December 17, 2014

By Shahnaz Mahmud

Last week, Global AgInvesting published an article on sensor technology detailing its significance in transforming the agriculture sector. This week, automation will be profiled as the second part of a series on agriculture technology.

Automation within the context of agriculture is mainly characterized by robotics. While it is not a new industry, now, robotics is perceived to be of much higher value in the agriculture sector. Why? Because of what it can accomplish large-scale at the plant level.

A Business Insider article, citing the MetaScan 3: Emerging Technologies report by Policy Horizons Canada, highlights automation as one of several agriculture technologies that will change the world.

Automation At Work

Several automation technologies are already available in the marketplace, with a few that will become sellable at scale between 2023 and 2026.

Within the last 10 years, farmers have begun testing technologies that assist their operations, such as pruning and harvesting. Agriculture robots, or “agbots” as they are often referred to as, can essentially remove the drudgery from manual, monotonous back-breaking work. Harvest Automation came to market early in 2013, entering into the commercial greenhouse and nursery space, and now works with 25 large farms across the US. Its robots are designed to efficiently move containers that house thousands of plants that are grown in containers. Agbots, according to Business Insider, will become financially viable in 2021.

The excitement around variable rate swath control, targeted to become financially viable in 2016, is that it may be the answer to saving on seed, minerals, fertilizer and herbicides by minimizing overlapping inputs. First, users would endeavor to learn the productivity of the different areas of their field and then pre-compute where the inputs would go. Tractors or agbots can apply inputs at variable rates in the field. The automation technology gets attached to hardware (like a tractor) to determine the correct amount of inputs. Premium Ag Solutions’ 20/20 Row Flow product is an example that currently exists in the marketplace.

Rapid iteration selective breeding came to fruition in 2014, eyeing financial viability in 2017. In this technology, algorithmic suggestions for the next generation of selective breeding are based on quantitative analysis.

Precision agriculture, also known as satellite farming and site specific crop management (SSCM), will become scientifically viable by 2019. It uses satellite imagery and advanced sensors that will give farmers insight into such areas as crop variability and geolocated weather data that will assist “automated decision-making”. Farmers should reap good returns through its use and be able to conserve resources. The US Department of Agriculture (USDA), the National Aeronautics and Space Agency (NASA) and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) are a few of the agencies contributing to the development of this technology.

Much discussion is on robotic farm swarms, which are agbots combined with microscopic sensors that would “monitor, predict, cultivate and extract crops”, that work completely autonomously. Some swarm technology already exists, such as David Dorhout’s “robo-farmer”, based on the swarming skills of insects, fish and birds. Dorhout is the founder of Dorhout R&D, whose first prototype was released in 2011 with seed-planting skills. Robotic farm swarms should become mainstream by 2026.

Automation has the potential to not only make farming more efficient, but to vastly improve it, saving on manpower. Take for instance robotics. John Kawola, CEO of Harvest Automation, says the applications and the technologies that can be commercially viable right now are “when the tasks that you are choosing are things that can be more easily automated and where you are developing a platform that can be economical and work with people”. Harvest Automation, which is completely venture capital-financed, chose the task of having its robots move containers efficiently, such as transporting them to the other end of a field. “When people say ‘I’d love to have a robot to pick strawberries in the field, that’s hard to do,” says Kawola. “If you are thinking in that context, like a robot rolling down the field and picking the red strawberries and leaving the green ones by themselves, that’s going to take awhile.” He adds that, like Harvest Automation, many of the companies developing technologies for agriculture think in the same vein: to focus on something a robot can do just as well (and arguably more economically) as a human being can do now. “You don’t want to discourage people from developing the robot that will pick the strawberry – I think that would be interesting, but, it might be awhile before it gets there,” he emphasizes.

The Road Ahead

Adoption is still a big challenge amongst the farming community, a product of it being new territory and costly. Kawola also notes that the agriculture space is such that variation, like the weather, does not lend itself well to automation. “Automation works much better and is more effective and more powerful when you have consistent big chunks of work to do,” he explains. “Even within our own market that we are selling into now, we can be a much better return to the owner if he were to say: okay, for the next two months, we are going to move these 500,000 plants. Then, everybody shows up [the field crew], with use of the robots and it takes a couple of weeks for them do it.” The reality is more akin to workers showing up and knowing what they are tasked with on a particular day, but tomorrow’s workload is still unclear. But, Kawola also says that when a new technology gets introduced and is widely accepted, if it’s powerful enough and offers enough benefit, the adoption rate can scale quickly because agriculture is a very “referenceable” market.

While money is being funneled into the overall agtech sector, Kawola notes that most of the uptick in the last 12 months is based around big data and less about hardware technology.

But, just what is that ‘uptick’? As reported by CNN Money, the agtech sector has had an average of 132 new startups launched between 2006 and 2012, with private sector investments surpassing $10 billion in 2010, from data it obtained by the Kauffman Foundation. So it seems, that the overall, the agriculture space will experience a truly transformative revolution. And automation is poised to play a big role in this revolution.