ROBOT OF THE MONTH
We meet the company that is replacing farm tractors with a team of robots
A robot bringing you dinner on a plate is sadly some distance away, but Small Robots does have food in its sights – it’s just that this little fellow will be planting your food rather than delivering it. Find out how in this month’s Profile on p22.
Not many business ideas are born at quarter to six of a morning. Even fewer while listening to Farming
Today. With all due respect to Radio 4’s farming staple, it’s hardly TED Talks.
But it was while catching a snippet of a pre-dawn interview that a seed was sown in Ben Scott-Robinson’s mind. Why not replace the tractors that do so much damage to soil and crops with teams of robots?
Now a BT Tech4Good Award winner, Small Robots could be at the forefront of farming’s next technological revolution. And it’s all done by Tom, Dick and Harry…
Caught in the tractor beam
Ben Scott-Robinson was on the early-morning commute to his job as head of experience at Ordnance Survey when his lightbulb moment occurred. Farming Today was reporting from a conference, interviewing a professor “who started raving about how tractors were damaging farming, damaging the soil and causing huge amounts of pain to the industry, while not providing any benefits”.
At this point, most people would have flicked over to Radio 2, but Scott-Robinson couldn’t stop thinking about it. “I was really inspired by it. I remembered his name, got to work, and sent him an email. He got back to me. He had been working on this for 15 years in academia. He’s tried to take it out to different companies, like John Deere [the tractor manufacturer], and they basically said ‘not interested – we’re doing absolutely fine selling tractors’.”
However, the professor knew a man who’d just given up his job at consultancy firm Accenture to take on his father’s farm, who was willing to explore alternatives to smashing up the fields with huge tyres. His name was Sam Watson Jones and the pair became co-founders of Small Robots.
“We spent six months out on the road meeting farmers… doing lots of deep qualitative research and finding out what their pain points were,” Scott-Robinson explained. “We found out that farmers were much more innovative than I thought they were going to be and they’re much more used to taking on technologies. They also can see the problems in farming – they can see tractors are causing damage to the environment, damage to the soil.”
However, most farmers can’t afford to make huge capital investments in new technology that has no proven track record. So Scott-Robinson and Watson Jones began developing the concept of Farming as a Service (FaaS) – leasing robots to farmers to do the jobs that would otherwise require heavy machinery.
Tom, Dick and Harry
There are three robots that do the grunt work on the farms: Tom, Dick and Harry. Their job is to completely automate the process of growing wheat, although as always there’s a woman’s brains behind the brawn: Wilma.
Tom is a monitoring robot that lives on the farm. His job is to take normal photos, infrared photos and hyperspectral imagery that help the system monitor the health of the crops, how many weeds and pests are present, and the level of chemicals in the soil.
The information from Tom is processed and used to deploy Dick. He’s the maintenance bot. “If the crops need watering or fertilising, or if there’s an area that needs weeding, Dick comes out and uses lasers to kill the weeds,” said Scott-Robinson. He has a sci-fi method of dealing with pests, too, using a precisely targeted micro-spray to kill insects or fungi. It’s far more efficient and environmentally friendly than spraying fields with pesticides.
Harry is the guy who plants the crops in the first place. “If Tom comes back and says it’s time to plant the crops, then Harry goes out,” said Scott-Robinson. “Harry plants each plant individually. There’s no ploughing involved, there’s no disturbance of the soil, there’s no breakup of the soil biome, there’s no damage to the worms, he just plants the seeds in the ground and lets them grow.”
In charge of the boys is the aforementioned Wilma, an AI-based operating system that takes data from Tom, runs it through machine learning and a rules engine, and converts it into instructions for Dick and Harry. “It means we get a per-plant view of the crop,” said Scott-Robinson. “Instead of having one data point, which is the field, we suddenly have a data point which is a single plant. We can look after, care for, nurture that single plant individually.”
Feeling the benefit
A farm run with robots can’t fail to impress the inner geek of a PC Pro reader, but farmers will be more impressed with improved yield and reduced costs. Do the robots deliver?
“Ninety per cent of fuel used on a farm is in ploughing,” said Scott-Robinson. “When you take heavy tractors off the
fields, you don’t need to plough any more. You’re saving over 90% on the fuel and obviously it’s electrically powered, so there’s no carbon emissions directly. Tom, who uses the most electricity, is solarpowered so there’s no emissions at all around that.”
Then there are savings on pesticides and other chemicals. “Dick, with micro-spraying, uses about 5% of the chemicals used at the moment. And obviously because he’s using lasers rather than chemicals for weeding, there’s no chemicals at all used for that.”
Better still, none of the chemicals hit the ground. At present, farmers spray crop fields with fungicides, whether they need it or not, 95% of which will go straight into the soil. “The trouble with that is within the ground you have useful mycelia – fungi which help root growth and help with the soil biome. They’re all destroyed by fungicides as well.”
The yield of the crop is also much improved, claims Scott-Robinson. For one, the soil the crop is growing in hasn’t been compacted by tractors, so it has a better chance of healthy root growth. As each plant is planted individually, they can be optimally spaced and at precisely the right depth. Plus, each plant is carefully covered with soil, ensuring the “emergence rate” of the crop is much higher than it would be with conventional methods.
The robots can also use every last inch of a field. If you look at a tractor-planted field, you’ll notice big, muddy areas at either end of the field called headlands, where the heavy machinery is turned. The overall effect of all these measures is a 30-70% increase in yield. Those are the kind of figures that get farmers’ attention.
While the robots might be at the bleeding edge of farming technology, many farms are saddled with 20th-century connectivity, with barely a whisper of 4G signal and poor fixed-line speeds. How does this seemingly data-intensive system cope with limited connectivity?
“The reason Tom has a kennel he can go back to on the farm is partially so that he can charge his batteries, but partially so he can upload his data to a local AI that’s on a specially built chipset,” said Scott-Robinson. “The machinelearning processing is done within the kennel. Only the processed data needs to be sent out, which is a fraction of the gigabytes Tom collects. We’ve got around the fact that there are very poor connections on farms by not actually having any network requirements.”
It’s hardly surprising, then, that the Small Robots are in big demand. Scott-Robinson says he receives around ten to 15 queries from farmers each week, and they’ve got 20 prepaid customers ready to roll out the first-generation robots. And we’re not just talking about small holdings, either. Waitrose and the National Trust are among the list of customers preparing to roll out the technology.
Finding the capital for enough robots to service 20 customers is a challenge, but Scott-Robinson said the company was self-financed to start and has now attracted more than £1 million of non-equity funding. Innovate UK provided funding to develop Wilma; the company won a competition by the Institute of Engineering and Technology to help move its planting technology to proof of concept; and it’s also completed an Indiegogo crowdfunding campaign. “We’re now in the stage where we’re going for seed funding,” he said, referring to the type of capital rather than money for the crops themselves…
And what of the farmers, who are no longer required to spend their days sitting in tractors, bashing their way through the fields? What will they do with themselves while the robots care for the crops? Small Robots is supporting a project called Project Gingham where, rather than focusing on produce, farmers can work on products or brands. “Instead of producing wheat, they could start producing beer, or gin, or straws, or all kinds of things,” said Scott-Robinson. “Not only will they get greater value out of each hectare of land they’re farming, we’re also helping to diversify the rural community. Those kids who wouldn’t normally be interested in working on a farm… can get involved in marketing, websites, SEO… it’s a lot more appealing.”
Three robots do the grunt work on the farms, completely automating the process of growing wheat