Swarms of rural robots – the way forward for British farming
An economic analysis based on the Hand Free Hectare experience provides the first concrete evidence that crop robots will help make UK farmers more competitive and improve environmental management.
This is the core message of a paper I will be presenting to the Agricultural Economics Society annual conference, which is from April 15 to17 in Warwick.
Robotics will radically change the economies of scale in arable farming.
Once human drivers are removed from farm equipment, the motivation for large farm machines almost disappears. Evidence shows that swarms of smaller farm machines can be cost-effective on modest size farms, even when fields are small and irregularly shaped.
The lead author of the AES paper is my colleague Professor James Lowenberg-DeBoer, with other co-authors Professor Richard Godwin and Kit Franklin (from the Hand Free Hectare project team), also from Harper Adams University.
Many robotics researchers and entrepreneurs have argued that robots would be both profitable and good for the environment, but this is the first whole farm economic analysis supporting that argument.
The research was based on experience with the Hand Free Hectare project at Harper Adams University in 2017 and 2018, which produced grain entirely with small scale farm equipment retrofitted for autonomous operation.
In 2017 the team achieved a world-first when they cultivated a crop of spring barley without stepping inside the hectare, on the Harper Adams University farm.
Success continued in year two, when winter wheat was grown and harvested and the team achieved unloading on the move for the first time with their adapted ISEKI tractor.
Swarm robotics will help small and medium sized British farms compete after Brexit.
For example, this analysis shows that with robotics, the cost of wheat production in the UK can be competitive with countries that now export wheat to Britain. With robotics, the economic forces driving hedge removal, cutting field trees and other changes to the British landscape will be mitigated.
Farming with drones will be explored further tomorrow (April 9) at the Drones for Farming Conference at Harper Adams University. Learn more at harper.ac.uk/dffc19t
* Professor Karl Behrendt is Elizabeth Creak Chair in Agri-Tech Economic Modelling at Harper Adams University.
