Farm Tender

Ag Tech Sunday - Small Robot Company Our Vision For A Better Future For Farming

By Sam Watson Jones

Since January 2017, we have spent a lot of time talking to farmers, to people involved in farming and to people who are interested in how food is produced.

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Understandably, some people are sceptical about the scale of our vision and what we are trying to achieve. I thought it would be useful, therefore, to use the next few posts to recap what we are doing and why we have chosen to do it in this way...

But first ......

A recap on our vision for a better future for farming

What we are ultimately trying to achieve is a farming system in which you firstly understand your field at a digital level and secondly, take action in the field at a digital level. We call these two phases ‘Digital Data’ and ‘Digital Action’...

We call the farmers who are ready to embrace this future - Digital Farmers.
For our purposes, and for the purposes of broad acre arable farming, we define ‘Digital Data’ as having a per plant understanding of the crops growing in your field. In practical terms, this means understanding if an individual plant has a disease or nutrient issue, what that disease or nutrient issue is and how severe the problem is.

Also involved in Digital Data is a much more granular view of the soil in the field. We will gather and analyse data from every square metre of the field to begin with and ultimately, we will look to go even more granular than that.

We think that understanding the soil and the crop at this level of detail is vital. It is a significant step forward from where farming is today and without it in place there is little hope for farming to make the kind of changes it needs to if it is to feed a growing global population.

There are many tools available in agriculture which look as though they are providing a digital view of the field but to our mind, nothing that comes close to what I have described above. This, to us, is a truly digital view of our field. We are moving farming away from thinking about the field as the management unit (i.e. “this field has a septoria issue” or “this field needs more potassium”) and we are moving towards a world in which we see both the growing crop and the soil as a series of 1s and 0s.

This gets us on to ‘Digital Action’. In this new view of farming, the farmer knows exactly which plants need treating, with what and at what application rate. They treat the plants that need treating, applying chemicals or fertiliser at the location on the plant in which the science tells us there is the minimum possible chance of waste.

The Digital Farmer will not treat the parts of the field that do not need treating. This is the most obvious sentence in the world to write but it represents a seismic shift in farm management.

When this farmer is planting a crop, the machines they use will help them to decide what the optimum seed spacing and seed depth is for each square metre. We get away from treating the whole field at the same. Ultimately, the same will happen for harvesting too; each plant will be harvested when it is ready, not when the field as an average is ready.
Our basic thesis is that this view of a future for farming is dramatically better than the farming system we have today and that the technology exists to make it happen.

The logical next step is to ask; if the technology is available to operate at this level of accuracy, why do we not already do this?

The answer, unfortunately, is that the machinery we currently have available to us in the farming industry has not been designed to operate this accurately. It has been designed with a different question in mind.

The question farming currently asks itself is “How can I cover as much ground as possible in as little time as possible?”

This, in our view, is the wrong question.

These are better questions:
“How can I maximise the chances of every single plant in my field achieving its agronomic potential?”

“How can I apply chemical and fertiliser so that as much as possible is taken up by the plant and as little as possible is wasted or comes into contact with non-target species?”

“How can I exponentially improve my understanding of and management of my soil without exponentially increasing my workload?”

If we ask ourselves these questions, then it becomes clear that the modern tractor and the modern sprayer are no longer the right tools for the job.
It becomes clear that we need to design something which gives us a truly digital view of our field. Which is why we are developing new machines.......

Please do get in touch via our website: www.smallrobotcompany.com