When I was young the news was dominated by famines, over -population was seen as a terrible threat and at the same time Rachel Carson’s “Silent Spring” was highlighting the environmental consequences of insecticides. My Mother was a keen organic gardener at a time when most people were adopting chemical weed control and loving the huge crops you could grow with artificial fertiliser. In the seventies I was an enthusiast for older forms of farming and went to the Scottish Hebrides to learn how things were done in the old ways, stooking corn, hand milking and hoeing turnips. After a couple of seasons of learning, my hands coarsened and my back ached most of the time. I slowly realised that the people only persisted with these technologies where there was no other choice. They had no money to buy agrochemicals and the farms were too small to justify mechanisation so they continued to use hand labour to deal with everything. I also saw that the lack of knowledge about animal and plant disease led to much wastage and animal welfare was poor. Animals often starved through the winters to eke out the meagre supply of stored forage and the whole system was very vulnerable. This was not the Garden of Eden the idealists predicted.
I moved into more main stream agriculture and worked as a tractor driver and herdsman for many years as I needed the money to feed my young family. There, I saw the downsides of modern systems which rely on continuous repetitive work by humans. Driving tractors all day long or standing in a milking parlour for hours at a time putting teat cups on cows is very similar to the most mind numbing factory work. Only continuous attention to small details prevents the system failing through weed infestations in crops or a failure to get cows pregnant causes dairying to fail.
I enrolled in an Open University degree that I could do between milkings and learned about the technological revolution that transistor switches were making in computing. That any signal could be digitised and transmitted, that the world was running out of many essential resources, that most systems could be improved by feedback control systems. I realised that I had a penchant for designing and making things, I was a natural engineer. I was then lucky enough to win a place at Silsoe College to study for a Masters in Agricultural Machinery Engineering and this led me into research and as a trained engineer with a deep knowledge of modern dairy farm management I was able to join the team developing robotic milking across the road at the Silsoe Research Institute where I completed my PhD.
After we transferred the design of the robotic milking system to industry in the early 1990s I focused on the aspects of cow monitoring that humans do while milking cows to monitor disease and manage fertility.
People have been leaving the land for a better life in cities for centuries in the UK and this trend is now global. Periodically we hear about back to the land movements. These are usually led by intellectuals like John Berger who went to an Alpine village to live (it is not really farming) the old way in the 1980s. He wrote lyrically about the turning of the seasons and lives of the people but it was about a disappearing way of life which was subsidised by other more productive areas of society. He could not have sustained himself and a family on a vegetable patch and a few low producing animals, his writing was his income. Some of the lyricism relates to the struggle to survive and the killing of animals by hunting. Keeping a garden protected from birds, squirrels and rabbits requires a degree of killing animals, so you might as well eat the flesh. The solution lies in robotics and automation to replace not only repetitive drudgery but also continuous in field applications of intelligence, placing nutrient when and where plants need it, snuffing out insect attacks with non-polluting methods of control, monitoring animal health continuously, the list is endless. Digital agritechnology will allow humans to apply best practice management everywhere to food production without large quantities of chemicals, genetic modifications or magic bullet solutions promoted by large corporations. Because every sector has different needs this create niche engineering solutions which will be inherently met by small enterprises with global reach. There will be a continuing need for humans to write sophisticated software and to design and build complex machines to manage crops and animals down to an individual level.
The human population needs to eat healthy nutritious food. We have well proven sustainable methods of organic crop production evolved over thousands of years but these rely on low intensities of output (rotations to allow nutrient build up) which cannot sustain a global population of more than 3 billion people without converting every hectare of usable land to farming. High intensity systems can produce the amounts of food we need from land we already have under cultivation but only by using large quantities of chemical fertilisers which can lead to water pollution and certainly the release of nitrous oxide which is a potent global warming gas. Most fertiliser is just wasted due to poor placement in time, space and weather conditions. We can provide high quality protein from intensively managed animals but this may lead to impacts on animal welfare and pollution which are unacceptable to a humane society. I see these issues as all being soluble by understanding the systems and designing control methods that will minimise chemical use and allow us to adapt systems of food production that have worked for thousands of years to the needs of modern society, feeding the nine billion without causing climate change, without destroying the aquatic environment and allowing animals to live natural lives. This to me is what digital agritechnology is all about. We can do more with less by better management and that will only come through developing sensing systems and feedback control methods that optimise production.