ON THE FARM WITH ADAM
THE FUTURE OF HARVESTING LIES WITH ROBOTS
Developments in robotic technology could change the harvest forever.
The season of harvest, when crops are golden in the fields, is the enchanting peak of the farming year. In a lovely and evocative poem, John Clare paints a vivid picture of the old and young working together to bring the harvest home: reapers leaving beds before dawn, gleaners toiling in open fields gathering the grain and young farmhands finding shade to rest from the midday sun.
It’s a vision that lingers in the national memory, but Clare penned his harvest poetry almost 200 years ago and the scene today would be barely recognisable to him.
Modern British farming is a hugely mechanised, high-tech, high stakes business. Our farming forebears harnessed heavy horses to bring in nature’s bounty; today we harness the full force of technology to do the same job. Soil-monitoring drones and self-steering tractors guided by GPS might shake people’s view of traditional farming but, frankly, they’ve been used for years.
FRUITS OF LABOUR
Britain is renowned for delicious soft fruit, with the most famous being our strawberries and raspberries. Wilkin & Sons at Tiptree in Essex grows about 25 different types of fruit for jam-making and the company pioneers techniques to increase its annual yield. It has extended the cropping season by growing strawberry plants in frames above the ground, housed inside huge polytunnels and fed just the right amount of water, gathered mostly from the roof. I’ve seen it myself and it’s very impressive.
Tiptree’s soft fruit is picked by workers in the time-honoured way, but hands-free harvesting is in development. In recent years, computer scientists in the fields of Lincolnshire have been trying to perfect the robotic technology needed to bring in the broccoli crop. Using the same camera technology as a games console, a prototype robotic harvester has undergone 3D ‘vision’ tests so it can monitor, manage and harvest winter vegetables. The long-term aim of this work, and other research at institutions all over the UK, is to market fully automatic harvesters that can be adapted for a variety of different crops.
ICEBERG ANDROID
Few people associate ‘harvest’ with iceberg lettuce, but in summer it’s one of the crops that is most in demand, with millions bought every week. Like all delicate crops, salad vegetables are difficult to pick and are most at risk of damage, which is why harvesting them has always relied on hours of back-breaking effort by seasonal workers.
But engineers at the University of Cambridge have been trialling a robotic lettuce picker. It uses artificial intelligence to mimic the human eye and identify lettuces that are the right size and condition for harvesting. Then a robotic arm gently clamps the veg while a sophisticated piston device with a sharp blade makes a high-force cut.
Humans can pick an average of one lettuce every seven seconds. While the robot was far slower in the early tests, the Cambridge team are confident they can create an automatic rig that will save field time.
The majority of these advances are more accurate ways of doing what farmers have done for centuries – gathering data to help decision-making. But it sure beats lifting a finger to the wind and praying for sunshine.