Take me to your fields: Robots on the farm

There’s always work to be done on the farm. But often it’s the same work day after day after day. Parts of the job must feel a bit like an assembly line.
Wouldn’t it be great if you could just get a robot to do it?
That might not be so far off. As Jeremy Bernfeld explains in part two of Harvest Public Media’s weeklong series “Farmer of the Future.”

There’s always work to be done on the farm. But often it’s the same work day after day after day. Parts of the job must feel a bit like an assembly line.
Wouldn’t it be great if you could just get a robot to do it?
That might not be so far off. As Jeremy Bernfeld explains in part two of Harvest Public Media’s weeklong series “Farmer of the Future.”

Robot sound
No, it’s not a Kentucky Derby videogame. It’s a farm robot that could be used to plant seed or spread fertilizer. Only problem is it’s only ankle high and about a foot long. It’d take an awful long time to plant a 5,000 acre farm.
Robot sound
This robot is the winning entry from last year’s Association of Biological and Agricultural Engineers robotics competition. It belongs to the Kansas State biological and agricultural engineering robotics team. They’ve won the competition the last five years – all five of the years the competition has been held. Last year’s contest was in Louisville, hence the equine theme.
It’s a little four-wheeled machine designed to drop coffee grains from its bottom at specific locations. It has three little sensors that read where the crops are and keep the machine exactly ten inches away (for the competition, the “crop” was little bristles glued into a plywood board.) The robot travels the perimeter of the crop area and drops the pellets every LENGTH.
Dvorak 218 “Coming up with little tricks. Things that I guess what a good engineer does is solves the problem in some technologically innovative way. That’s kind of how we’ve managed to win every year.”
That’s Joe Dvorak, he’s a grad student at Kansas State and he was the president of the robotics team the last two years.
It’s not hard to see how this robot could be used for farm work. Well, a much bigger version of this robot.
Dvorak 258 “The reason we’re doing these small-scale things is because it’s cheaper and we can do them and take them from our universities and take them to the competition, but the whole idea of them is very applicable. If we’re doing them on a small-scale it just needs to be scaled up to work at a larger scale.”
Sounds a little bit crazy, right? Like a science fiction novel. Robots running around the field growing our food.
Star Wars sound.
They have robots on the farm in galaxy far, far, away in the Star Wars movies. But they’ve also got flying cars. So…could we really see robots on the farm?
Robots aren’t quite commonplace yet, but farmers today already rely heavily on advanced technology. Many farmers used autosteer in their tractors, technology that uses GPS to program a tractor to drive a perfectly straight line. Hardly any dairy farmer milks his cows by hand anymore, and some even use robotic milking devices. Many farms rely on aerial or satellite imaging to measure the nitrogen content their soil. It’s heady stuff.
Brown 246 “Robotics and autonomy become appropriate where you have a situation which is dull, which is dirty or which is dangerous.”
That’s Jeremy Brown, president and CEO of Jaybridge robotics, a Massachusetts-based company that makes software the helps turn regular machinery into robotic machinery for commercial use. Jaybridge and tractor manufacturer Kinze developed a robotic tractor and it’s set to head to market in limited release this fall.
To be clear: robot tractors. In the field. This fall. It’s possible, Brown says, because most farms are already technologically advanced.
Brown 1006 “I was just astonished at how high-tech farming had already become – it was an incredible place to start building from.”
It’s all possible thanks to sensors. They’re continuously becoming more advanced, cheaper and more rugged, so they can be used in the field.
Robotics is all about a machine reacting to the world around it. We already have tractors that drive in super-straight lines by themselves thanks to autosteer. Throw in sensors that allow it to back up, change gears when heading up or downhill, detect objects in the field, and you’ve got a robot harvesting your wheat.
After Kinze’s robot tractor hits showroom floors, expect to see more ag robot products soon, Brown says.
Brown 2858 “The capital equipment costs for farming is already enormous, right? Once you’re dealing on that scale the capital cost of the autonomy capability I don’t think presents a real showstopper.”
The benefits to robotic technology on the farm are clear: cut down on labor costs, which can often make up a significant part of a farmer’s budget. With fewer young people taking up farming and wanting to live rural lives, and immigration crackdowns spooking a large part of the farm workforce, a robot farmhand will only look more appealing.
Plus, farms have huge labor demands, but often only at two or three times a year, like planting and harvest. It’s hard for a farmer to employ year round the laborers he needs for the busy times. A robot able to do some of that work would surely help.
Again, Jaybridge CEO Jeremy Brown:
Brown 1920 “At harvest time it’s a pretty significant problem – a lack of labor available to help with additional load that happens then. And so, the farmers actually have been quite enthusiastic in seeing what this can do and how this can help them have predictable harvest times and be able to do longer hours with fewer people if necessary.”
Does this spell the end for the flesh and blood human farmer? Absolutely not. Today’s modern farmer is the CEO of his or her farm – every day making important business decisions, using complex financial instruments and managing a workforce. That won’t change. Even Brown, the robotic software engineer, says his company isn’t trying to replace farmers. Only help them.
Brown 2245 “There’s very much a human element in all of the business decisions and all of the equipment selection and maintenance and fleet decisions, so I don’t think you’re going to eliminate the farmer with automation.”
For their part, farmers are businesspeople. If it’s safe and it can help them squeeze more profit from their business, most conventional farmers will sign on. Like high-tech tractors and fancy GPS technology, farmers will soon be keeping robots in their barns.
Brown 3222 “I think it will be absolutely a regular part of the agricultural arsenal, not everyone will use it for every application, but many people will use it quite effectively and quite profitably.”
With robots on the way, the role of the farmer may have to change to adapt to new tools. But they’ve done that for centuries. See many oxen teams around?
The farmer of the future isn’t a robot. Even in our wildest imaginations, we still rely on farmers.
Brown 3345 “Even if we look at Star Wars, just to run with that, Luke’s aunt and uncle were human farmers. They had robot farmhands.”
The farmhand of the future, though? It’s rapidly changing from science fiction, to science fact.
SOQ