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.
After two years of hard work it is time to start talking about Robot Hayes
Most British people now get a large proportion of their calories from processed and ultra-processed food and drinks stabilised chemically for a long shelf life and these foods are associated with rising nutritional disorders such as obesity and type 2 Diabetes. The cost and scarcity of labour close to our cities has caused retailers to source “fresh” food from distant areas such as Spain, Peru and so on. The changes to the ecosystems in areas such as Murcia in Spain are dramatic and unsustainable thus reducing food security. Growing our own vegetables and fruits close to the point of consumption has to be a key policy objective for the new government. We need to encourage more local production and the development of labour saving technology and this is what I have set out to do at Robot Hayes.
I have had a long career in agricultural engineering research co-inventing robotic milking, and developing sensors for monitoring dairy cow health and fertility. During the pandemic I sold my two start up businesses and used the money in 2022 to buy a small south facing field with good soil and road access so as to do my part in solving the food crisis which is destroying people’s health. The word Hayes is common in Devon signifying an enclosure or field so as I will develop and test robots here I gave it that name.
I now rent out 100 sq m allotments to local people to grow whatever they want. . The allotment system has been around in the UK for centuries but fell into the hands of local authorities who have been slow to respond to the huge demand for people to grow their own food. Allotment areas have long waiting lists even as some plots fall into disuse. A mature allotment area is often the most biodiverse area in the urban environment. There are hundreds of people on the waiting lists for allotments nearby. In the area East of the M5 at Exeter eight thousand (8000) new houses and flats are planned to join the 1000s already being built at Cranbrook with tiny gardens within a couple of miles of my field.
The enthusiasm of my dozen or so gardeners is overwhelming and a genuine community spirit is developing with many young families. I love the sound of children’s voices as they play in the gardens. Already we have buzzards and owls flying over as the vole and field mice populate the uncultivated fringes of woodland that I have planted and herons look for prey in the ponds. I daresay some existing locals will dislike the visual intrusion and prefer vast empty fields of commodity crops. More farmers should offer allotments, it doesn’t require planning permission and has a margin per hectare ten times that of cereals.
One of our newly established allotments
I retain a number of plots for myself so that I can develop systems to make organic vegetable production less labour intensive. No-one enjoys weeding vegetables, it is back breaking and continuous during the growing season. Our rental contracts are based on the typical local authority contract but with more flexibility and we have a few site rules such as no chemical pesticides or fertiliser so the emphasis is on innovating organic types of husbandry.
I bought and installed my first robot in a polytunnel in 2023. It is an open source design from farmBot in California using a Raspberry Pi computer running in the Python language and has many features that I have not had a chance to explore yet. I mostly use it for watering and hoeing and this winter I hope to demonstrate fresh vegetable production in our mild Devon climate. It needs to run in a polytunnel raised bed to protect its electroonics and aluminium drive rails from the weather. Because of its precision I think I will focus on raising seedlings of exotics (peppers and spices etc) in pots for planting out in the spring. With my hard won expertise I think we can start offering robotically managed polytunnels to hotels and restaurants and private houses locally to grow their own organic produce with minimal labour. I need to find a business partner who can focus on developing that business.
The first robot at Robot Hayes was bought from farmBot and installed in a polytunnel
Polytunnels have their place but we can grow a lot in open field situations and this is the focus of my engineering activity this year. I currently have a Defra funded Farm Innovation grant managed by InnovateUK to develop safer working practices for horticulture. I cannot say too much as some of the technology that I and my small team are developing will be patented. Our focus is to convert existing tractors to be more precise and safe. Modern SatNav systems can accurately position a hoe blade to within a centimetre of a target, which means that we can develop sowing and weeding systems that do not require manual labour. Cutting and porting vegetables is still very labour intensive, often on muddy winter fields so we need safety systems that will stop a machine if someone is in danger. Farm accidents with moving machinery are still common and we need new technology to reduce risks.
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.
