Hands Free Farm celebrates six years of success
IT HAS been six years since the team at the Hands Free research farm began their quest to prove that fully autonomous vehicles could be the future of farming.
The Hands Free Hectare was the first project of its kind in the world to try to grow, tend and harvest a crop without operators in the driving seats or agronomists on the ground. Since then, the researchers have not only met their objective, but successfully scaled it up, and begun demonstrating the specialist new career roles that will be required to build and operate commercially-sized Hands Free farms.
Reflecting on and celebrating that progress, researchers, sponsors and VIP guests recently gathered in the Agri EPI Midlands Innovation hub – and looked forward to the next steps in this ‘sector transforming’ journey.
The project has been run in partnership between Harper Adams and Precision Decisions, along with the UK division of Australian precision agriculture specialist, Farmscan AG.
Hands Free Farm principal investigator, Kit Franklin, told attendees that, despite the Hands Free Farm winning numerous awards and receiving significant media interest from across the globe, its true value had been in helping to drive forward commercial research, policy development and learning for Harper Adams students across a variety of courses.
He said: “Going forward, the project as is comes to an end in six weeks – but we have a unique opportunity to keep learning, and to learn more.
“When we look at the range of equipment we have here at the Hands Free Farm, we have some fairly unconventional equipment, but with this sort of equipment and this sort of land, it opens the farm – right here, right now – to starting an autonomous strip crop field here on the Harper Adams site.”