The Way It Should Have Been

I wanted to call your attention to this article by William Boston at the Wall Street Journal because it makes a point I have been trying to articulate for some time.

In the verdant hills of Washington state’s Palouse region, Andrew Nelson’s tractor hums through the wheat fields on his 7,500-acre farm. Inside the cab, he’s not gripping the steering wheel—he’s on a Zoom call or checking messages.

A software engineer and fifth-generation farmer, Nelson, 41, is at the vanguard of a transformation that is changing the way we grow and harvest our food. The tractor isn’t only driving itself; its array of sensors, cameras, and analytic software is also constantly deciding where and when to spray fertilizer or whack weeds.

Many modern farms already use GPS-guided tractors and digital technology such as farm-management software systems. Now, advances in artificial intelligence mean that the next step—the autonomous farm, with only minimal human tending—is finally coming into focus.

Imagine a farm where fleets of autonomous tractors, drones and harvesters are guided by AI that tweaks operations minute by minute based on soil and weather data. Sensors would track plant health across thousands of acres, triggering precise sprays or irrigation exactly where needed. Farmers could swap long hours in the cab for monitoring dashboards and making high-level decisions. Every seed, drop of water and ounce of fertilizer would be optimized to boost yields and protect the land—driven by a connected system that gets smarter with each season.

It goes on to discuss autonomous tractors, weeders, fruit pickers, and other applications. Here’s a snippet on picking fruit:

Automation, now most often used on large farms with wheat or corn laid out in neat rows, is a bigger challenge for crops like fruits and berries, which ripen at different times and grow on trees or bushes. Maintaining and harvesting these so-called specialty crops is labor-intensive. “In specialty crops, the small army of weeders and pickers could soon be replaced by just one or two people overseeing the technology. That may be a decade out, but that’s where we’re going,” says Fiocco of McKinsey.

Fragile fruits like strawberries and grapes pose a huge challenge. Tortuga, an agriculture tech startup in Denver, developed a robot to do the job. Tortuga was acquired in March by vertical farming company Oishii. The robot resembles NASA’s Mars Rover with fat tires and extended arms. It rolls along a bed of strawberries or grapes and uses a long pincher arm to reach into the vine and snip off a single berry or a bunch of grapes, placing them gingerly into a basket.

“Robotic harvesting can offer greater consistency and efficiency than manual labor, while reducing expenses and addressing the labor shortages affecting the industry as a whole,” Brendan Somerville, chief operating officer and co-founder of Oishii said in an email, adding that the company’s long-term vision is to fully automate its harvesting operations.

Israel-based Tevel Aerobotics Technologies aims to help fruit growers reduce the need for labor with its “Flying Autonomous Robots” that can prune, thin and harvest crops. Using AI and machine vision, the robots locate the fruit, determine whether it’s ripe and then pluck it off the tree.

I think that the reference to AI in the first passage is largely a red herring. What’s being discussed is more robotics than AI. IMO this is the right direction for the United States. There’s a future for the United States in agrorobotics. There is none in importing an unskilled manual labor force that is only financially viable with a reliable supply of new workers and you can offload the actual costs of your labor force, e.g. healthcare, education, safety, etc., onto someone else.

We should be leading the world in developments like this as we did with the steel plow, the combine harvester, etc. Unfortunately, we’re playing catch-up as this video illustrates:

What happened? If farm owners can make money without capital investment, they will and that’s what’s happened. BTW, IMO Deere is correct in its approach: encouraging farmers to become comfortable with the technology and ensuring they see immediate payoffs.