Welcome to the fourth agricultural revolution
three and a half years ago
i came very close to having a car crash
it was 5 45 in the morning and i was
driving to work
and if you live in the uk and are crazy
enough to be up at that time
there’s a program on the radio called
farming today and i was listening to
that
half asleep they featured on the program
the oxford farming conference which is
the center point of the uk’s farming
industry
where representative of the biggest
farms farm businesses and even
government ministers
come to talk about the industry that is
farming
the theme that year was the future
and i listened to a vaguely interesting
interview
with the head of a large tractor company
and they were talking about the future
as they saw it
vast vehicles delivering incremental
efficiency
for the industrial process that is
arable
farming these vehicles were becoming
driverless
which meant that more could be done by
less people
whole fields could be sprayed faster
plows could go deeper
drills could chuck seed into the ground
faster or with fewer
or even no people which was fascinating
stuff
but then the next interview was with the
professor
from the agricultural university in the
rural
north west of england in serious
considered tones
professor simon blackmore spoke of a
revolution
he started by politely refuting the
value of big industrial vehicles
he even questioned that farming is an
industrial process
at all farming he said is not about the
cranking out of a crop
farming is about the caring for plants
and each plant
despite centuries of driving towards
uniformity
is still different so instead of
treating the field as a single data
point
and the uniform application of chemicals
and fertilizer
we should be looking at each individual
plant
and caring for it at that level
this is not the work for big industrial
machines
this is the work for small precise
accurate vehicles
this is the work for artificial
intelligences
this is the work for robots
by using these robots we could only use
the chemicals and fertilizers
on the plants that needed it by using
these robots we could not only produce
more food
but we could make the whole system
sustainable as far as i could see it
this was the future it was the future of
food
it was the future of the environment it
was the future survival of mankind and
they’d all been defined
by those serious studious tones
that was when i nearly crashed the car
that
was my moment of change so i guess right
now you’re wondering
what do you mean the future of food
surely farming’s pretty good right we
all eat in fact
more people eat more food now than they
ever done in the past
and food poverty while still bad has
dropped by 70
since 1945. then at the end of world war
ii the third agricultural revolution
really kicked off and between 1945 and
1995
average wheat production in some places
more than doubled
industrial farming in europe and north
america went from producing three tons
per hectare
with small tractors and small fields
sometimes using horses
and small a few chemicals to eight
tonnes per hectare
in massive fields with large tractors
and the heavy use
of chemicals and fertilizers but
meanwhile
across the majority of the world the
people who can’t afford to buy the
machinery
who had a farm too small to use these
massive vehicles
lost out the majority of farms in africa
and asia for example are not
hundreds or thousands of hectares they
are five hectares
or one these hundreds
of millions of farmers largely missed
out on those advancements in yield
and then even in europe and north
america
the improvements stopped since 1995 the
trend line
for wheat production in the world has
flatlined
and big agriculture the multi-billion
pound
revenue companies that make the
machinery and the chemicals that drive
the modern industrial agricultural
process
have been trying to fix it as i
mentioned from the start they are
ramping up their industrial processes
in the only way that industrial
companies know how by making things
bigger
and faster and more and as a result
things are
changing over 40 percent of the world’s
fields are degraded and that
is just getting worse soil compaction in
the uk is costing
1 billion pounds a year in lost earnings
since 1961
soils have lost 30 percent of their
carbon
and nitrogen the uk
loses 2.2 million tons of soil
a year straight into the rivers and then
into the sea
why well to put it simply these big
attractors crush the soil
they turn the soil into a hard rock-like
substance that simply cannot support
life
so to counter this farmers have to plow
they have to turn over the soil and
break it up
but by doing this they release all the
lovely top soil
with all its lovely nutrients to the
wind and the rain
where it is washed or blown away
it also destroys all exposes to
predators
the worms and the beetles that create
nutrients
and eat the pests when you lose these
nutrients
and these natural defenses you have to
apply chemicals
herbicides pesticides fungicides and
fertilizers
and they are ever more expensive
so farmers all farmers
are slowly going out of business in fact
the third agricultural revolution that
views food
as an industrial process is dead
the system where greater production and
greater efficiency
is driven by bigger machinery and more
chemicals has
stopped working the wasteful
unsustainable mass production of food
needs to be replaced replaced with a
system that is precise
and accurate and efficient
a system that knows every plant and
understands
what that plant needs a system that both
increases food production
and reduces chemicals a system that
feeds the world
but does it sustainably welcome
to the fourth agricultural revolution
so let’s go back to that near car crash
so as soon as i got into work i
emailed simon by lunchtime we were
talking and i was inspired to think
about how it could be possible
to make this vision of light precise
robots on a farm
into a reality this really kicked off
when a couple of months later he
introduced me
to sam a fourth generation arable farmer
sam saw the problems first hand when he
returned
to his family farm he saw that their
yields hadn’t increased since the 90s
and then their costs had doubled he too
could see the damage that was being done
and had been inspired to think
about how this old system could be torn
up
and done in a radical new way it took
one call between us for us to realize we
were two sides of the same coin
we could both see the massive problem on
the farm
but what do farmers think so my
background is in user experience and
this helped me to realize that the
technology is all very well
but if people don’t want to use over it
doesn’t work for them then they won’t
adopt it
so if sam spent months finding out six
months
on the road sitting in farm kitchens
just listening
what were their fears what would they
trust how do they feel
about the potential of technology how
open were they to adopting it
and the results were staggering to us
farmers were not the luddites that i’d
assumed
they understood the technology and no
one knew better
than the stresses that were being put on
the soil and the environment
some of these farmers viewed their lives
on the farm
as 40 experiments and want nothing more
than those experiments to make things
more efficient and more environmentally
friendly
but they simply don’t have the money to
buy
new farming machinery that may or may
not work
nor could they afford the machinery that
would be superseded the following year
or might break down
all be the target for thieves so
we came up with farming as a service
a model that wasn’t based around the
machinery itself
but around the outcomes the machinery is
designed to provide
a model that doesn’t automate a single
function
but delivers a healthy crop at the end
of the year a model that is paid for
per hectare a model that farmers can
trial
easily with no risk
but most importantly a service that
cares for a crop
by understanding each individual
plant and to make this model work we
realize
that we would not have to have one
single purpose robot but three distinct
robots that did three distinct
drops i would like to introduce you to
tom
dick and harry a service of precise
and lightweight robots that don’t
compact the soil and carry out all the
processes of planting and monitoring and
caring for the crop
right up to the point of harvest tom
lives on the farm collecting data
all day every day data on each
individual crop plant
the soil the weeds the pests and the
diseases
tom works completely autonomously
navigating the fields
and returning to its kennel at the end
of the day to recharge
and share the information that he has
captured
dick is a crop care robot sent out to
the farm
only when necessary who kills the weeds
using electricity
treats individual plants against pests
and diseases and feeds
only the plants that are hungry
because dick only kills the weeds that
actually threaten a crop
while plants can be left to grow
stopping the imbalance caused
by green deserts of crop fields
because dick only sprays the plants that
need fungicide or pesticide
huge amounts of chemicals are saved and
invertebrates
can thrive harry plants
each seed individually at exactly the
right depth and exactly the right
spacing straight
into the previous year’s stubble with no
ploughing and no tillage
by not disturbing the soil it is
retaining up to four tons of carbon in
the soil that would have been released
by planning tom dick and harry are
nothing without the brains of the
operation wilma
and wilmer turns the information from
tom into instructions
for dick and harry wilmer uses ai
to sort through all the data and work
out which plants are healthy and which
need help
wilma shows the farmer what is happening
and provides us
with a global view of the progress of
all the crops
together tom dick harry and wilmer
can make a huge difference they can
reduce chemicals and energy usage by
over 90
they can bring the level of co2
emissions down from around five tons per
hectare
to actually sequestering carbon in the
soil
tom dick and harry can make farms
profitable again
across the world because we can deliver
this service without farmers
having to buy the technology we can work
with farmers
of any size no matter where they are in
the world
which means that this revolution can be
global
small robot company is one of hundreds
of
agritex startups from around the world
most of those are focused on the fourth
agricultural revolution goals
of precision and accuracy and
sustainability
and with the farmers support and the
support of the governments
and you we can change farming into a
sustainable
carbon positive benefit to mankind and
the world we live in
we believe that we can make all these
farms environmentally sustainable
we believe we can make those farms
carbon positive
we can turn farmers from being the
villains of the environmental crisis
that we find ourselves in
into being the heroes that they truly
are
but most of all in this time of
unremitting negative news
when it is difficult to know how one
person can make a difference
we think our three small robots have one
more job
they can bring hope thank you
you