Technology: The Future of Agriculture

                       A technological revolution in farming led by advances in robotics and sensing technologies looks set to disrupt modern practice.

Subject terms:

• Agriculture

Over the centuries, as farmers have adopted more technology in their pursuit of greater yields, the belief that 'bigger is better' has come to dominate farming, rendering small-scale operations impractical. But advances in robotics and sensing technologies are threatening to disrupt today's agribusiness model. “There is the potential for intelligent robots to change the economic model of farming so that it becomes feasible to be a small producer again,” says robotics engineer George Kantor at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.

Part of Nature Outlook: Food security

Twenty-first century robotics and sensing technologies have the potential to solve problems as old as farming itself. “I believe, by moving to a robotic agricultural system, we can make crop production significantly more efficient and more sustainable,” says Simon Blackmore, an engineer at Harper Adams University in Newport, UK. In greenhouses devoted to fruit and vegetable production, engineers are exploring automation as a way to reduce costs and boost quality (see ‘Ripe for the picking’). Devices to monitor vegetable growth, as well as robotic pickers, are currently being tested. For livestock farmers, sensing technologies can help to manage the health and welfare of their animals (‘Animal trackers’). And work is underway to improve monitoring and maintenance of soil quality (‘Silicon soil saviours’), and to eliminate pests and disease without resorting to indiscriminate use of agrichemicals (‘Eliminating enemies’).

Although some of these technologies are already available, most are at the research stage in labs and spin-off companies. “Big-machinery manufacturers are not putting their money into manufacturing agricultural robots because it goes against their current business models,” says Blackmore. Researchers such as Blackmore and Kantor are part of a growing body of scientists with plans to revolutionize agricultural practice. If they succeed, they'll change how we produce food forever. “We can use technology to double food production,” says Richard Green, agricultural engineer at Harper Adams.

Ripe for the picking

• Ripe for the picking• 
• Eliminating enemies• 
• Animal trackers• 
• Silicon soil saviours• 
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Jan Windszus

The Netherlands is famed for the efficiency of its fruit- and vegetable-growing greenhouses, but these operations rely on people to pick the produce. “Humans are still better than robots, but there is a lot of effort going into automatic harvesting,” says Eldert van Henten, an agricultural engineer at Wageningen University in the Netherlands, who is working on a sweet-pepper harvester. The challenge is to quickly and precisely identify the pepper and avoid cutting the main stem of the plant. The key lies in fast, precise software. “We are performing deep learning with the machine so it can interpret all the data from a colour camera fast,” says van Henten. “We even feed data from regular street scenes into the neural network to better train it.”

In the United Kingdom, Green has developed a strawberry harvester that he says can pick the fruit faster than humans. It relies on stereoscopic vision with RGB cameras to capture depth, but it is its powerful algorithms that allow it to pick a strawberry every two seconds. People can pick 15 to 20 a minute, Green estimates. “Our partners at the National Physical Laboratory worked on the problem for two years, but had a brainstorm one day and finally cracked it,” says Green, adding that the solution is too commercially sensitive to share. He thinks that supervised groups of robots can step into the shoes of strawberry pickers in around five years. Harper Adams University is considering setting up a spin-off company to commercialize the technology. The big hurdle to commercialization, however, is that food producers demand robots that can pick all kinds of vegetables, says van Henten. The variety of shapes, sizes and colours of tomatoes, for instance, makes picking them a tough challenge, although there is already a robot available to remove unwanted leaves from the plants.

Another key place to look for efficiencies is timing. Picking too early is wasteful because you miss out on growth, but picking too late slashes weeks off the storage time. Precision-farming engineer Manuela Zude-Sasse at the Leibniz Institute for Agricultural Engineering and Bioeconomy in Potsdam, Germany, is attaching sensors to apples to detect their size, and levels of the pigments chlorophyll and anthocyanin. The data are fed into an algorithm to calculate developmental stage, and, when the time is ripe for picking, growers are alerted by smartphone.

So far, Zude-Sasse has put sensors on pears, citrus fruits, peaches, bananas and apples (pictured). She is set to start field trials later this year in a commercial tomato greenhouse and an apple orchard. She is also developing a smartphone app for cherry growers. The app will use photographs of cherries taken by growers to calculate growth rate and a quality score.

Growing fresh fruit and vegetables is all about keeping the quality high while minimizing costs. “If you can schedule harvest to optimum fruit development, then you can reap an economic benefit and a quality one,” says Zude-Sasse.