The pick of the robots for farming

Several hundreds of years ago farming used to employ approximately one person for every hectare. Then came the Agricultural Revolution and today that figure is nearer one person for every 100 hectares, except perhaps in horticulture where it remains a relic of the one-person-per-hectare past.

Over recent decades farming has witnessed a steady decline in home-grown seasonal pickers, initially substituted with pickers from the EU until Brexit ever so firmly closed the door – albeit with the odd chink of light from beyond.

The result: UK farmers struggle to recruit enough seasonal labour, despite the reintroduction of SAWS – the Seasonal Agricultural Workers Scheme.

Never before has the time been right for technology to come to the rescue and it has, in the form of robot picking and other technological advances. As one person said: 

high-tech farming is not an oxymoron.

Modern farming can include apps that control irrigation, GPS systems that steer tractors and RFID-chipped ear tags that monitor livestock.

And then there are the agricultural robots.

Today, robots exist to pick apples, gather strawberries, harvest lettuce and remove weeds.

Meanwhile, drones use aerial images to enable farmers to quickly assess crop health and robotic greenhouses can appear many miles removed from traditional farmland regions, enabling them to support vegetable crops close to urban populations.

The farm of today can look very different from that of just a few decades ago, and technology is behind the transformation, the New Agricultural Revolution.

Crop harvesting and picking is often repetitive work not highly prized by the labour market. However, it also requires manual dexterity and a delicate touch: pick an apple with your fingers and you’ll bruise it but cup it in your hand and twist it off the tree and you’ll have a perfect specimen.

Not only can certain fruits easily bruise, but leafy vegetables can be equally easily torn.

This presents a huge challenge for robotic technologies that have simply lacked that advanced precision. But things are changing, and they are changing rapidly.

In Denver, Colarado, Tortuga AgTech provides farms with robots that automate tasks such as identifying and picking ripe fruit, whilst Harvest Automation, in Billerica, Maine offers a behaviour-based robot solution that handles the important, but highly repetitive and strenuous work of spacing container crops and plants.

Lettuce harvesting remained stubbornly resistant to robots until the University of Cambridge made a breakthrough with Vegebot, a prototype that scans a lettuce and approves it (or otherwise) for harvesting. A second camera, located near a blade, guides the pick without crushing the plant. Alongside, a machine-learning algorithm ‘teaches’ the robot to avoid unripe or diseased plants.

In Israel, FFRobotics has experimented with a robotic fruit harvester using computer vision to identify ripe fruit. Emulating the motion of a human hand it can successfully pick apples – at a claimed rate of 10 times faster than human pickers.

Closer to home, in Kent to be precise, Produced in Kent recently organised a demonstration of robotic picking for growers (including wine producers) using strawberries as the target.

Small start-up company Dogtooth Technologies, based just outside of Cambridge, demonstrated robots working in teams and autonomously moving along crop rows as they judge whether fruit is ready for picking.

The robot then picks the berry by the stalk, lowering it onto an onboard monitoring system that can immediately check the fruit is free from disease and insect damage. From there the berry is passed into a punnet, sorted according to size.

Each team of around 10 robots currently has a human supervisor but that is expected to change as the machines evolve. Any robot that malfunctions immediately sends a message to the supervisor for an immediate response.

The robots also tell the supervisor when all punnets are full and need replacing.

An added bonus is that because the robots scan all the fruit as they pass along the rows, they can accurately predict future yields.

With farmers typically contracting with supermarkets to supply fruit in 7-14 days’ time, that accuracy is essential: better forecasting means more of the crop being sold at a higher margin.

Picking by stalk means less bruising of the fruit, which means less wastage. Equally, there is reduced risk of disease transference and less handling of the fruit leading to a longer shelf-life.

Dogtooth currently operates a fleet of around 70 robots, picking ‘many tens of tons of fruit each season’ in the UK and in Australia, but now it is offering to sell directly to farms as a capital investment.

The new version is powered by removable batteries which means robots can operate 24 hours a day.

With Kent growing around 40% of the UK’s soft fruits, this type of technology can have a huge impact on the supply chain to Britain’s stores and it is just another example of the way technology is fuelling the New Agricultural Revolution where labour shortages and challenges become a thing of the past.

For those of you decrying the loss of a labour opportunity, Dr Duncan Robertson, CEO of Dogtooth has an answer according to Kent Online: 

We aren’t displacing jobs. We are replacing people who have already left the workforce.

It’s a moot point. As people move to better paid jobs in controlled environments, farming will inevitably see its labour force further decline. That’s where robots could prove to be the right solution, at just the right time