XP farming modes.

It is aggravating to see a probably amazing custom made server instrument dominated by bot matches intended for grinding XP, but while investigating the situation, I learned that a stunning point is happening: Gamers are becoming a member of XP farming servers hoping to rack up attachment unlocks, but are alternatively exploring that they are the XP getting farmed.

I’ve viewed strings of players variety “/gun,” seemingly hoping that the command will give them a gun. It does not.

XP farming servers are normally set up with a smaller human workforce battling a large group of bots who are cursed to spawn with a sliver of overall health each individual. To give you a feeling of what that appears like, beneath is a gif of me spawn tenting bots at the stop of a PvE Rush match. It’s a unfortunate sight, but these AI dudes are at least armed. In most XP farming servers, the bot group isn’t really even allowed to have guns.

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Soon after that PvE massacre, I started becoming a member of servers explicitly labeled as ‘XP farming’ servers to consider to uncover out just how a great deal XP gamers are in fact finding from this. DICE tweeted previously that it “deployed a alter to Battlefield Portal that impacts the performance of XP Farming Servers,” so presumably it can be not a great deal. I’m not confident nonetheless, however, for the reason that I’m often the 1 being farmed.

Most of these farming servers are set up so that players can retain signing up for even immediately after the modest staff meant for individuals is total. That places most players on the massive bot workforce: weaponless fodder for the XP farmers, who I’m guaranteed are delighted to have human targets be part of the AI horde.

What is actually really humorous is that not everybody leaves immediately after identifying that only a handful of players in the server are XP farming and they are not a person of them. I have stuck all-around and watched players desperately operate at their tormentors with knives more than and in excess of. Somewhere together the line, a rumor must’ve began that typing “/change” or “/swapteam” into chat places you on the other staff, simply because there is a large amount of that. It does not perform. I have also observed strings of players style “/gun,” apparently hoping that the command will

From the field to the sky; Purdue University uses drone technology for farming

October 29, 2021 Audrey

FARMLAND, Ind. — Harvest time is here but the work doesn’t stop for farmers when the crops leave the field, in some ways it begins anew.

Hoosier farmers are busy this week dodging raindrops while planting cover crops like radishes, wheat and oats. This lineup of winter produce helps keep the soil, and the nutrients within, in place until next year.

Purdue University is using drones to do what tractors cannot, as they say the future of agriculture may be above the ground.

“I think this drone is absolutely amazing,” Purdue Extension Precision AG Educator Mark Carter said. “We use it for spreading seeds. Use it for spraying pesticides, herbicides. We can do it in a very precise manner. It’s very controlled.”

Remote controlled, Purdue University employs nearly 25 drones throughout Indiana at various AG Centers. Each drone can carry roughly 25 pounds of seed or liquid which is then programmed and spread throughout any given field.

“You think about the first tractor that pulled something without horses… that was technology,” Carter said. “This is just the next step. We have digital agriculture where we’re mapping everything, we’re tracking every acre and immediately we started seeing some different results.”

With the help of their eight-propellered implements, farmers can plot their fields, plant more precisely and get a real time view of what’s typically reserved for birds.

“Real time information can let you know if you have any issues emerging… whether it’s disease or insects, weeds or water issues,” Carter said. “You can see it from up high. and you don’t need a bunch of fancy software, you just fly up and take a look and see what’s there.”

While most newer tractors are equipped with satellite technology which allows them to be precise to the nearest inch, these often, self driving tractors, still come up short when the weather’s wet.

“The fields are so muddy that if we put a tractor in there right now it’s gonna sink. It’s gonna rut up the field. It’s gonna make a big mess,” Carter said. “The beautiful thing about this technology with the drones is I’m spreading cover crops today where as we couldn’t get the tractor and the drill in to plant the cover crop even if we waited a few days… and the weather today is favorable for planting – why waste time?”

If time is money then Carter says farmers should be all ears.

“Every dollar counts, our seasons aren’t always the longest and the weather is always a variable so every minute counts,” Carter said. “Our margins are thin that’s why it all really matters.”

At Purdue University’s Davis Purdue AG Center along County Road 900 West in Farmland, a few miles northeast of Muncie; educators like Carter and AG-Center Superintendent Jeff Boyer take the time to test new technology so hardworking producers don’t have to.