Category: Climate Change

What is Robot Hayes

What I am doing at Robot Hayes

Dr Toby Mottram FREng, FIAgrE

After a career in farming and engineering I decided I wanted to contribute my expertise to solving the biggest problems in the UK providing fresh, healthy food in a rapidly changing climate. In my opinion UK Government sponsorship of agricultural research has had very little impact on farming and quality food production that has diminished in my lifetime. The reasons for this failure would take an angry book to discuss. I prefer to be active by doing what I think is important on my own land and lead by practical example.

The key things I want to work on are:-

  • the loss of connection of the people from the ability to grow food
  • the overuse of agrochemicals
  • the changing climate particularly in rainfall patterns
  • the improvement of soil carbon levels
  • the production of vegetables and fruit throughout the year
  • reducing the drudgery in field work with robotic tools

In 2022 after a long search during those strange isolational years I managed to buy an unnamed field in Devon. I chose it for its South facing aspect, fertile Pebblebed soil and easy access from a busy main road. It is not far from Exeter and I suspect that in a few years it will effectively be a green island in the suburban sprawl favoured by the District Council.

My first actions were to give the field the name Robot Hayes to reflect my aims, plant shelter belts to reduce wind damage in the long term, install a polytunnel to extend the growing season and a lockup container for tools and seeds. I divided the best part of the land into 48 x 100 sq m allotments and began renting these out to local people. That brings a whole different aspect to the field which I suspect was basically a sheep run and hay field without a single human for 360 days a year.

After adding some solar panels I was able to install a small robot inside the polytunnel to manage the vegetables with image processing and controledl watering and weeding. In the second winter I began planting fruit trees and vines. Of course the first things that happened was a heatwave in 2023 and then a wet wet growing season in 2024. This convinced me more and more that the management of field crops in the UK needs to adapt.

The heavy rain that seems to becoming common is now capable of damaging growing plants and washing away topsoil. Although average temperatures are rising we also get sudden bursts of polar wind that can cause frost damage.

So we need to integrate more rows of sheltering bush perennial crops, shade and rainbreak covers, and ventilated polytunnels. This of course is in addition to planting, growing and weeding without resort to chemical warfare on the environment, while protecting crops from rabbits, deer and insects.

Vegetables in a changing climate

Devon has a very mild climate with summer heat and winter chill moderated by the sea but even here we see the climate changing. This June it was so hot that my clay soil dried out to dust after a wet winter, temperatures in the polytunnel went over 50C. As for rain we seem to get showers so heavy that they smash plants and wash out any exposed soil.

I would love a greenhouse as the technology has advanced hugely and makes a perfect platform for robotic management even down to picking and packing vegetables but the capital costs are huge (say £20k for 100 sq m) and running costs subject to uncontrollable fuel cost variations.

So I need more flexible methods of controlling the exposure of plants to the elements at a reasonable cost. At the Venice Biennale I saw a very interesting exhibit of Taiwanese farm buildings evolved to manage their high value fruit and vegetable crops in semi tropical latitudes but with mountains that have cold and snowy conditions. They also get typhoons with very high winds and extreme rainfall.

This summer I used a tarpaulin over the polytunnel to reduce the solar exposure but this is a temporary and difficult to manage option. A polytunnel can of course be adapted with different covers and ventilation but it is hard to change the covering as we bury the sides in soil to stop the wind blowing the covers away.


Figure 1: Model of a fruit farm growing under a frame with an extendable shade/rain filter cover

The Taiwanese style is to create a rigid frame maybe 2.4 m (8’) above ground with tensile wire between the rigid frames that can support crops like tomatoes and beans and also provide a guide and support for covers that can be winched into position as required. I am going to try and experiment with these next season to understand the practicalities. We don’t get typhoons in Devon but we get a lot of wind and periodic heavy rain. I think I will use a mesh of plastic to allow rain to percolate and shade to stop severe burning.

a model of a vegetable plot cover by a permeable cover about 2.4 m above the crop

Food shortages caused by flooding

trucks in floods
Photo by Jéan Béller on Unsplash

The globalised trading network that grew up with the rise of China and the collapse of the Soviet Empire has massively changed where food and other goods are produced in relation to their markets. However, the fragility of this network was brought home during the Covid-19 pandemic and its aftershocks. For my business two packages shipped in March 2020 were stuck in airports and customs facilities for months causing a loss of major customers. Similarly, sudden changes in politics such as Brexit and the invasion of Ukraine and subsequent sanctioning of criminal gangs led to major disruptions to fresh food trade in UK and the Black Sea trade in grains to Africa and the Middle East. These political driven disruptions will be overcome but a more fundamental long term threat is disruption to food supply due to climate change.

In 2023 there have been major storms and floods that have damaged the transport infrastructure in numerous places. Countries around the world have seen major floods with smashed bridges, washed out roads and huge damage to croplands in China, Greece, Libya, Slovenia to name a few (www.floodlist.com) . Climate change is bringing more intense rainstorms driven by a more dynamic atmospheric hydrological cycle. These lead to flash floods particularly in urban areas where water cannot be absorbed by non-porous surfaces. The world’s most productive land is often situated in riverine and coastal littorals that are at greater risk than ever of flooding.

The disruption to fresh food supply is particularly a risk as the products are perishable and need to be delivered within a minimum few days of harvest via a cold chain network. A disruption of a few days is a serious matter and thus it will become more important to develop short supply chains to reduce the risk of disruption. This is a strong argument for local peri-urban horticulture.

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.