It is going to be a hot one, Joe thinks as he finishes servicing his flock of new ag bots.
Last year at this time, he could look forward to a sweaty day of field spraying, but this morning he has scheduled a meeting with his consulting agrologist to determine if there’s money to be made in a nutrient top dressing after the recent rain.
As the ag bots he bought in the spring whiz out of the yard on the way to the field to dispatch weeds, Joe is happy to be spending his time more profitably, and that the robots’ precise weed removal will keep his environmentally sensitive neighbours happy.
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Ever since tractors replaced horses, the trend in crop production machinery has been “bigger is better.”
The latest combines, tractors and sprayers lumber across fields, sprouting satellite receivers and mini computers.
Roaring under the power of diesel engines boasting hundreds of horsepower, they gobble acres like space age giants.
But the future farm might widen its embrace to include new slogans such as small is beautiful and robotics rock.
Already, new technology is increasing precision and allowing the harvest of information as well as crop. The future could see this carried far beyond today’s limits.
A major limitation on the farm is the human operator, who cannot work around the clock and whose time is most profitably spent in management rather than equipment operation.
That has some analysts predicting that robots may soon take over tasks now done by farmers.
Trever Crowe, dean of agricultural engineering at the University of Saskatchewan, believes crop scouting may be the first unmanned operation seen in prairie fields.
Crowe’s research team is developing a golf cart-based machine that will wander fields seeking weeds and measuring nitrogen levels in plant leaves.
“These tools can work 24 hours a day and then wirelessly send the data back to the farm office with information about crop and weed development,” he said.
Ron Palmer, a University of Regina professor of electronic systems engineering, also thinks small, automated equipment with precise guidance will find a home on future farms.
The veteran agricultural engineer is president of Accutrak Systems Ltd., which helped pioneer auto-steering and farm machinery guidance systems in North America.
Palmer said global positioning systems have made it possible to auto-steer equipment, reducing operator error and fatigue, but in the future GPS will be seen as “the awkward, clumsy tool that it is.”
“It isn’t a fine enough tool to eliminate overlapping applications. When it comes to larger equipment, 70-foot air drills or 120-foot sprayers, no system will be,” he said.
Palmer said the key to farm efficiency is smaller equipment and better-managed land.
Unmanned two metre wide machines could traverse fields, removing weeds mechanically with targeted water jets or a few drops of glyphosate or other low risk, systemic herbicides, he said.
“Farmers will spend their time assigning the work to the machines and maintaining them. Fuel, reloading, minor repairs, field moves, that sort of work … and planning their field operations.”
Operating without human intervention and with little disruption of soil, these field-bots will work around the clock in all weather conditions.
Palmer said GPS is not refined enough to reliably work between seed rows or even where trees or other conditions interfere with signals.
He sees ground-based, frequency-hopping, spread-spectrum systems replacing GPS as the signal of choice to control farm equipment.
“It will be a matter of defining where plants should or shouldn’t be and eliminating those in the wrong place. Weeds are plants in the wrong place,” he said.
With chemical weed control costs exceeding $25 per acre, Palmer said farmers could easily make small automated equipment pay.
Freed from machinery operation, the future farmer will apply more brain power to his operation. Agronomist Rob Saik of Agri-Trend Agrology Ltd. in Red Deer said advanced information systems will be needed to make precision applications pay.
“Mapping systems that provide producers with insect and disease movement and populations, weather information and plant management will all be needed,” he said.
“Farmers will be managing too many crops to be expert in all of them, but they will be experts in managing information.”
To assist them, agronomic consultants will become more important.
“Farmers will hire agronomists to provide them with the best production information available for the crop they are producing and the season’s conditions. In many ways, that will mean implementing a lot of what we already know about crop production.”
