Meet Tom, Dick, Harry and Wilma.
Digital Data paired with Digital Action...
Tom is a monitoring robot.
He goes out into the field (a field of wheat, in this case) and he digitises the field.
He does this, first by taking high quality digital images of every single plant in the field. In fact, Tom’s cameras are so accurate that he can focus in on the individual tiller on the wheat plants.
The same is true for weeds; the Digital Farmer will not only know exactly where their weeds are, they will know exactly what species of weed they have and how to treat them. Tom will also measure and monitor the soil, ultimately working to the point where he is sampling the soil from every square metre of your field.
A digital field for the first time
Why do we need Tom?
For context, both of these operations are currently carried out by human beings in a way that relies heavily on averaging.
When we monitor the plants in our fields, we walk into the field and maybe walk 10% of the field, closely analysing maybe 30 or 40 plants in a field of several hundred thousand plants. Whatever the symptoms we observe on those individual plants, we say that the whole field has the same symptoms.
Therefore if those plants have a disease issue, we apply the same chemical across the whole field.
Likewise, when we monitor the soil we take a few dozen soil samples and create an ‘average’ view of the whole field based on those results.
The problem with averaging, of course, is that there are unavoidable inaccuracies and as a result there can be no doubt that we apply chemicals and nutrients to plants or to areas of the field that don’t need them, or weed killer to parts of the field that have no weeds.
Wilma comes next
Wilma is not a robot, she is an AI driven operating system, a piece of software if you like. She is the boss, the brains, the intelligence behind the whole operation. She not only analyses the data that Tom gathers, she teaches Tom, Dick and Harry to understand what they are looking at so that eventually the whole system recognises every single weed, every single disease and every single nutrient issue.
Why do we need Wilma?
Without Wilma, our robots are just tractors that look a bit different. With Wilma, they have the intelligence to do the job at such a level of accuracy that there will come a point where there is no comparison between what a tractor can do and what a field robot can do.
Tom and Wilma are part of
Phase One : Digital Data.
Tom and Wilma are on farmers’ fields today, carrying out a data gathering and mapping service for paying customers
There is nothing that we have seen in farming today which comes close to our definition of a digital view of the field - if you’ve seen something that you think comes close, please do let us know.....
Once farming truly achieves digitisation, a whole new world of possibility opens up. Here are the first steps we are going to take….
Now for Phase Two : Digital Action
Dick is a micro-spraying and non-chemical weeding robot
He takes the data that has been gathered by Tom, analysed and interpreted by Wilma, and he takes action.
He goes out into the field and just treats the plants that need treating, just with the amount of chemical and fertiliser that they need.
In the same way, Dick understands where each individual weed is in the field and he will use lasers or electrical charges to remove those weeds without the need to use any chemicals at all.
Why do we need Dick?
Dick creates massive savings for the farmer and massive savings for the environment. He is, in many ways, the most exciting aspect of this whole system but he could not exist without the firm foundation level of data provided by Tom and Wilma.
At the moment, we treat our field as the management unit, as I have said in previous posts. If we see a nutrient deficiency issue or a disease in a few plants, we say that the whole field has the same symptoms and we treat the whole field in the same way.
Inaccurate. Wasteful.
Dick will save over 95% of all herbicides used on farms, and over 85% of all other chemicals used on farms. He will also save around 80% of fertiliser.
Farmers need this because farms are becoming increasingly unprofitable and increasingly reliant on public funded subsidy.
The environment needs this because currently, we know that 40% of the nitrogen fertiliser we use in fields is wasted; it never comes into contact with the plants it is supposed to be feeding.
It either evaporates or it sits in the soil until the next rain event, when it washes into water courses, eventually contributing to an estimated $800bn per year of damage to marine habitats caused by nitrogen run off.
Chemicals in agriculture are not necessarily bad, but they can be if they are inaccurately applied, and we are simply not using technology as effectively as we could be do improve this.
Dick is still in development - we are working on the non-chemical weeding aspect of his service as a first priority and, depending on funding, Dick will be in fields zapping weeds in 2020 or 2021.
Harry is the final part of the troupe, but the first into the field.
Harry is a digital planter.
He uses the intelligence provided by Tom and Wilma to understand the minute variations in the physics, chemistry and biology of the soil over which he is travelling.
Harry also holds in his head (with a bit of tutelage from Wilma) all of the publicly available research that has ever been done anywhere in the world on the crop that he is planting, the soil type that he is travelling on and the markets into which the crop he is planting is going to be sold.
Harry uses this intelligence to vary the seed spacing and seed depth to give each individual seed the maximum possible chance of succeeding. If Harry assesses that the predicted yield for the square metre of soil he is on at any given moment is unlikely to produce a profit, given the predicted price of the crop he is planting, then he won’t plant. He will come back later and put something else in that space; maybe another commercial crop or maybe a non-commercial crop which is good for pollinators, for example.
Why do we need Harry?
Again, for context, what we do on the farm at the moment is that we treat the whole field the same. We have big, square machines that we use to drill our crops and we like to drive in straight lines. Therefore, if we come to a patch of the field that we know is going to be unproductive, we tend to just plant it in exactly the same way as the rest of the field.
In fact, often what we do, is we increase the seed rate whilst we are going through those patches so that at least some plants will grow.
Inaccurate and wasteful again...
The other big advantage Harry has, is that he is small and lightweight.
At the moment, we lose a 1-1.5t/ha on average around the headland areas of our fields (essentially a 12-18m circumference area in our fields that we use to turn our machines on).
The main reason for this loss of yield is compaction. Headlands can easily account for 25% of the area of field, more in smaller more awkwardly shaped fields. But there is no agronomic reason that this soil shouldn’t be just as productive as the rest of the field. With a lightweight Harry, we have a chance to increase the yield on farmers’ fields just by reducing the weight we put on the soil.
Harry, like Dick, is still in development.
If you want to find out more about our upcoming CrowdCube campaign and the chance to own shares in our exciting business at an early stage, please e-mail [email protected] to find out more.