Author: Toby

Invasion of the non-Hollywood Robots

A great show of the latest field robots in 2022

In a spirit of curiosity and in need of an adventure after the confinements of the last two years I took flight to California for a bit of October sunshine to visit FIRAUSA2022 to see the latest display of Californian Agricultural Robotics. Last year I managed to navigate Covid restrictions to visit FIRA2021 in Toulouse and my blog report of that meeting is here.

FIRA USA 2022 was held in Fresno a modern city of half a million at the Southern end of Central Valley region of California which is one of the great growing areas of the world where with irrigation water from the mountains pretty much anything can be grown. At the airport one is greeted with Welcome to Fresno, agricultural capital of the world.

The meeting was enjoyed by 1000 + delegates in a three day mix of R&D results, commercial interactions and most interestingly field demonstrations in salad crops and vineyards.

Figure 1: The design of full autonomous tractors completely reshapes the layout. They are basically a frame with wheels at each corner, a power source, sensors and a computer. This Naio machine has front mid and rear tool bars on hydraulic hitches.


Being California there was huge enthusiasm to invest in the new wave of technology based on autonomous robotics, image processing and precision navigation. I think the investment crowd may have been a little disappointed as various company founders expressed views that suggested company growth should be organic and that VC money was not always appropriate as rapid scaling of agritechnology and early exits were unlikely.

The main interest was in systems that address the key problem in horticulture and viticulture of labour shortage. Even Mexican growers present were complaining that there is a labour shortage there. So weeding by hoes, spot spraying or lasers were the most viewed systems along with sub systems suppliers for navigation, wifi charging or image processing etc,

Most of the blade weeders were relatively simple, agitating a blade to swipe a weed identified by image processing as not the crop. One company FarmWise had build a full autonomous vehicle to weed which begs the question why not just mount it on a tractor and apply navigation and autoturn controls such as those offered by several manufacturers now.

Figure 2: interplant and interrow weeding just has to identify a plant as not the crop to then chop its roots with a blade. The red circles are weeds left to dry out in the sunshine of California


To me all the blade weeders looked primitive in comparison to the Garford Robocrop invented by Nick Tillet and Tony Hague 20 years ago and this was also pointed out by one of the scientific speakers.

More exciting was the laser weeder that could operate in beds of very small seedlings as it could burn out out weeds with pinpoint accuracy.

There were a lot of interesting panel discussions and science presentations and one I caught said that blade weeders were over 90% effective weeding between lettuce plants in rows although timing is critical. In Arugula (Rocket in UK) where plants are grown in beds timing is even more critical and there a laser weeder came out very well. You can see it working in the video . I walked down the bed after the machine finished and saw only two weeds in 100 metres. Both were emerging contiguous to the Rocket seedling which would need a finger weeding if a human was doing it.

There was a lot of attention on viticulture robots mostly for spraying which is obviously a major operation. See the video for a view of some of them. My favourite machine is the Swarmfarm system which was not able to make the journey from Australia where a number of them are busy. They are basically a metal frame, a diesel power source, navigation and autosteer. The video demonstration is well worth watching. I spoke to Andrew Bates the founder and he said he has a couple coming to UK soon.

There was considerable discussion about whether legislation will hamper the deployment of autonomous robots on farms. No-one wants a farm worker or child hurt by a robot although scaring off ramblers and crop circlers might be acceptable.

The Californian equivalent of HSE have recently judged that fully autonomous tractors must be supervised by a human and this has dealt a major blow to progress on autonomy.

This maybe a hurdle we need to jump in the UK fairly soon as autonomous tractors are working at a number of farms in test conditions.

1989 and 2022 turning points

I was asked recently by a friend why I am so engaged with Ukraine on LinkedIn. There is a short answer, I went there before the invasion a couple of times and saw the scale and beauty of the country and its resilience and I was emotionally pulled into helping refugees as best I could this year which opened my eyes to the genocide planned by Putin. But there is a longer answer about the phases of my life and how they map to global events. Global events impact our private lives in unpredictable ways.

The reason that the invasion of Ukraine and the dramatic failure of the Russian empire to impose its will on a nascent free country tends to the narrative version of history and the role of individuals. How can one not view Zelensky and his brilliant one liners “I don’t need a ride, I need ammunition”, “we will build a future without heating but definitely without you (Russia)” as the epitome of cometh the hour cometh the man. He obviously has a highly competent team of generals and ministers and the slowly accelerating supply of modern weapons. It may lead to the collapse of the Russian imperial project that has dominated Eurasia for at least 300 years. Zelensky is on his way into history like Charles Martel who defeated a Muslim invasion of France in 732 or Churchill in 1940.

The last time I felt as energised positively by world events was in 1989 when like a set of skittles the countries of Eastern Europe were bowled out of the Soviet system. It coincided with my wife and I buying a ruined pig farm in Somerset and building a mobile home there. Week after week another country declared itself free and began requesting the withdrawal of the Soviet army garrisons sent to keep them in line. Some changes were violent (Romania) but most were more like an election result in a democracy. Of course, the huge work needed to sort out the mess left by communist mis- management was hidden and is still incomplete.

The new novel Lessons by Ian McEwen captures the elevated hopes that the fall of the Berlin Wall triggered for the hero Roland as he happened to be in Berlin trying to find his lost wife.

“The grim settlement of the Second World War was ended. A peaceful Germany would be united. The Russian Empire was dissolving without bloodshed. A new Europe must emerge. Russia would follow Hungary, Poland and the rest to become a democracy. It might even lead the way. It was not so fantastical to imagine driving one day from Calais to the Bering Straits and never showing a passport. The Cold War’s nuclear menace was over. The great disarmament could begin. History books would close with this, a jubilant mass of decent people celebrating a turning point for European civilisation. The new century would be fundamentally different, fundamentally better, wiser. …….Russia, a liberal democracy, unfolding like a flower in spring. Nuclear weapons negotiated downwards to extinction. Then mega-tides of spare cash and good intentions flowing like fresh water, cleansing the dirt of every social problem. The general well-being refreshed, schools, hospitals, cities renewed. Tyrannies dissolving across the South American continent, the Amazon rainforests rescued and treasured – let poverty be razed instead of trees. For millions, time for music, dancing, art and celebration. Mrs Thatcher had demonstrated it at the UN – the political right had finally understood climate change and believed in action while there was time.”

In 1990 I had the privilege of attending the AgEng 1990 Conference in Berlin which by brilliant coincidental planning occurred during the week when Germany was politically reunited. It was easy to feel that huge surge of optimism. As we welcomed the dawn of the new Germany and Europe by walking up the Unter de Linden after each session we discussed how the 4th Agricultural revolution would be based on sensors, data and computers. We were testing our first milking robot at Silsoe at the time. That set the background for the next phase of my career in research and commercialisation of animal health sensing. That period ended in 2021 when I sold eCow’s IP to measure pH in bovine rumens having sold Milkalyser in 2020 with its automated LFA tester for progesterone.

Over the next 8 years as our children passed through sixth form to University we built a viable dairy goat farm, finding and breeding the herd, laying concrete yards, building airy housing solving problems in animal disease, marketing and fire fighting. We scavenged milking machine parts and built up an efficient milking parlour on a shoe string budget. All this for me was at weekends and in the long vacations of the research council that employed me to develop the UK’s first robotic milking system. By 1996 we had shown the commercial viability of our goat farm such that we were able to get permission and build a fine energy efficient four bedroomed house that we moved into on Christmas Day 1997.

Some of that optimism was justified and clearly some was very misplaced, Russia started but then failed to democratise and the political right tried to deny climate change. I think we need a new change in world history for the better after the disasters of Brexit, Covid and the war in Ukraine. Maybe the over privileged Boomers will give way to the next generations and see their house prices and pensions collapse to give youngsters a chance.

So 2022 and the Ukraine war also link to a sea change in my career as well as showing how resilient democracy is and how essential it is work to mitigate and adapt to climate change.

I am now working on a project to develop peri-urban horticulture trying to reduce food miles for vegetables, improving freshness and regenerating soil with robotic peasants. More will be revealed next year.

Unsettled with real food in Tuscany

We need to shorter supply chains and local production

To kickstart the shift to my next agritech development and to do some research for my next book I took myself on an Unsettled retreat package to Podere San Georgio in the Tuscan hills near Pisa.

The Podere (or small farm) is an ancient former convent long ago converted into basic hotel accommodation and focused on providing high quality fresh cooked food from the locality. The local producers are all selected for using organic and biodynamic methods of production. Nothing comes out of packets from a food service facility, the wines and beer come from local producers too small to be available outside the area. The Podere has 500 olive trees of its own and lies on the via del vino so vineyards are all around. The sandy soil is an upraised seabed and fossilised sea shells are found in some layers. This soil provides the minerals for the tasty local wines and is ideal for olive tree production.

Local wineries in Tuscany are mostly too small to sell wine wholesale, this is one of the larger ones near San Gimigagno

The landscape is very hilly and wildly forested, the steep slopes and cliffs being too difficult for monocultural forestry so the air is clean. Birdsong is audible most of the day. Unsettled had brought together a diverse group of fourteen single visitors mostly mid-career professionals from around the world with about half being from the USA and Canada, I was the only European in the EMEA half of the group. This lent itself to great cultural interactions with nightly get togethers for dining and dancing under the moon.

Unsettled laid on visits to wineries, cheesemakers and a highlight for me being a truffle farm where we saw dogs hunt out truffles that we later cooked with homemade pasta.

Matteo took us to the woods with his dogs

In the evenings beside tasting the local wines and eating the excellent ad hoc meals provided, we had hands on demonstrations of pasta and pizza making. The chef Alessio specialises in using offcuts and seasonal vegetables and this being autumn there was plenty of variety.

Clearly the fertile soil of Tuscany and the local food traditions lend themselves to a high degree of self sufficiency which has to become a regional objective as we move away from the energy demands of long distance supply chains. I believe that this philosophy will allow us to stop relying on long shelf life processed food which has affected human health with outcomes such as obesity, auto-immune disorders and food fads. Any future farm I get into will include retail sales and maybe a cooked food service to add value to the offering.

Autonomous Robots Moving Fast

The FIRA industry conference and show series is focused on autonomous field machines which have become of huge interest given labour shortages particularly in high value vegetable and fruit crops. This year’s show was held at the Diagora conference centre near Toulouse, France between 7-9 th December 2021 in a mix of face to face meetings and online presentations from across the world. The hybrid format worked well as live streaming is now fairly robust and there was excellent studio management so that even questioners appeared on screen live. In fact I found the video presentations easier to follow back in my hotel room chromecast to a wide screen TV rather than in the conference rooms where visual quality was sometimes poor and distant text was sometimes unreadable.

I had been hoping for genuine live demonstrations but every company resorted to video which of course is immune from real world problems. The robots move up and down rows on video across flat fields.

The biggest company in terms of sales appears to be Naio whilst the longest development cycle seems to be AgroIntelli’s Robotti which grew out of a Kongskilde project and is now in early sales mode. There was a great demonstration of robust simplicity from Swarmfarm in Australia with 20+ machines in the field. The full list of exhibitors is available on the website.

A fully loaded Robotti from Denmark with diesel power packs

The basic format of autonomous field robots is of a steel frame with an independently driven and steered wheel at each corner. A mast on the frame gives elevation to cameras and antennas, Sensors are mounted around the frame for collision detection and data recording. Most machines have one or more tool bars and a 3 point linkage to mount third party implements such as hoes, seeders and even harvesting units.

An early stripped down prototype shows the essentials , frame, wheels, toolbar, GPS tower

Buses for power (electric and hydraulic) and data distribution are a key element attached to the frames. Machines are sized to standard widths for viticulture or horticultural implements. It was claimed that machine weights were 10% of conventional tractor and implement outfits. The system concept is ideal for no till or minimal till rotations. They do not have the power and weight for traditional ploughing and cultivating and they do not cause soil compaction either except in the tramlines. Given the need to reduce energy use and to sequester carbon in soils the autonomous systems offer huge advantages as well reducing the labour cost.

Most machines used either an off the shelf diesel engine powering hydraulic drive or a hybrid system using a small diesel engine to charge batteries and using electric drives. There was an interesting discussion about electric versus diesel versus hydrogen or fuel cell, The pragmatic solution is to use a modular approach that can be adapted as new power source technologies appear. A radical departure was the demonstration of a wireless charging station for batteries by Wiferion. The robot can drive to a shared station and wirelessly charge up with 93% of the power available from the associated power supply (mains, wind or solar + battery). This removes the need to fill up with diesel or plug in a power supply.

Most of the bigger machines had three point linkages so that third party implements can be fitted, this is the back end of a Sitia viticulture machine

One limitation of the robots is that they cannot move from field to field on public roads under robot control due to the same legislation that controls autonomous cars and trucks. This is not a major issue for large farms within a ring fence with internal paths but something to be addressed to enable machine flexibility and sharing.

The most popular and simple application is spot spraying or weeding with bolt on modules that use image capture of weed species and deploy the chemical or mechanical knockout system according to the image and location of target. The difficulties and potential for developing better and faster systems of image capture was well described by Robovision who are specialists in capturing human expertise in visual tasks into software.

A little further from commercialization were robot harvesters and video was shown of systems picking strawberries, asparagus, and cauliflowers in open field conditions. These machines were in only their first season of operation so this is a space to watch for developments. Mishandling of the crop was held as the potential risk for adoption as any damage reduces shelf life and quality and thus price. Two machines in the USA (Harvest Croo and Advanced Farm) were picking the very delicate crop of strawberries and there a major part of the problem is post picking handling and transport. The Harvest Croo machine used image processing, multiple robot grapples and a liquid transport system to move and pack the fruit.

It was stated several times that mechanised field harvesting can improve product quality by removing human contamination of the crop (no exposure to salmonella or covid from pickers) and also by grading the fruit in the field the costs and difficulty of human labour in the packing house could be significantly reduced. Naturally the heavier loads of harvesting need a transport system that does not cause soil compaction to carry produce off the field.

Various pricing mechanisms for the technology were mentioned from outright purchase, leasing and payment by materials harvested (which could then compete directly with the human cost of harvesting). Some of the systems developed have been by a partnership between producers identifying the problem and the start up tech developers. As there is virtually no long term operating experience repair cycles and fault detection were barely discussed except as a legal risk. Only one farmer mentioned the lack of any checking for the real things that happen such as bearing failures causing misaligned weeding disks etc.

A stripped down MuddyMachine prototype has been picking asparagus after only one year in development

Although high value crops have significant niche markets which are under severe stress due to low labour availability from migration restrictions and a loss of traditional recruitment patterns in the countryside, they do not amount to scales that will massively reduce cost of production. While tractors sell in hundreds of thousands of units per year the take up of specialist autonomous platforms is likely to be in hundreds per year for the next few years until issues such as cost of use, serviceability, dealership response times have been resolved. There will still be a need for the flexible farm tractor for many years to come.

This could N badly

Last week I visited North West Scotland on a short holiday. It is a land of stunning open spaces, glaciated volcanic lumps and mountains interspersed with wide valleys, green and lush at this time of year. The green vegetation is not grass though, but a huge mix of species of plants that like the wet acid soil conditions and mild climate. There are a few sheep farms, but everywhere, even in the high hills there are ruined farms, crofts and shielings (seasonal settlements for grazing animals). The population used to be much greater, before the industrial period with its clearances and emigration. The whole area is a model for what will happen as smallholders around the globe abandon their plots and move into cities for a “better” life. This is the reality of rewilding, it has been going on a long time in the Highlands.

A wide Highland valley with a white crofthouse in the distance, low cloud covers the hills, Copyright Antoine Fabre @antoinefbr
Highland Valleys are empty of people and livestock where once were many villages. Image: Antoine Fabre

Northern Latitudes hold a huge potential for the next phase of agriculture. There are huge reserves of carbon and nitrogen in the peaty soil under the vegetation. As the planet warms up there is a risk that these soils and the huge tundra areas of Canada and Russia will release even more methane and Nitrous Oxide than the sparse animals that graze there.

In the Bronze Age 5-6000 years ago much of upland Britain was farmed, as shown by the settlement ruins and field boundaries on top of Dartmoor and Exmoor. The village people on Skara Brae, Orkney at 590 North grew cereals. The reason was the climate was +20C warmer than the twentieth century. It is predicted that we will have accidentally achieved a similar or warmer climate within a few decades unless we find a way to reduce carbon dioxide emissions.

At the same time we expect to lose arable land to climate change and urbanisation further South. The growing area is moving North with climate change. If we try breaking new ground in the traditional way with the plough it would be a disaster as it would release the bound up carbon and nitrogen as methane and nitrous oxide, further exacerbating the greenhouse gas effect. It would also cause soil erosion and biodiversity loss.

We need an alternative way to use the soil resource for food production that does not disturb the deep soil. How about draining and grazing it ? This would almost certainly have been how the Bronze Age settlers would have started. Once the sward had been eaten or burnt back they would have been able to use simple draft animals (probably human) to drag an implement across to scratch the surface and sow some saved seeds. They would have had to weed the crop by hand as early ploughs did not bury the surface trash well if at all.

If that sounds familiar it is because it is min-till without weedkiller and modern plant varieties. It was subsistence farming, probably in parallel with hunter gathering. The labour must have been back breaking but if the alternative was starvation it would get done.

We can now use the new technologies of robotic tractors with shallow tools to till and weed much as humans used to do. We can dispense with heavy tractors causing soil compaction and use lightweight autonomous tool bars to continuously patrol the fields disrupting the weeds. The same robots could be used to distribute small amounts of fertiliser at appropriate moments in the growth cycle and remove weeds without chemicals. Appropriate moments would be based on plant needs and weather status determined by web connected algorithms. Applying fertiliser when rain is not predicted could have a major impact. Dry soil emits little nitrous oxide which is a major greenhouse gas. Emissions are growing rapidly according to the latest IPCC report as farmers around the world increasingly use artificial N fertiliser to increase yields of crops. Even more serious is the pollution of river water leading to dead ocean zones which also emit huge amounts of N2O.

Weeding robot and humans in a row crop
Which would you prefer ? Hand rowing, boring back aching or an autonomous weeder that works continuously ? Image: Naio

We need cover crops and rotational grazing to suppress weeds and restore fertility without exposing the soil to erosion. The question arises what do you do with all the grass and clover ? Maybe feed it to livestock ?

Switching the world to a lower meat diet might reduce methane emissions but it will lead to more N pollution and that could have an even more disastrous effect than we have currently. This could N badly.

Robots on the Strawberry Highway

It was very good to wake up on Sunday to hear a programme about tests of robots to track up and down rows of hydroponic strawberries killing off powdery mildew with UV light, no pesticides needed.

Red strawberries on a plant
https://www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/play/m000ydnb

Click here https://www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/play/m000ydnb

I have said for years that agricultural robotics in the UK needs to focus on the high value enterprises where labour is in short supply that is dairy, fruit and vegetables and that is what was described. The robots are not there to replace the skilled labour of picking the fruit but to do the routine task to kill off powdery mildew which they do with UV light.

The farm employs hundreds of people and so ensuring that the robots operate safely was a key element in the design. The next step is to conduct cost benefit analysis of these systems in a business with low margins it may still be

Codebreaker: The significance of RNA manipulation and its risks

I suggest that anyone interested in the sudden expansion of the capabilities of RNA coding reads The Codebreaker by Walter Isaacson about the competition and collaboration in developing the CRISPR technologies in cutting splicing genetic sequences to make antibodies for LFA tests and building vaccines.

Diagram of DNA strands and the enzymes needed to perform gene editing
CRISPR system can be used to target and cut out or insert gene sequences Source: Wikipedia CRISPR

We have recently all had a crash course in the capabilities of RNA to be engineered to instruct cells to make proteins. RNA is a string of nucleic acids bound and shaped together by chemical ionic bonds. The sequence of the nucleic acids or bases, encodes instructions for a cell to respond in many different ways. Viruses replicate by hijacking cell reproductive functions to make more virions and expressing them into body fluids which go on to infect other cells. As the technology becomes more accessible and scaleable there are many other things we can do with the ability of RNA to penetrate and infect cells.

The prominent example is how the The Pfizer/BionTech RNA vaccine hijacks the cell functions to make spike shaped particles that trigger a suitable immune response from the body, arming it to resist CoViD-19. Millions of people have now had the vaccine and the hospital admissions and deaths have fallen dramatically where this has happened. There may be long term risks but the majority scientific opinion is that these vaccines are safe and in any case lose their effectiveness over time and need refreshing. The bigger risk is that we get complacent about the general health of the population which is self-evidently poor due to obesity, low activity levels, energy rich diets and the other ills of wealthy countries. There is a sort of moral hazard in having easily accessible health care.

In agriculture, there are alternative uses for RNA technology and the pandemic has taken attention away from these developments particularly insecticide uses. RNA can be designed to interfere with the genetics of a target insect using a process call RNA interference (RNAi). By targeting genes essential for pest insect’s growth, development, or reproduction, RNAi could be used selectively to kill pest insects without adversely affecting non-target species (Whyard et al., 2009). It is worth examining the risks in agriculture of this recoding of naturally and randomly occurring messenger RNA.

In agriculture there used to be two distinct approaches to improving production. You could either manage existing resources better. So you measure outcomes and use feedback control to optimise for example giving more feed to your better animals. The classic example of this was Bobby Boutflour at the Royal Agricultural College (now a University) who could buy a random cow in Gloucester market and feed her properly to quadruple her milk yield and give her a long life. In modern times this engineering approach means sensors, robotics and software to control systems. The other approach is to breed better plants and animals which traditionally was a very slow process but can now be massively accelerated by the gene editing technologies discovered recently. Genetic change is now a coding process with new risks.

Computer coding works in a digital format that humans have designed but as the layers of complexity have grown and sit on top of operating systems that are often proprietary and unpublished we get bugs and errors. We often rely on human intuition to spot when things are not working properly and we always have the option to turn the machine off and reboot. As machine learning intrudes advances in many sectors we find new problems arising and no-one can describe the process by which a machine decision has been taken. We know we have a problem with biased training sets but what about the algorithms.

So when we talk about gene modification through RNA coding we are operating in a zone designed by aeons of evolution (or God if you prefer) that is mysterious and works in ways that we do not understand. Only about 1% of genes code for proteins and we are only just beginning to understand what the other 99% are there for. The development of CRISPR relied on finding repeated sequences of genes which turned out to be a sort multifunctional memory of previously useful sequences, a bit like that odd tool in the farm workshop that only get used once every few years.

Another analogy is that of the difference between somatic cells and germline cells. Manipulation of somatic cells can be used to change something in an individual organism but changing the germline cells will pass that change into future offspring. It is the unforeseen boundary conditions and the code blocks leaking into other parts of the system that cause the problems in computer software and by analogy in biological genetic modification particularly in the germline that great risks lie. I reccommend reading The Codebreaker as it shows how the scientists involved are aware of the issues of editing RNAi and using it to manipulate DNA. One guy is in prison in China for experimenting on the human germline.

Once a germline is modified and goes wild we will have little control of where it will end up and the effect may be at an ecosystem level years later. The problems of pollinators and seed treatments with neonicotinoids or the vultures dying out in India due to diclofenac poisoning are very simple, direct examples of unforeseen consequences of chemical interventions. These may be much more difficult to detect and understand in the ecosystem.

As an engineer I know that the systems I designed and built have had effects that I predicted but I am not sure that the same can be said for genetic engineering.

Beer without Fear

Beer without Fear in Ukraine

Beer without Fear. Travel in the time of Covid from poorly governed Britain

I have recently travelled to the Ukraine for medical and dental treatment as most of the routine procedures that I used to have from the NHS have been denied to me. Has anyone tried to use the NHS app lately to get a checkup ? Unless you have a previously diagnosed condition you might as well expire and die trying to access the care needed to stay healthy. If you want treatment, pretend to be ill, if you cannot find physical symptoms then you can now say you suffer from “mental health” problems which will get you pills. All power to the drugs companies.

Cossack Dancers in Odessa at a ceremony welcoming EU day

So I went to Ukraine to get a couple of health problems diagnosed and treated and to get dental treatment. I now have Xrays and a treatment plan for my knee which 20 years ago began developing arthritis following a goat related industrial accident. And a treatment for a deep burn on my forearm due to a domestic accident trying to cook during a period of single life. Do you know that domestic ovens are not designed for persons over 1.8 m in height (aka men). I was able to get a proper tooth cleanup, last year I had to pay hundreds of pounds for serious peridontal work due to lack of maintenance.

Let me just state up front that I am not in denial about the seriousness of the disease. I believe Covid-19 to be a serious viral condition caused by a mutating bat/pig interaction which largely spreads through aerosolised breath particles. It is not particularly lethal but generates enough patients with co-morbidities needing hospital treatment to overwhelm most health services. With 20 years of co-working at the BBSRC Institute for Animal Health and having studied Applied Biology at MSc level I have a good grasp of the science and the issues involved in vaccine programs for animals of which humans are a subset.

But to access routine health treatment in Ukraine I had to get myself tested for Covid before departure and pay a monopoly provider to get tested on my return and self-isolate despite being vaccinated. I was tested for free as part of my treatment at a former Soviet sanatorium in the foothills of the Carpathians in Ukraine. The mandatory tests cost us over two hundreds pounds each in total, the most expensive being the tests mandated to a monopoly of CTM by the Scottish government (twice the price of tests in England). In fact the largest cost of travel was the testing. I understand the need for this but there are huge flaws in the system.

The test certificate is checked by a busy boarding clerk who looks at a piece of paper to see name and negative test and then waves you through to board the plane. The Expresstest at Edinburgh produces a nice .pdf without a QR code. Print it yourself and hope the ink doesn’t smudge. At Heathrow on the way out this was the least important document they check. On the way back through Borispol airport Kiev I had a certificate from the Universum clinic with a QR code which includes the URL of the data output of the Quiagen machine. But no-one scans that to automatically cross-check the data. I suspect that, particularly in the corrupt Ukraine, many of the certificates are fake. A huge opportunity to log and track data about individuals with the disease is being missed, which brings us to the interesting issues of how politics is interacting with policy.

I have been reading Anne Applebaum’s Twilight of Democracy and experiencing that mix of confusion and revulsion that many of us feel about the current governance of the UK. Daily we hear that the close advisers of our prime minister do not think he is up to the job and that the health minister is a serial liar. Our right wing nationalistic governments are conflicted. They want to declare our freedom from government controls whilst at the same time imposing the most draconian rhetoric about the need to enforce national boundaries and show the power of the state. Then they give us confusing messages about advice on travel and the law. Boris plays the liberal internationalist (his Dad has a house in Greece so its OK to travel to ones foreign property) who wants to set us free but appoints a Home Secretary who has taken the hostile environment policy of Theresa May to new levels of nastiness. The Border Controls on arrival in Edinburgh took as long as those of the USA for this returning citizen with two persons at each desk , checking each others work I guess.

The mismatch of rhetoric and action is shocking, there is a “woke” desire not to scapegoat Asian minorities for not getting vaccinated but then list Leicester, Bradford, Bolton, Burnley and South Glasgow as hotspots as if we don’t know our own countries Asian ghettoes. And then they keep flight arrivals open from India and have people arriving from Red list countries queue up at Heathrow with those from green list countries. The media repeat government statements uncritically for example quoting Nicola Sturgeon telling us not to travel to Bolton, an edict that has no validity in law even if it could be enforced at non-existent border controls.

Scottish government says it is against the law to visit a few parts of England no-one wants to go to any way. But it has no power to enforce or to prosecute this non-existent law. Are there roadblocks on the A1 where coppers ask if you have visited Bradford ? It is all fantasy. Meanwhile the BBC and others promote a culture of fear and stay at home which is largely unnecessary and has clearly scared huge numbers of people. The sort of people who walk along windy coast paths in Hazmat gear and who jump into the sea at the approach of a healthy looking jogger.

Politics and the cultural mindset also impose their own restrictions. On Austrian airlines they insisted that we buy and wear masks that conform to an ISO standard but efficiently serve you with drinks which mean you only wear it for a few minutes in the flight. We were told at Heathrow that we we would not be able to leave the Vienna airport terminal while we waited overnight for our connecting flight to Lviv but when we arrived we were ushered out of the terminal without any questions and stayed at the comfortable hotel opposite the terminal.

The UK now has some of the lowest Covid case rates in the Western world but imposes severe restrictions on how its previously free citizens live and travel. Ukraine (a similarly low incidence place) a country previously enslaved by Russian/Soviet/Nazi empires allows a free choice to wear a mask except in enclosed spaces and you can go to the ballet, drink in a bar and travel abroad . It was just pleasant to walk around without that end of days zombie atmosphere our deserted high streets have had for a year. To go into a pub and have a meal and beer without fear of censure is just such fun.

It is easy for the nutters on the internet to see this whole episode in our communal lives as a conspiracy of a supreme intelligence plotting the downfall of humanity into an end of days scenario. It is more like a conspiracy of dunces. Countries on a down cycle of quality government such as the UK where the press and politicians attack the institutions of state, promote stupidity (statutes for statues, unlimited flights from red zone countries, protect the overweight from the consequences of gluttony, splitting up the UK with their daft Brexit deal). Countries where things are on an upswing such as Ukraine trying to control corruption and fight the Russian land grab tend to do things better. That is a sad reflection on our once well governed country.

Reverse Transcriptase testing RT-PCR

A few years ago the ability to measure sequence of proteins in an RNA strand was limited and slow. But now millions of RT-PCR tests are being done every day and overnight to detect the marker strands of antigens to the Covid-19 virus.

Many people are confused by statements such as PCR is not a test. Which is correct. The test is reverse transciptase where a mirror image of the sequence of proteins created by the bodies immune response to infective virus (antigen) is compared to the sample following a complex extraction process. The PCR is an amplification process that converts the needle in a haystack of RNA to many needles in less haystack. At the same time a control is also amplified and so the comparison is with the amount in the amplified control.

There is a video explaining the test here http://<iframe width=”1280″ height=”720″ src=”https://www.youtube.com/embed/ThG_02miq-4″ title=”YouTube video player” frameborder=”0″ allow=”accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture” allowfullscreen></iframe>

The video shows a lot of hand processes but increasingly the steps are automated and the quality control logged to central databases so anomalies can be checked.

Why I work in Digital Agritechnology

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.