Agricultural Automation and Food Processing — Part 1 of 2
The advent of agriculture in ancient times may have been the fundamental enabler for all known civilizations to flourish. And ready access to food remains a cornerstone to society even today. We all need to eat, and there are more of us every day. Advances in farming technology have been enabling increased crop yields since time immemorial; and nowhere is this more visible than in the last hundred years with the widespread adoption and expansion of agricultural automation. Even before the emergence of COVID-19, the adoption of new farming techniques and the use of technology to automate the processes of growing, harvesting and transporting crops, has been critical to address an increasing shortage of farm labor and the need to increase food production. It is estimated that we will need to expand food production by an additional 70% from today’s output to feed the World’s population in 2050, according to the Food and Agricultural Organization of The United Nations. In a post-COVID world, there is an even more paramount need to leverage technology and science to ensure a robust food supply chain in which animal and plant produce reaches consumers reliably, sustainably and safely.
While the field of agricultural technology (Ag Tech) continues to expand to bring us more food at less cost, there are certain avenues of technological expansion that can be seen to improve not only the quantity of food produced, but perhaps more importantly the robustness of the supply. In the face of major labor disruptions such as we continue to see with COVID, we need to have systems of production in place that can operate with minimal human intervention.
A Forbes article on AgTech highlights a couple of the key areas of food production that I believe are fruitful ground for investing in supply chain reliability:
- Water Management: Systems designed to maximize plant yield through efficient watering
- Plant / Soil Analytics: Services to analyze soil quality and plant health
- Sensors: IoT devices to measure the health and growth of plants
- Advanced Machinery: Drones to monitor crops, and robots to pick them
- Grocery Supply Chain Management: Food quality / safety tracking
- Vertical farming: which uses LED lighting, advanced sensors, and automation to effectively stack farming plots on top of one another indoors.
- Cultured meats and plant-based proteins: Although these approaches are fairly labor intensive in the lab today, when they reach industrial scale they will need to leverage increasing automation to bring down costs.
History
Machine technologies are not the only way we have increased food production in the past, but machinery will always be a large part of the equation. Advances in hybrid-seed (seeds produced by cross-pollinating different strains of crops, like corn, to improve characteristics such as yield and disease resistance) led to a dramatic increase in corn grain yield starting in the 1930s. The US Department of Agriculture estimates that “we produce at least 20 percent more corn on 25 percent fewer acres than in 1930 when seed of hybrid corn became available in quantity to American farmers.” Primary source material from farmers who lived through this transition indicate a 3.75x increase in per acre yield of corn in the decades after hybrid seeds were introduced. The increased yield brought about by hybrid seed led to the proliferation of innovations like the gas powered tractor, needed to efficiently harvest the higher-yielding crops:
The impact that hybrid seed and new technology had on crop yield is apparent when looking at bushel per acre (bu/ac) yield of corn grain in the US:
This innovation was desperately needed at the time since:
- The Dust Bowl of the 1930s showed the negative impact on crop production of inefficient farming practices used to meet rising demand
- The resulting crop failures coincided with the Great Depression, which had left millions poor and starving; driving a need to produce more food at lower prices
There is a similar dynamic playing out now in which farmers are being negatively impacted by labor shortages, even while greater production is needed to address demand from population growth, and a financial crisis akin to the Great Depression is being driven by COVID-19 shutdowns. Now, like in the 1930s, it will take a combination of more efficient farming and advances in automation to address these challenges.
State-of-the-Field Today
Farmers are experiencing mass labor shortages that are impacting how and what they grow. A 2019 survey of 1,071 California farmers by the California Farm Bureau Federation in collaboration with the University of California-Davis showed that:
- 55% of farmers had labor shortages
- 37% of farmers said they had adjusted cultivation practices to ease labor shortages
- 31% said they are switching acreage to less labor-intensive crops
In many parts of the world there is heavy reliance on seasonal migrant workers for farm work, and a global pandemic in which people are not able to move freely makes this dynamic risky for farmers. In the US, 10% of farm workers are participants in the H-2A visa program (Bangkok Post). These workers have jobs lasting less than one year and are often housed by their employer and transported to job sites — this creates an additional burden for farmers because of the need to maintain social distancing at the job site, and in the housing and transport of workers. Reducing reliance on these workers through automation would be a panacea for farmers facing labor shortages, and could reduce the spread of disease to consumers and between workers.
Historically, the combination of automation and new farming techniques have increased crop production significantly. One example of this, grain yields has already been covered, and another prominent example, fruits and tomatoes, will be covered in more detail later. Increasing food production 70% by 2050, as the UN says we need to do to meet demand, is unlikely to happen without blending more automation into our farming techniques, and this presents an opportunity for investors and technology founders to help bring powerful new innovations into this continuously growing market.
In addition to making our food supply safer, automation would have the added benefit to the consumer of empowering farmers to grow/harvest what there is demand for, not what there is enough labor to grow/harvest. This is good for consumers and farmers because the crops that are actually in demand can be made available at a lower cost with increased safety.
The term “Smart Farming” encompasses technologies that increase farming efficiency and automate the production lifecycle for crops. The agricultural technologies that will become the bedrock of Smart Farming are:
- autonomous robots, which can be used to plant seedlings, harvest, sort, irrigate, and measure crops
- aerial drones, which can be used to seed, spray, and inspect crops
- sensors/IoT, which can be used to optimize the cultivation process and provide valuable data to inform the new fleet of robotic workers.
As part of the move towards smart farming, we can expect to see a wave of driverless tractors hitting the market. As autonomous driving technologies mature, tractors and agricultural equipment will likely be the first to convert over, given that they are operating in largely open, empty spaces.
Smart Farming also includes new farming techniques that can be more efficient and lend themselves better to automation, such as Indoor Farming. Indoor Farming uses enclosures like greenhouses, hoop houses and warehouses to protect crops from the uncontrolled environments we collectively refer to as the “outdoors”. The controlled environment can make automated harvesting vastly easier by increasing the predictability of crop readiness, and eliminating the need to work around the weather to complete a harvest. And because the enclosed environment naturally reduces the number of plant diseases that must be accounted for it is easier for growers to achieve organic standards by skipping the need for pesticides and herbicides. According to USDA data aggregated by The Greenhouse blog, there are 40,000 US farms growing traditional crops indoors, producing a market value of $14.8bn annually. However, the US only accounts for 0.2% of the global greenhouse vegetable market. Increasing its share of this market will allow the US to fully harness the power of automation technologies in crop cultivation.
An important subset of indoor farming is vertical farming. Plug and Play defines vertical farming as “the practice of growing produce stacked one above another in a closed and controlled environment.” Vertical farms often utilize hydroponics, in which plants are grown in a medium such as pebbles or gravel with water and mineral nutrient solutions; aeroponics, where no growing medium is used and plant roots are sprayed with water and nutrients; or aquaponics, where aquatic animals such as fish or shrimp are cultivated alongside the plant crop, forming an circular biological ecosystem. Vertical farms reduce the need for labor by using robots to seed, harvest, monitor, and handle logistics. Further, they can use up to 70% less water than traditional farms because evaporation and soil runoff are almost completely eliminated. Another important benefit is that these vertical farms are more space efficient — Iron Ox, a vertical farming startup, claims it grows 30 times more produce per acre than a regular farm (The Verge). However, vertical farming is still an evolving field and not all approaches are created equal. Iron Ox and the well known Plenty still rely on very labor-intensive processes to grow and package their produce. Our portfolio company Upward Farms has found ways to automate the majority of their process from end to end, from seeding the grow trays all the way to harvest and packaging, while simultaneously reducing 90% of all moving parts through their clever floating-raft conveyance system. Indoor Vertical Farming also provides the ability to locate the grow operations such as Edenworks closer to end customers. The indoor growing facility can be co-located near the distribution centers of major produce retailers, allowing them to provide fresh greens reliably year round, even in climates with harsh winters; thus requiring less importation and transportation infrastructure and resulting in fresher produce for the end consumer. In these ways automation can aid local sourcing efforts and agricultural sustainability initiatives to transform our food production practices for the better.
As a systems engineer, this is exactly the type of efficient, mutually-beneficial scenario that I was seeking to create in my hardware design work. And now my work in venture capital is providing a much broader perspective, enabling me to locate and share these breakthrough technologies that are working for the good of us all. In part 2 of this article I’ll discuss more ways that agricultural automation is working to make our food supply safer, smarter, and greener, through hybridized plants more suited to automation, data in the fields, and agricultural aviation.
Prime Movers Lab invests in breakthrough scientific startups founded by Prime Movers, the inventors who transform billions of lives. We invest in seed-stage companies reinventing energy, transportation, infrastructure, manufacturing, human augmentation and computing
Sign up here if you are not already subscribed to our blog.
