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The Farms of the Future Will Be Automated From Seed to Harvest
Singularity Hub ^ | October 30, 2017 | Peter Rejcek

Posted on 11/10/2017 10:30:33 AM PST by 2ndDivisionVet

Swarms of drones buzz overhead, while robotic vehicles crawl across the landscape. Orbiting satellites snap high-resolution images of the scene far below. Not one human being can be seen in the pre-dawn glow spreading across the land.

This isn’t some post-apocalyptic vision of the future à la The Terminator. This is a snapshot of the farm of the future. Every phase of the operation—from seed to harvest—may someday be automated, without the need to ever get one’s fingernails dirty.

In fact, it’s science fiction already being engineered into reality. Today, robots empowered with artificial intelligence can zap weeds with preternatural precision, while autonomous tractors move with tireless efficiency across the farmland. Satellites can assess crop health from outer space, providing gobs of data to help produce the sort of business intelligence once accessible only to Fortune 500 companies.

“Precision agriculture is on the brink of a new phase of development involving smart machines that can operate by themselves, which will allow production agriculture to become significantly more efficient. Precision agriculture is becoming robotic agriculture,” said professor Simon Blackmore last year during a conference in Asia on the latest developments in robotic agriculture. Blackmore is head of engineering at Harper Adams University and head of the National Centre for Precision Farming in the UK.

It’s Blackmore’s university that recently showcased what may someday be possible. The project, dubbed Hands Free Hectare and led by researchers from Harper Adams and private industry, farmed one hectare (about 2.5 acres) of spring barley without one person ever setting foot in the field.

The team re-purposed, re-wired and roboticized farm equipment ranging from a Japanese tractor to a 25-year-old combine. Drones served as scouts to survey the operation and collect samples to help the team monitor the progress of the barley. At the end of the season, the robo farmers harvested about 4.5 tons of barley at a price tag of £200,000.

(VIDEO-AT-LINK)

“This project aimed to prove that there’s no technological reason why a field can’t be farmed without humans working the land directly now, and we’ve done that,” said Martin Abell, mechatronics researcher for Precision Decisions, which partnered with Harper Adams, in a press release.

I, Robot Farmer

The Harper Adams experiment is the latest example of how machines are disrupting the agricultural industry. Around the same time that the Hands Free Hectare combine was harvesting barley, Deere & Company announced it would acquire a startup called Blue River Technology for a reported $305 million.

Blue River has developed a “see-and-spray” system that combines computer vision and artificial intelligence to discriminate between crops and weeds. It hits the former with fertilizer and blasts the latter with herbicides with such precision that it can eliminate 90 percent of the chemicals used in conventional agriculture.

It’s not just farmland that’s getting a helping hand from robots. A California company called Abundant Robotics, spun out of the nonprofit research institute SRI International, is developing robots capable of picking apples with vacuum-like arms that suck the fruit straight off the trees in the orchards.

“Traditional robots were designed to perform very specific tasks over and over again. But the robots that will be used in food and agricultural applications will have to be much more flexible than what we’ve seen in automotive manufacturing plants in order to deal with natural variation in food products or the outdoor environment,” Dan Harburg, an associate at venture capital firm Anterra Capital who previously worked at a Massachusetts-based startup making a robotic arm capable of grabbing fruit, told AgFunder News.

“This means ag-focused robotics startups have to design systems from the ground up, which can take time and money, and their robots have to be able to complete multiple tasks to avoid sitting on the shelf for a significant portion of the year,” he noted.

Eyes in the Sky

It will take more than an army of robotic tractors to grow a successful crop. The farm of the future will rely on drones, satellites, and other airborne instruments to provide data about their crops on the ground.

Companies like Descartes Labs, for instance, employ machine learning to analyze satellite imagery to forecast soy and corn yields. The Los Alamos, New Mexico startup collects five terabytes of data every day from multiple satellite constellations, including NASA and the European Space Agency. Combined with weather readings and other real-time inputs, Descartes Labs can predict cornfield yields with 99 percent accuracy. Its AI platform can even assess crop health from infrared readings.

The US agency DARPA recently granted Descartes Labs $1.5 million to monitor and analyze wheat yields in the Middle East and Africa. The idea is that accurate forecasts may help identify regions at risk of crop failure, which could lead to famine and political unrest. Another company called TellusLabs out of Somerville, Massachusetts also employs machine learning algorithms to predict corn and soy yields with similar accuracy from satellite imagery.

Farmers don’t have to reach orbit to get insights on their cropland. A startup in Oakland, Ceres Imaging, produces high-resolution imagery from multispectral cameras flown across fields aboard small planes. The snapshots capture the landscape at different wavelengths, identifying insights into problems like water stress, as well as providing estimates of chlorophyll and nitrogen levels. The geo-tagged images mean farmers can easily locate areas that need to be addressed.

Growing From the Inside

Even the best intelligence—whether from drones, satellites, or machine learning algorithms—will be challenged to predict the unpredictable issues posed by climate change. That’s one reason more and more companies are betting the farm on what’s called controlled environment agriculture. Today, that doesn’t just mean fancy greenhouses, but everything from warehouse-sized, automated vertical farms to grow rooms run by robots, located not in the emptiness of Kansas or Nebraska but smack dab in the middle of the main streets of America.

Proponents of these new concepts argue these high-tech indoor farms can produce much higher yields while drastically reducing water usage and synthetic inputs like fertilizer and herbicides.

Iron Ox, out of San Francisco, is developing one-acre urban greenhouses that will be operated by robots and reportedly capable of producing the equivalent of 30 acres of farmland. Powered by artificial intelligence, a team of three robots will run the entire operation of planting, nurturing, and harvesting the crops.

Vertical farming startup Plenty, also based in San Francisco, uses AI to automate its operations, and got a $200 million vote of confidence from the SoftBank Vision Fund earlier this year. The company claims its system uses only 1 percent of the water consumed in conventional agriculture while producing 350 times as much produce. Plenty is part of a new crop of urban-oriented farms, including Bowery Farming and AeroFarms.

“What I can envision is locating a larger scale indoor farm in the economically disadvantaged food desert, in order to stimulate a broader economic impact that could create jobs and generate income for that area,” said Dr. Gary Stutte, an expert in space agriculture and controlled environment agriculture, in an interview with AgFunder News. “The indoor agriculture model is adaptable to becoming an engine for economic growth and food security in both rural and urban food deserts.”

Still, the model is not without its own challenges and criticisms. Most of what these farms can produce falls into the “leafy greens” category and often comes with a premium price, which seems antithetical to the proposed mission of creating oases in the food deserts of cities. While water usage may be minimized, the electricity required to power the operation, especially the LEDs (which played a huge part in revolutionizing indoor agriculture), are not cheap.

Still, all of these advances, from robo farmers to automated greenhouses, may need to be part of a future where nearly 10 billion people will inhabit the planet by 2050. An oft-quoted statistic from the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations says the world must boost food production by 70 percent to meet the needs of the population. Technology may not save the world, but it will help feed it.


TOPICS: Agriculture; Business/Economy; Computers/Internet; Food
KEYWORDS: automation; drones; farming; robots

1 posted on 11/10/2017 10:30:33 AM PST by 2ndDivisionVet
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To: 2ndDivisionVet

I could use a roomba lawn weed sprayer....


2 posted on 11/10/2017 10:33:46 AM PST by Paladin2 (No spelchk nor wrong word auto substition on mobile dev. Please be intelligent and deal with it....)
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To: Paladin2

Farms from the future will not be needed. Food will be made by chemicals formed in 3-D Microwaves.


3 posted on 11/10/2017 10:37:44 AM PST by Forward the Light Brigade (Into the Jaws of H*ll Onward! Ride to the sound of the guns!)
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To: 2ndDivisionVet

“Swarms of drones buzz overhead, while robotic vehicles crawl across the landscape. Orbiting satellites snap high-resolution images of the scene far below. Not one human being can be seen in the pre-dawn glow spreading across the land.”

As if there aren’t huge numbers of people laboring away at creating/building/maintaining those robots, and supporting that high-tech infrastructure - in far better conditions than weather-exposed fields.


4 posted on 11/10/2017 10:44:50 AM PST by ctdonath2 (It's not "white privilege", it's "Puritan work ethic". Behavior begets consequences.)
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To: 2ndDivisionVet
What about this, lol?
5 posted on 11/10/2017 10:48:03 AM PST by OttawaFreeper ("If I had to go to war again, I'd bring lacrosse players" Conn Smythe)
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To: Forward the Light Brigade

Hamburgers will come from printers!


6 posted on 11/10/2017 10:48:07 AM PST by FreeperCell
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To: Forward the Light Brigade

I’ll also need a Mr. Fusion to power the microwave....


7 posted on 11/10/2017 10:53:34 AM PST by Paladin2 (No spelchk nor wrong word auto substition on mobile dev. Please be intelligent and deal with it....)
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To: 2ndDivisionVet

Will robots also go out to the mailbox to pick up the subsidy checks for not growing crops?


8 posted on 11/10/2017 10:59:40 AM PST by HP8753 (Live Free!!!! .............or don't.)
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To: 2ndDivisionVet

But, but...how’s John McCain and Jeb Bush going to justify the illegals invasion?


9 posted on 11/10/2017 11:07:32 AM PST by Paulie (America without Christ is like a Chemistry book without the periodic table.)
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To: 2ndDivisionVet

From seed to pot, automatically.
Geez, haven’t we heard *enough* stories about Harvey Weinstein?


10 posted on 11/10/2017 11:16:02 AM PST by grey_whiskers (The opinions are silly those of the author and are subject to change without notice.)
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To: 2ndDivisionVet

It isn’t like there’s a shortage of grains now. The issue isn’t increasing yields, it’s a matter of increasing profitability.

It doesn’t change anything if instead of 100 bushels an acre at $6 a bushel you produce 200 bushels at $3 per, even if the per-unit cost of production also drops in half.


11 posted on 11/10/2017 11:40:43 AM PST by IronJack
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To: 2ndDivisionVet

So . . . all that ee-lec-tron-ich-all stuff will be needin’ lots a’ fixin’.

All it’s showing is new systems. That’s all.
Will be implemented steps at a time.
Will require lots of set up, testing, tear it out, start again, sell it, start over etc.
Will require lots of folks to fix stuff when it breaks.
Tornadoes will rip it all apart.
Floods will wash it away.
Fires will burn it up.
Gub-Mints will regulate it and tax it.
Troglodytes will curse it.
ALGOR-ians will worship it.

Most will just keep moving on with necessary progress and improvement.
Babies will be made.
‘Shine will be drank.
Cows will poop.

G-d is happiest when His children are at play.

The End.


12 posted on 11/10/2017 11:49:11 AM PST by Macoozie (Handcuffs and Orange Jumpsuits)
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To: 2ndDivisionVet

‘Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?’ ;)


13 posted on 11/10/2017 12:03:38 PM PST by Diana in Wisconsin (I don't have 'Hobbies.' I'm developing a robust Post-Apocalyptic skill set!)
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To: 2ndDivisionVet

That way we all can live in projects like Obama wanted.


14 posted on 11/10/2017 12:14:44 PM PST by hadaclueonce (This time I am Deplorable)
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To: Paulie

Now we learn the truth.

Robots - willing to do the jobs Americans won’t do.


15 posted on 11/10/2017 12:36:31 PM PST by Eddie01
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To: ctdonath2
#4: "in far better conditions than weather-exposed fields"

Well, after a few months working in a corporate "cube" you'll wish you were one of the robots back in the weather-exposed fields.
 

16 posted on 11/10/2017 12:46:51 PM PST by Governor Dinwiddie (Why do the heathen rage, and the people imagine a vain thing?)
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To: Governor Dinwiddie

I’ve spent 25 years in corporate cubes.
Don’t think I’d trade it for 8-16 hour days in the sun & rain. Would much rather design robots to.

(I’d be happy to work my own farm, insofar as independence appeals to me. Picking strawberries for min wage, not so much.)


17 posted on 11/10/2017 1:01:29 PM PST by ctdonath2 (It's not "white privilege", it's "Puritan work ethic". Behavior begets consequences.)
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To: 2ndDivisionVet

Question to anyone...

Is it theoretically possible to grow a food product - a cashew nut, a carrot, whatever - from plant stem cells, and completely eliminate the tree or the plant?


18 posted on 11/10/2017 2:11:07 PM PST by zeestephen
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To: zeestephen

They’re working on that with meat.


19 posted on 11/10/2017 5:56:26 PM PST by 2ndDivisionVet (You cannot invade the mainland US. There'd be a rifle behind every blade of grass.)
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To: 2ndDivisionVet

My son in law is R&D with John Deere and his family has a huge grain and hog operation. Their tech is cutting edge. Most row equipment is computer and GPS controlled with a secondary tracking system several hundred feet up on their grain elevator. I rode along with him during some planting and he could bring up soil moisture, herbicide and insecticide application, planting density, and more on a screen with resolution less than a square foot and superimpose if he liked. One he’ll of an audio system in his also!


20 posted on 09/01/2019 8:38:34 AM PDT by CrazyIvan (The Democrat party. A collaboration of Cloward-Piven and Dunning-Kruger.)
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