Farming Drives Toward ‘Precision Agriculture’ Technologies
THIS STORY ORIGINALLY appeared on Undark and is part of the Climate Desk collaboration.
Across Midwestern farms, if Girish Chowdhary has his way, farmers will someday release beagle-sized robots into their fields like a pack of hounds flushing pheasant. The robots, he says, will scurry in the cool shade beneath a wide diversity of plants, pulling weeds, planting cover crops, diagnosing plant infections, and gathering data to help farmers optimize their farms.
Chowdhary, a researcher at the University of Illinois, works surrounded by corn, one of the most productive monocultures in the world. In the United States, the corn industry was valued at $82.6 billion in 2021, but it—like almost every other segment of the agricultural economy—faces daunting problems, including changing weather patterns, environmental degradation, severe labor shortages, and the rising cost of key inputs: herbicides, pesticides, and seed.
Agribusiness as a whole is betting that the world has reached the tipping point where desperate need caused by a growing population, the economic realities of conventional farming, and advancing technology converge to require something called precision agriculture, which aims to minimize inputs and the costs and environmental problems that go with them.
No segment of agriculture is without its passionate advocates of robotics and artificial intelligence as solutions to, basically, all the problems facing farmers today. The extent of their visions ranges from technology that overlays existing farm practices to a comprehensive rethinking of agriculture that eliminates tractors, soil, sunlight, weather, and even being outdoors as factors in farm life.
But the promises of precision agriculture still haven’t been met. Because most of the promised systems aren’t on the market, few final prices have been set, and there’s precious little real-world data proving whether they work.
“The marketing around precision agriculture, that it’s going to have a huge impact, we don’t have the data for that yet,” says Emily Duncan, a researcher in the Department of Geography, Environment, and Geomatics at the University of Guelph in Canada. “Going back to the idea that we want to reduce the use of inputs, precision agriculture doesn’t necessarily say we’re going to be using less overall.”
Even so, Chowdhary, who is a cofounder and chief technical officer of Earthsense, the company that makes those beagle-sized robots, is hopeful that the adoption of his robots will propel farmers well past precision agriculture, to think about the business of farming in a whole new way. Right now, he says, most farmers focus on yield, defining success as growing more on the same amount of land. The result: horizon-to-horizon, industrial monocultures saturated with chemicals and tended by massive and increasingly expensive machinery. With the help of his robots, Chowdhary foresees a future, instead, of smaller farms living more in harmony with nature, growing a diversity of higher-value crops with fewer chemicals.
“The biggest thing we can do is make it easier for farmers to focus on profit, and not just on yield,” Chowdhary wrote in an email to Undark. “Management tools that help reduce fertilizer and herbicide costs while improving the quality of land and keeping yield up will help farmers realize more profit through fundamentally more sustainable techniques.”
Chowdhary’s robots may help farmers cut costs by, among other things, pulling weeds that compete with corn. For centuries, farmers tamed weeds with hoes and plows. World War II gave rise to the modern chemical industry, and the herbicides it produced made farmers perceive weeds as a non-issue, leaving the ground beneath crops like corn unnaturally bare and vastly increasing the yield per acre, revolutionizing the farm economy.
Nature is persistent, however, and inevitably weeds evolved that resist herbicides. To compensate, suppliers blend powerful and increasingly expensive herbicidal cocktails and genetically modify seed to be chemically resistant. That agricultural arms race traps farmers in a cycle of rising costs, threatens precious water resources, and only works until, as Iowa farmer Earl Slinker puts it, “you go out and spray it one year and it doesn’t do anything.” The result is a smaller harvest, according to Slinker, which in the low-profit-margin business of farming can mean disaster.
The question that underlies all the theorizing is both economic and cultural: Are farmers going to buy in?
“The challenge is demonstrating the benefits to farmers and making these things easy to adopt,” says Madhu Khanna, who studies technology adoption at the University of Illinois Department of Agriculture and Consumer Economics. “For most of these technologies, the benefits are uncertain.”
IN AGRICULTURE, THE conventional wisdom is that the outcome of the race to the farm of the future will be determined by clear-eyed economic decisionmaking. If robotics and artificial intelligence make business sense, the market will develop. “Farmers and growers are very smart about that,” says Baskar Ganapathysubramanian of Iowa State University’s Artificial Intelligence Institute for Resilient Agriculture. “From a hardware and software perspective, if there’s a clear value proposition,” he adds, “they’re going to choose it.”
The growth numbers suggest farmers are open to the potential benefits of advanced technology. Overall, farmers spent almost $25 billion on tractors and other farm equipment in 2020. While Covid-19 slowed the adoption of robotics, farms worldwide are expected to incorporate the technology into their operations faster than the industrial market—increases of 19.3 percent and 12.3 percent, respectively, over five years. The global research firm MarketsandMarkets estimates that spending on robots will go from nearly $5 billion in 2021 to almost $12 billion in 2026. One result of that optimism, according to CropLife, a US agribusiness publication, is that the third quarter of 2021 saw more venture capital investment in agriculture technology startups than ever: more than $4 billion.
“So few people have experience with farming,” says Joe Anderson, an agricultural historian and professor at Mount Royal University in Calgary. “They assume there’s more stasis than there has been. There are lots of innovations. There have been lots of changes.”
The tractors dragging huge implements across fertile fields feature technology that has outpaced even the most advanced automobiles. Many are steered by GPS, following paths mapped out over years of planting and harvest, rendering the farmer in the air-conditioned, video-equipped cab not much more than a passenger.