The rise of the robot farmers
In the future, robots could take care of every stage of arable farming, from mapping the land and planting crops to weeding and harvesting. John Harris reports
In a quiet corner of rural Hampshire, a robot called Rachel is pootling around an overgrown field. With bright orange casing and a smartphone clipped to her back end, she looks like a cross between an expensive toy and the kind of rover used on space missions. Up close, she has four USB ports and a disc-like GPS receiver. A system called Lidar enables her to orient herself using laser beams. She cost about £2,000 to make. Every three seconds, Rachel takes a close-up photograph of the plants and soil around her, which will build into a forensic map of the field and the wider farm beyond. After 20 minutes or so of this, she is momentarily disturbed by two of the farm’s dogs, unsure what to make of her.
Watching her progress from a corner of the field are three people from the Small Robot Company, and the farmer who co-owns the land. Jamie Butler grows wheat – an uncertain business that can easily tip into the red. The weather is a constant source of anxiety; a hot summer like this year’s is exactly the kind of unforeseen event that can disrupt even the most careful forecasts. What does he make of Rachel? “This is the revolution,” he says. And he could well be right: if the robot working in this field is the shape of farming to come, it could have dramatic implications for our food security and the natural world.
In future, Rachel’s creators explain, robots could take care of every stage of the growing process: mapping the land, planting seeds, caring for the crop, forensically weeding, then harvesting. She may currently do only the first job, but prototypes for the other tasks will arrive over the next couple of years. Ben Scott-robinson, co-founder of the Small Robot Company, is a genial 44-year-old who talks about what he does with a Tiggerish enthusiasm. He is new to the world of agriculture and still surprised at what he has found. “I expected farmers to be quite Luddite about the adoption of new technology,” he says, as he packs Rachel away. “Some are, but there are a load of them who understand that new things need to happen.”
If food growers embrace this new way of farming, it will end their dependence on a ploughing process that reduces the fertility of the land, and huge tractors that not only compact the soil but restrict growing seasons to times of the year when machines won’t get bogged down in mud. By tending crops at the level of the individual plant, robot farming will also lead to a big drop in pesticide spend. The developers claim they can increase arable farming revenues by up to 40% and reduce production costs by as much as 60%. The agility of robots means small farms with compact
fields won’t be at a disadvantage; independent shops and restaurants will be able to grow their produce on smallholdings efficiently tended by machines.
There could be equally big environmental gains. Mega-scaled agriculture often leads to the ripping out of hedgerows, to pesticides contaminating rivers and streams, and soil erosion that can exacerbate flooding. The alarming decline in the number of bees in Europe, the US and beyond is linked to the use of insecticides; as is the equally sobering fall in bird populations. According to its prime movers, robot farming offers alternatives to all these things, and hope of an eventual ecological renaissance. Scott-robinson offers not only a cure for these problems, but a new world of profitability. So what are the downsides? He cracks an awkward smile. “Erm… well, at the moment, we can’t see any.”
Robots that milk cows are already a reality. So are digitised systems for feeding chickens. Robots that automatically move henhouses have been used in trials to keep birds well exercised. In the US, automated harvesting of lettuces and strawberries is starting to become commercially viable. In France, robots prune grapevines, and are used for weeding and cultivation. What sets some of the British pioneers of robot farming apart is their ambition to mesh together the entirety of the growing cycle. This is why big financial players are starting to put money into inventions that, only four or five years ago, might have seemed laughably far-fetched.
The Small Robot Company is based in a tiny office in the bowels of Portsmouth’s Guildhall. Two long desks are strewn with wires, circuit boards and components produced on 3D printers. Fixed to the walls are artists’ impressions of the models of robot conceived by the company’s founders for the three pre-harvest stages of wheat-growing: Tom, Dick and Harry. Tom does the same job as Rachel: he “lives on your farm and digitises your fields – he monitors them on a plant by plant basis, keeping track of the health and development of each plant”. Dick “micro-sprays each plant with fertilisers or chemicals as required to help it thrive”. Harry “places individual seeds in the ground and accurately records where he has placed them”. These three will be overseen by Wilma, the software system that “extracts the information from our crop data model and, in combination with our AI software, helps you make decisions”.
Scott-robinson, who used to work for Ordnance Survey and founded his robotic farming start-up in 2016, decided to
“Using robots, small farms with compact fields would no longer be at a disadvantage; smallholdings could be tended by machine”
concentrate on wheat. “Wheat is the largest crop in the world,” he says. “There are three-quarters of a billion hectares of it. It’s one of the biggest damagers of the environment, and one of the biggest areas we could improve to increase food production. And wheat makes it easy for us to go to barley, maize and corn, which are very similar in terms of the way they grow.” He says the firm’s innovations will soon be rolled out commercially: “Within the next three years, you are going to be able to drive around and see these machines in the fields.”
At the moment, the company is a tiny operation, employing only eight people. Because its innovations uncouple food growing from big machinery and huge fields, they should – in theory – allow small- and medium-sized farms to prosper, and strip vast agribusinesses of their competitive advantage. But what happens if Scott-robinson eventually sells out to some multinational conglomerate? “That’s not what we’re here for,” he says. “My interest is not in starting a business to make shitloads of money and retire in five years’ time.” But that’s what most start-ups say. And most of them eventually sell out. “That’s true, yes. But if we were taken over by someone else, the outcome could be radically different, in terms of its effect on the world.” This is the one note of darkness that enters an otherwise optimistic conversation. “This technology could be used in a completely different way,” he says. “You could have entire states in America with no people in them. The potential for what we’re doing to be used in the wrong way is there.” What can he do about that? “Well, we have a very, very strong ethos within the business about what we’re trying to do. We’re here to feed the world.”
In Britain, a lot of the ideas behind robotic farming have emerged from Harper Adams University, a big education and research campus on the edge of Newport, in Shropshire. I drive there on a baking-hot Wednesday to meet Professor Simon Blackmore, the 64-year-old pioneer of “precision farming”. The Small Robot Company is based on his work, and he is hailed by Scott-robinson and his colleagues as a visionary. He came up with the comprehensive seed-to-harvest concept the Small Robot Company is trying to put into practice, and started making the case for a radical transformation in the way we grow food.
One belief runs through everything he says: that farming is still stuck in the 20th century mindset that size matters. Crops are fertilised and sprayed with pesticides en masse; harvesting takes place on an industrialised basis, leaving no space for judging, plant by plant, a crop’s needs or readiness for harvesting. It’s hugely wasteful. Other industries, such as car manufacturing, have gone through revolutions that have introduced new levels of sophistication and flexibility; as Blackmore sees it, it is high time farming did the same.
He takes me on a tour of the university’s robotics lab. He ruefully shows me a self-driving lawnmower named Tommy he says would be ideal for golf clubs, but has yet to find a commercial backer. There’s also a precision crop-spraying device called Norman (it seems no farming robot is complete without a whimsical first name). He also explains Hands Free Hectare, a project in its second year that has successfully grown barley with no direct human involvement – using robot scouts that monitor the crop and soil, and self-driving combine harvesters – and has moved on to wheat. The big tractor manufacturers, he says, have so far been barely interested in his work. “They’re into selling big bits of metal,” he says. “They’re not interested in something that’s going to disrupt them.”
Blackmore talks about robot farming as a liberating technology. But what happens if it gets into the hands of agribusiness? What about that nightmare future of huge spaces devoid of human beings? “Most people think this is going to be expensive, is going to do everyone out of a job and is going to be good for the big farms, not the small farms,” he says. “It’s actually the exact opposite. The big farms are all about economies of scale: big fields, big tractors. We are developing small machines. I believe the extra production we need to feed the planet is going to come from small farms that can’t use those economies of scale.” In Asia the average size of a farm is about one acre. “I do a lot of work in China,” he says. “The whole southern part has many of those small farms. And they now have a big opportunity to use robots.”
The most spectacular innovation Blackmore has worked on is laser weeding. The idea is simple, but mind-boggling. A farming robot, he says, can be equipped with software that can recognise up to 800 kinds of weed, destroying them with precision targeting. At a stroke, chemical weedkillers would be yesterday’s news. “Everybody’s interested in it – but we’ve got the lead on it,” he says. “We can send a laser weeding robot out into the field, and you don’t need anything else to be there: it can work on a commercial farm today.” He says it will be introduced to British farms next spring.
“Space robots running around the fields with lasers, killing plants,” says Paul Harter, chief technology officer of a start-up called Earth Rover, based in Somerset House in London, nudging the Thames. “It’s an amazing story.” It is also on the verge of becoming a reality. Earth Rover is another company that owes its existence to Blackmore’s work. As the name suggests, its prototype robot takes some of its ideas from the British team that worked on the Exomars rover, an automated device that will be sent to Mars in 2020. Their aim is to use such cosmic technology in the growing of organic broccoli – with lettuce, carrots and onions to follow.
Earth Rover’s laser weeding machine will start to appear on farms next year, with the automated harvesting of broccoli following sometime around 2021. Since the EU referendum, British food growers have already experienced labour shortages, because the people who once would have come to the UK to work in the fields have stayed at home. This may have big repercussions for broccoli, which Earth Rover claims it will soon be able to solve.
“Weeding and harvesting are the two main labour costs with broccoli,” Harter says. “If a field’s got badly infested with weeds, they put 30 or 40 people in and they literally lie down on beds being pulled slowly by a tractor, and weed for eight hours, by hand. Harvesting isn’t as arduous, but it’s still a manual process.” He pauses. “Farmers are losing whole fields of crops because of labour shortages. People are saying, ‘We need another way to do these jobs, because we’re losing the labour force.’” So if robot farming does strip some of the human element from farming, there may be an upside. If there is a way to combine Brexit with a thriving food-growing industry, it might centre on small, intelligent machines zooming around the fields day and night, tending our food, quietly zapping whatever gets in the way.
A longer version of this article first appeared in The Guardian. © Guardian News & Media Limited 2018
“A farming robot can be equipped with software to recognise up to 800 different kinds of weed and to destroy them with precision targeting”