I’ve seen the future of farming and it’s robotic

A TRIP around the stalls and stands at the recent ploughing extravaganza left one in no doubt that the future will be robotic. From the invention of the hoe 11,000 years ago in the fertile plain between the rivers Tigris and Euphrates in southern Iraq, farming has been characterised by ever increasing mechanisation.

The most recent and revolutionary descendant of the hoe is the robot, a contraption that is leading industrial, technological, intellectual and social change and taking us to places we haven’t dared dream of. Hopefully, the robot will always be led by the human, but that is another story and not as far-fetched an eventuality as we once thought.

My awareness of the dawning age of the robot is heightened every day as my dependence on technological developments grows. For instance, we have two cars in this household, one with reversing sensors and one without. When parking, I depend on the sensors to tell me how I’m doing but when I have occasion to drive the car without the sensors, I can be a bit of a disaster.

The impact of the robot and technology on farming was brought home to me in a very interesting piece I read on Quartz ( qz.com), an international news website. The piece looked at the growth of mechanisation and the impact of robotics on agriculture.

The main impact is the decline in the global farming workforce, a decline that was already sharp and swift in recent decades. Some eye-watering statistics in this regard show that in 1950, a total of 35pc of the workforce in the developing world worked on farms, but by 2010 this was down to 4.4pc. In the underdeveloped world, this figure declined from 81pc in 1950 to 48pc in 2010.

In Ireland between 1930 and 1960, the whole farm labouring sector all but disappeared, primarily as a result of economic stagnation but spurred on in the ’60s and ’70s by increased mechanisation.

There has been much talk of late about the shortage of labour on farms and the cost of labour, particularly in the dairy sector. Some people have gone so far as to suggest that we should bring in cheap labour from other parts of the world. This is tantamount to proposing we create an underclass to serve our food industry until robotics are up to speed.

Indeed, countries that import labour from neighbouring jurisdictions for seasonal agricultural work are looking more and more to mechanisation to replace this. For instance, 15 to 20 tons of grapes can be picked in an hour by a mechanical harvester, a machine that replaces 30 workers. Similarly, a €1m lettuce harvester can pay for itself in one year.

Mechanisation impacts not just on machines but on crops and animals. Certain fruits and vegetables are being modified to suit harvesting equipment, while weed control and crop monitoring are increasingly done using drone technology.

The sector most impacted by developments in robotics is the dairy sector, where robots not only do the milking, they also monitor the health and well-being of individual cows.

We can expect robotics and technical advances in agriculture to speed up dramatically in the immediate future. According to the World Bank, by 2050 we will need to produce