The New Normal interview series: How agriculture could be reinvented

‘Farm labour is a massive issue in Europe and the US and the pandemic has led to a big focus on securing food supplies and a new interest in how to digitise and automate agriculture. We’ve seen a big increase in enquiries about our work at Earth Rover to help farmers digitally visualise their crop using robot technology retrofitted to tractors.

‘There’s nothing new to deploy, just a bit of tech to put on to the front or back of the tractor – cameras, an onboard super computer and high precision GPS, accurate to plus or minus a centimetre on the field, with real time reporting of individual plant growth. This allows farmers to better understand what’s going on in their fields, so they can grow their yield, reduce wastage and make better money.’

‘The starting point is being able to count, map and measure – how many plants have I got? I know I planted 42,000 heads of broccoli in this hectare, how many are actually growing? How big are they? Are they all growing at the same rate? If I’m a lettuce farmer, I want to know that my iceberg lettuces are all roughly the same size because that helps how they go in the box that goes out to the supermarkets. So they need to count, map and measure and know if there are any particular parts of the fields where things are going wrong.

‘If you take a crop of something like organic broccoli, if you plant 42,000 plants a hectare, you’ll sell about 18,000. That’s a lot of loss, so if you can get another five or 10 percent out of that field, then that’s all upside for the farmer. But also, if our digitised map has told you that a certain part of that crop is not going to make it anyway, then you stop throwing money at it. In the case of a non-organic farm you know where to spray and not to spray, where to apply nutrient inputs and where not to do so, leading to massive financial and environmental savings.’

‘I think further automation of harvesting – including robotisation – is going to be important. The updates that I’m getting in the UK are that the farmers don’t have enough labour for harvesting at the moment. Manpower is a big problem. In the UK it’s being affected by Covid-19 and Brexit. In California it is affected by labour laws and barriers to temporary Mexican labour coming over.

‘Farmers in the UK are saying, “If I can’t guarantee that I am going to have the labour to pick broccoli next year, I’m just not going to grow broccoli. I can cope with the normal uncertainties, the weather and pests, but what if I can’t get the broccoli off the field?” So that means the production is going to switch to Holland, or to the Czech Republic or to Poland, so we will generate more CO2 emissions delivering those products to the UK and we’ll have a loss of revenue going to the Treasury, which is the last thing we need at the moment.

‘So in a way, Covid and Brexit are a massive advertisement for why the digitisation of agriculture matters.’

‘Getting investment for AgTech [agricultural technology] is hard, which is crazy because food isn’t a fad, it’s not going away, it’s not going out of fashion, we all need to eat. But tech investors don’t like hardware, they don’t like farming, they don’t quite understand it. Really, it’s not that difficult, it’s just digitising a business.

‘If I was sitting in front of the British chancellor now, I would say the UK has a lead in digitising agriculture, we are one of the leaders and investing in it is great for British farmers and a great export opportunity for the UK. This industry has fantastic opportunities and it wouldn’t take much to really capitalise it and get it going.’