a more sustainable and environmentally compatible way.”
New Technologies and Traditional Machinery
Farm of the Future
Professor Blackmore, why do we need robots in agriculture?
In the past and up to today, agriculture has been very energy intensive. On the other side, energy has been very cheap and we have used a lot of it to develop agriculture. But energy is going to become more expensive in the future. And the way we are getting pressures from the environment, from legislation and from society, we need to do everything we can to make food production processes as efficient as possible. So what we are seeing now is the advent of smarter machines that only use a minimum amount of energy, thus saving costs and allowing us to devote more efforts to aspects like food quality. We don’t need to have robotics in agriculture, but we do need to make agriculture more efficient. And one way of doing that is to have smarter machines. Machines that understand the variability we see in the field everyday and are able to adjust to get us the output we need.
What will happen to the agricultural workforce?
Mobile robots will replace the semi-skilled worker. But this is a very different situation from a totally autonomous farm, where no person ever sets foot. There is never going to be a totally automated farm. We will still need farmers, farm managers and agronomists. In short, we will still need people to make decisions. On the other hand, some agricultural tasks are better suited for machines. So we will require an increased quality of the workforce to deal with high-tech machines. This is one of the things happening in Japan at the moment. The government there is investing a lot of money in agricultural robotics to increase the workers’ skill level. This in turn increases the workers’ pay and the quality of life in rural areas.
What are the advantages of agricultural robots?
Aside from increased productivity and lower costs, robots will give us the opportunity to better understand crop growth and crop development than ever before. So far, these trials have been limited due to the cost of sampling. A robot on the other hand, can travel to hundreds of sampling sites each day and gather and store important data automatically: crop growth rates, nutrient status, the weather, the leaf area index. And if we get the chance to take these measurements on a daily basis, our understanding of crop development will move into a new phase.
When will we see robots in our fields?
Agricultural robots will happen – it’s inevitable. If the market wants them and the manufacturers are prepared to take this leap ahead, we will see agricultural robots running around in the fields very soon. If people do not invest in this technology, it will be many years away. I know of five autonomous tractors being developed in China at the moment. I don’t think there’s that many in the whole of Europe. If the Europeans want to retain their technological status and their manufacturing base in smart machines they have to move.
Precision is the key to efficient agriculture.