The Future Of Farm Robots

Robots are predicted to play an ever-increasing role in agriculture, but there is much debate about whether these will be large or small machines. Glenneis Kriel reports.

- Glenneis Kriel

FAST FACTS

• Big machines are capable of covering huge areas in one day.
• Cost is currently one of the main factors restricting the uptake of robots on farms.

Robots are already used across agriculture’s supply chain, and they are bound to become more autonomous and affordable. A question arising now is whether these will be gigantic machines, such as the smart harvesters used in the grain industry, or smaller ones able to work with existing farming equipment.

In ‘Farm robots: ecological utopia or dystopia’, published in Trends in Ecology and Evolution, agricultural economist Thomas Daum suggests that we might end up with fleets of small, intelligent robots, fuelled by sustainable energy, farming in harmony with nature, or a dystopian situation where large robots subdue the landscape with heavy machinery and artificial chemicals, resulting in humans becoming even more dissociated from nature and the origin of their food.

Daum says the future will probably be a mixture of these, but hopes the scenarios outlined will spark conversation and allow for an informed choice to be made.

So far, the development of semi-autonomous and autonomous vehicles are refuting Daum’s dystopian scenario. They result in more judicial use of fertiliser and pesticides, thanks to being equipped with precision technology, global positioning systems and advanced sensors.