Technology
From finding new places to farm in vertical and underground farming in our cities to data, drones and tiny robots in the fields, technology has an important role to play in speeding up the transition to sustainable farming. There is a plethora of technologies in development that get a lot of attention; here, we have chosen to foreground those which enable farmers to transition towards an agroecological future.
Vertical farming
Dr. Rob Hancock, James Hutton Institute
The Advanced Plant Growth Centre (APGC) at the James Hutton Institute is a new £27M project, funded through the Tay Cities Deal, that aims to exploit advances in controlled growing environments, environmental and plant monitoring technologies to bring about a step change in the way our research supports agriculture.
Following a detailed design and planning phase the APGC build is anticipated to start in 2020. We will measure the impact of the project primarily through anticipated increases in interaction and co-funding of research with the agricultural industry and other academic partners, and the resultant economic value added to the associated supply and value chains.
The capacity to grow large numbers of plants in highly controlled environments provides us with previously unavailable opportunities to accelerate the breeding of climate resilient crops required for the future of agriculture. For example, by optimising the environment to promote plant growth and development, we are able to produce multiple generations each year. Combining this with high throughput imaging technologies that allow us to rapidly assess the performance of individual plants will provide us with opportunities to massively accelerate our breeding programmes, bringing the varieties that growers need to the market place much sooner. These same imaging technologies have enormous value in the field: not only to monitor crop performance at high spatial resolution providing vital information for precision agriculture, but also for early disease diagnosis allowing farmers and growers to deal with pathogens before they impact yield and quality.
Although still in the design phase, a key element of the APGC has been extensive industry consultation right from conception, through to funding and now design. A big part of the successful bid was our capacity to demonstrate industry relevance. This was in no small part exemplified by the decision of Intelligent Growth Solutions Ltd. (IGS), a pioneering automated vertical farming company, to co-locate onto the Invergowrie campus of the Institute. The cross fertilisation of knowledge and ideas has challenged both organisations to think in the broadest possible terms about the application of their respective skills and knowledge to the broadest possible industrial base, including not only agriculture but also other applications in automation, big data, sensing and lighting technologies.
Although the project is still in its infancy, we’ve found the dialogue between industry and academia has been important to allow us to ensure the facility will meet the research challenges of the future.
Small robots
Callum Weir
Wimpole Estate, Cambridgeshire
Meet Tom, Dick and Harry — a trio of robots. Along with Wilma, the digital brains behind the robots, they could revolutionise the way we farm over the coming decades.
Resembling luridly painted miniature Mars exploration rovers, they are being developed by an agri-tech start up from Salisbury called the Small Robot Company to monitor crop health, seek out and destroy weeds, and plant seeds — and we’re testing them on our National Trust farm on the Wimpole Estate.
We have 370 hectares (914 acres) of arable land that we use for growing cereal crops. Our farm is one of 20 in the Small Robot Company’s Farming Advisory Group, but is the only organic farm, which makes it a challenging test site as we have more weeds — it gives the robot more to learn!
The robot being tested with us at Wimpole is called Tom, and it’s essentially a robotic agronomist. It sets an area to map and travels autonomously up and down the fields, taking photos of the crops and weeds in high resolution. The photos are then stitched together and an algorithm distinguishes what’s wheat and what’s weed, creating a digital map of all the weeds in the field.
The basic premise is that 95% of chemicals used in farming are unnecessary. Imagine that a robot could be sent out into a field to find where the weeds are, and come back with their precise coordinates. Instead of spraying the entire field with expensive herbicide, you only spray or mechanically remove individual weed plants. The same principle applies to the precision application of fertiliser, whereby fertiliser bills could be reduced, as well as the risk of leaching.
The robotic revolution could bring particular benefits to small farms. Instead of investing hundreds of thousands of pounds in an 8-tonne tractor, farmers would only have to pay out a fraction of that for Tom, Dick and Harry. Tractors compact the soil, and unnecessary cultivation damages soil structure and contributes to soil erosion, so soil health would benefit too.
Other, more radical, possibilities also exist. In the future robots might able to plant different seeds in the same field, allowing strip farming on a much bigger scale. This could move away from pure monoculture — just one variety of crop in a field — which would have many benefits. Take peas and wheat for example — if you can grow both in one field, the peas fix nitrogen into the soil, which helps the wheat grow. The pea flowers attract bees, increasing biodiversity. With weather becoming more extreme and unpredictable, it’s harder to know what will grow well, so having more than one crop improves farm resilience.
Robotics also has the potential to reduce the reliance of farming on fossil fuels. They’re smaller than standard farm machinery, so the robots can be electrically powered, potentially charged by solar panels.
The technology is still in its early days — and it may be 10 or 15 years before this technology becomes mainstream — but trialling new technologies here at Wimpole is very fitting. The 3rd Earl of Hardwick created Wimpole Home Farm in 1794 as a demonstration farm, using the latest machinery to improve efficiencies and increase yields. Today, our goal is to improve biodiversity and soil health, but the spirit of innovation lives on. Watch this space.
