Agricultural Robots

I found this post by Amanda Little at Bloomberg on the use of robots in farming very interesting:

A robot army is beginning its march across rural America, promising to transform the future of food. Twenty-five intelligent machines were dispatched last month to the Midwest and the Mississippi Delta, where they will advance over newly planted fields at 12 miles an hour, annihilating baby weeds.

Produced by John Deere and created by the startup Blue River Technology, these robotic weeders look much like standard industrial sprayers at first glance, but each is rigged with an intricate system of 36 cameras and a mass of tiny hoses. They use computer vision to distinguish between crops and weeds and then deploy with sniper-like precision tiny jets of herbicide onto the weeds — sparing the crop and ending the common practice of broadcast-spraying chemicals across billions of acres.

The “See and Spray Ultimate” robots are expensive, enormous, wildly complex machines currently accessible only to industrial-scale farmers, but within a few years their impact on the environment and human health could be nothing short of spectacular. They are in the vanguard of a wave of reimagined agricultural equipment that will help farmers produce more food on less land with radically reduced chemical applications.

The benefits of these agricultural robots are many including they make it possible to use fewer chemicals in the fields not limited to herbicides, fungicides, and other pesticides but also fertilizers. They have the potential of changing the economics of farming considerably.

At the turn of the 20th century large combine harvesters came into use in the Midwest of the United States, initially horsedrawn but later powered by gasoline engines. These devices enabled the efficient harvesting of large fields of various grains. They were expensive—too expensive for most individual farms. Various forms of cooperatives were formed to purchase and, in effect, rent them to farmers at harvest time. I expect something similar will happen with this development. It’s interesting to see companies like John Deere which produced the revolution in farming technology of the late 19th and early 20th centuries staking their futures on this new technology.