How Brexit is catapulting the biggest revolution in British farming
The industry stands on the verge of an exciting new era using technology and robots, say farming experts
ON AN overcast morning over Meon Springs, a 1,200-acre family farm nestled in the South Downs, 15 miles east of Winchester, a new agricultural revolution can be heard. It doesn’t thunder like a diesel tractor or bleat like a lamb. It bleeps like a gadget.
Will Butler, a 55-year-old, thirdgeneration farmer who is just getting used to such sounds on his land, jokes: “When my son is running the farm it will probably just be him and a couple of robots.”
Already, Meon Springs is increasingly deserted. In recent years, Mr Butler could spot as many as three dozen labourers scattered amid the lush landscape. Now those workers have been replaced by laptop-wielding technicians testing small, spidery, orange robots that crawl over his patch of picturesque countryside.
The machines, from a Portsmouthbased start-up called the Small Robot Company, take thousands of pictures of Mr Butler’s crops, which are then fired through an artificial intelligence algorithm. That informs him what is happening in every single centimetre of his fields. The analysis distinguishes between weeds and crops, and between healthy and diseased leaves, allowing Mr Butler to pinpoint fertiliser and pesticides rather than douse a whole acre with chemicals.
Known as Tom, Dick and Harry, the customisable robots weigh a quarter of a ton – rather than the 25 tons or more of a tractor – and are the front line of an “agritech” revolution that is sweeping the world.
From leaf-level sensors to Fitbit-style “wearables” for cows; from farm management software platforms to gene-editing and robots like Tom, Dick and Harry, new technologies are driving vastly improved precision and productivity in a sector that, estimates suggest, must feed a global population of more than nine billion by 2050.
Such inevitable growth has seen investors pouring billions into a hitherto traditional sector often seen as slow to adapt. But in Britain something particularly dramatic is happening.
Research for The Sunday Telegraph has found private funding in British agritech has almost quadrupled in the last 11 months compared to the whole of 2017 even as, globally, investment has flatlined.
At $30million (£23.6million) the total is dwarfed by megadeals worth hundreds of millions in North America. But it points to a new attitude towards UK agritech. Ben Scott-Robinson, co-founder of the Small Robot Company, counts off a handful of reasons driving the profound change. They include growth potential and the need to be more environmentally responsible. But at the top of the list is Brexit. As the Prime Minister continues to sell her deal to MPs, businesses and the public, one of the things she repeatedly touts is Britain’s exit from the EU’s Common Agricultural and Fisheries Policies. It is, Theresa May insists, a critical part of “taking back control”. There are two immediate consequences for British farms: cash and manpower.
“Eighty-five per cent of British farms are not viable without EU subsidies,” says Mr Scott-Robinson. Meanwhile, as Mr Butler is finding, the tap of cheap immigrant labour is being turned off. “I don’t know whether people are going to come over anymore to work here after Brexit,” he says.
The implications are clear: “British farmers urgently need to find new efficiencies,” says Mr Scott-Robinson.
The Government insists it wants to help. Michael Gove, the Environment Secretary, says subsidies will be replaced (over seven years, to 2028) with a model that rewards “public good”, such as environmental stewardship, rather than simple bulk production. Meanwhile, Greg Clark, the Business Secretary, has announced £90million for a Transforming Food Production Challenge to stimulate a sector it estimates contributes £14.3billion to the economy and employs 500,000 people.
“Most farmers are aware that we are on the brink of a very exciting technological revolution,” says Guy Smith, deputy president of the National Farmers’ Union. “But let’s be clear. This tech is not cheap.” He says there is a role for government in providing, say, soft loans, grants or tax breaks, to invest in new equipment. But the agritech appetite is there.
“We’ve always loved our new toys – and these are new toys.” He describes standing on the sorting line of a cherry farm in Herefordshire, which only a couple of years ago was manned by significant numbers of workers from Eastern Europe. Now, he says, each individual cherry is scanned and graded by size automatically. “It’s so exciting, to think every single cherry is scanned. Brexit really is providing new opportunities to think differently.” Just how differently is a key point. “We could become a cutting edge, international agtech hub, if we make the most of the opportunities,” says Mr Smith. “But on regulations, say, if we simply cut and paste the common rule
‘The rationale is that if we have a labour shortage after Brexit, the robots can pick up the slack’
book, that will stop us. If we’re overcautious we will lose the opportunity.”
The risk is clear. The biggest agritech deal of 2018 in Britain saw $10million invested in Tropic Biosciences, based in Norwich, which develops highperforming tropical crops using “cutting edge genetic editing technologies”.
“We are in the top few countries for agritech,” says David Rose, who researches the impact of technology on agriculture at nearby University of East Anglia. “You can’t say we’re not going to have a fourth agricultural revolution. The rationale is that if we have a labour shortage after Brexit, the robots can pick up the slack.”
And, he says, not just in fruit picking. “Drilling seeds, self-driving tractors, applying fertilisers, there are lots of things that can be done more efficiently with robots.”
“A farmer who has worked a farm for 50 years knows where crops grow best,” says Freddie Reed, projects and technical manager at Agri-Epi, one of four new research centres co-funded by government and industry.
“Data takes the experience of that farmer and puts it in a computer program so the next farmer can learn in one year, not 50.”
Ian Wheal, founder of a livestock app called Breedr, describes “a huge push towards data” in arable farming, and is trying to replicate that for cattle. “With better data you have better traceability, and you understand quality earlier on, which is crucial.”
It is a potentially revolutionary scheme that, he says, “is absolutely focused on the UK, because with Brexit there is a great opportunity for us to be more productive, while maintaining welfare and still be competitive on the global stage”.
With its impact on subsidies and labour, Brexit is catapulting British agriculture – willingly or not – headlong into a new era, says Helen Ferrier, the NFU’s regulatory affairs adviser. “Brexit is accelerating trends.”
“It’s exciting – as well as being a bit scary,” says Ms Ferrier. “But then the two often go together.”
Back at Meon Springs, Mr Butler, who has been working the same fields since he was 18, shows more excitement than fear. “I am very optimistic about the future. Farming is the core of the British Isles, and the economy. As a country we care about our farming and our food – and that will never change.”