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Making Small Farms More Sustainable — and Profitable

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Smallholder farms provide a large proportion of food supply in developing economies, but 40% of these farmers live on less than U.S.$2/day. With a rapidly growing global population it is imperative to improve the productivity and security of farmers making up this sector. This article presents the results of Better Life Farming, an ecosystem that connects smallholder farmers in India, Indonesia, and Bangladesh to the capabilities, products, and services of corporations and NGOs.

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As the world population grows and climate change intensifies, how can we transform the food supply chain to be more sustainable and resilient? Mike Zelkind, co-founder and CEO of 80 Acres Farms, is building a network of hyper-efficient, high-tech, indoor farms to provide local communities with fresh, nutritious produce. He joins Azeem Azhar to discuss the challenges of disrupting the farming industry to innovate the future of food.

They also discuss:

Why fruits and vegetables are now bred for logistics, not for flavor and nutrition.

How robotics and AI are being used to optimize yield, taste, and growing time.

Why "stressing" plants is key to making them healthy.

Further resources:
Exponential View newsletter HBR Presents is a network of podcasts curated by HBR editors, bringing you the best business ideas from the leading minds in management. The views and opinions expressed are solely those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of Harvard Business Review or its affiliates.

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How AI and Genomics Are Reshaping Farming

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As the world population grows and climate change intensifies, how can we transform the food supply chain to be more sustainable and resilient? Mike Zelkind, co-founder and CEO of 80 Acres Farms, is building a network of hyper-efficient, high-tech, indoor farms to provide local communities with fresh, nutritious produce.

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Agribots, driverless tractors and other types of farm automation form an industry that is expected to grow at around 23% a year and to be worth more than $20bn by 2025

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S LOWLY BUT surely, a spidery machine about the size of a golf cart swings an electrode over a tray of plants. Every few seconds there is a small puff of smoke as a weed keels over, having been zapped with a high voltage. The device doing the zapping is a prototype weeding robot developed by the Small Robot Company, a new firm operating out of an old munitions depot near Salisbury, in south-west Britain.

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Such machines, called "agribots", are appearing in many shapes and sizes from a variety of companies. Muddy tracks from other prototypes lead into the Small Robot Company's workshop, where a row of 3 D printers make bright orange components out of plastic. That makes parts easier to find should they fall off in a field, which is a sure sign that farmers are at work here, with roboticists and scientists.

Weed control is essential for improving crop yields, but it is getting increasingly difficult. Some weeds are becoming resistant to herbicides, which face stricter regulation and in some cases are being banned. On top of that, many consumers want organic produce. And labour shortages mean that repeatedly tilling the soil to disrupt weed growth using a mechanical hoe towed behind a tractor is costly, time consuming and not always practical.

Weeding is a chore that most farmers would happily hand to robots. But for a robot to do the job properly it must be able to distinguish a weed from what is being cultivated. That is becoming easier with advances in computer vision. Artificial-intelligence ( AI) algorithms are getting better at classifying images. Some phone apps can now identify a plant from just a photo. Robots equipped with cameras will not only weed but automate other farming roles. Agribots, driverless tractors and other types of farm automation form an industry that is expected to grow at around 23% a year and to be worth more than $20bn by 2025, according to MarketsandMarkets, an American research firm.

Having spotted a weed, there are several ways to try to kill it. The Small Robot Company's weeding agribot, called Dick, electrocutes them. The robot's wheels work like an electrode to make contact with the ground while another electrode is moved to touch the plant. This makes a circuit through the plant and creates heat, effectively boiling the plant's cells and killing it from stem to root instantly. It can take several thousand volts, although this is adjusted according to the type of weed. The remnants of the plant can then be left to naturally decompose into the soil.

Shocking

Dick will work with two other agribots, Tom and Harry, all of them electrically powered. The idea, says Ben Scott-Robinson, one of the company's co-founders, is that Tom will routinely scan fields to a level of detail of just a few centimetres. Using its cameras and other sensors, the spindly four-wheel-drive machine can cover about 20 hectares a day, mapping the health of every plant, along with soil conditions. When weeds appear, Dick will be dispatched to zap them. Harry, the third agribot, is under development for tasks such as seeding and applying precise levels of fertiliser to each plant, a process known as microdosing.

Tom will go into commercial production in August. Early versions are already in use on some farms in Britain, including the Leckford Estate, which is run by a large supermarket chain. Dick will begin trials later this year. Tom has already learnt how to spot broadleaved weeds and is being trained in the more difficult art of identifying grass-type weeds, which look similar to cereals. Unlike many vegetables, cereals are grown more densely in rows, which makes the mechanical hoeing of weeds a tricky operation. Armed with Tom's algorithms, Dick should be able to zap grassy weeds in cereals accurately.

The company will offer its robots as a service. Tom will live in a kennel on the farm, where it will download data for the farmer and recharge. Dick and Harry will be delivered to farms as and when they are needed, much as farmers already bring in contractors. This business model, reckons Mr Scott-Robinson, will demonstrate to farmers that the cost of using agribots will be competitive with other weed-control measures and provide additional benefits, such as being chemical-free.

Dick's zapping system is supplied by RootWave, another small British company, based near Leamington Spa. RootWave, which calls the process "electricide", already makes a hand-held version for spot weeding. Electricide does not disturb the soil or harm microbes, says Andrew Diprose, the firm's boss. As for safety, agribots would-like all farm machinery-need to be handled by trained operators. Built-in safety features, such as sensors that detect an approaching person or animal and shut the robot down, would reduce risks.

RootWave is working with other companies interested in electricide. These include Steketee, a Dutch producer of agricultural equipment. Its tractor-towed hoes already benefit from computer vision. Steketee equips one machine with cameras that detect well-spaced crops, such as vegetables, and then moves the hoeing knives in and out to weed not just along the rows, but also between individual plants.

Agribots can also hoe. Sebastien Boyer, an AI expert who has worked for IBM and Facebook, co-founded FarmWise, a San Francisco-based company, in 2016 to develop farming robots. After field trials, the firm is about to launch its first agribot, called Titan. This can navigate autonomously around a field of vegetables, such as lettuce, broccoli and cauliflower, identifying individual plants and their location. As it moves, Titan deploys a series of rotary blades, which are automatically adjusted to slice into the soil at an appropriate depth to dispatch any weeds. Future versions will do other jobs, such as seeding and microdosing fertiliser and pest treatments directly to individual plants. "It is personalised care for plants," says Mr Boyer.

Self-contained agribots will have to compete with systems towed by smart tractors. Most modern tractors and combine harvesters can steer themselves across fields using satellite positioning and other sensors. Some tractors use digital maps of crops obtained by satellites and drones to highlight the places that require fertiliser or pesticides. Big tractor-producers, such as John Deere and CNH Industrial, which makes Case and New Holland machines (and whose largest shareholder owns shares in The Economist Group), are developing fully autonomous tractors.

When chemicals are required on crops, both tractor-towed systems and agribots could apply microdoses to the individual plants that require them, rather than spraying an entire field. Some trials have suggested microdosing could reduce the amount of herbicide being sprayed on a crop by 90% or more. BASF, a German chemical giant, is working with Bosch, a German engineering firm, on a spraying system that identifies plants and then applies herbicides in just such a targeted way.

The development of harvesting agribots is also being driven by A I. These machines tend to come in many different shapes and sizes and use a variety of systems specifically tailored to pick individual crops, such as tomatoes, asparagus and lettuce. This suggests that agribots that weed and care for plants will evolve in a similar manner, their form depending on the crop concerned and its location, which could be a field, a vineyard or an orchard. Some may be smart machines towed by fully autonomous tractors, while in other cases swarms of small agribots will be employed. The one sure thing is that farmers won't spend a penny on any of them unless they prove they are up to the job.■

This article appeared in the Science & technology section of the print edition under the headline "Farming with Tom, Dick and Harry"

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Using artificial intelligence, agricultural robots are on the rise

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S LOWLY BUT surely, a spidery machine about the size of a golf cart swings an electrode over a tray of plants. Every few seconds there is a small puff of smoke as a weed keels over, having been zapped with a high voltage.

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https://ssires.tec.mx/es/noticia/salvar-las-abejas

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Una tercera parte de la dieta humana, según el Departamento de Agricultura de los Estados Unidos (USDA por sus siglas en inglés), depende de plantas polinizadas por insectos. Y las abejas hacen la mayor parte de ese trabajo.

Pero las abejas productoras de miel están en peligro. Los ácaros parásitos, los pesticidas, y el colapso de sus colonias sin causa aparente, fenómeno llamado problema de colapso de colonias (CCD por sus siglas en inglés), están provocando la mala salud de las abejas y la disminución de su población en todo el mundo.

En un esfuerzo por salvar a las abejas y reforzar el suministro mundial de alimentos, Edete, una empresa de tecnología agrícola con sede en Israel, se ha propuesto reducir la presión sobre las abejas al ayudarles con la polinización de los cultivos. Desde su fundación en 2016, Edete ha desarrollado y probado un proceso de polinización artificial mediante polinizadores mecánicos que pueden operar día y noche.

"Creemos que la humanidad debe hacer todo lo que esté a su alcance para preservar las poblaciones de insectos", dice la cofundadora de Edete, Keren Mimran. "Sin embargo, mientras se necesite más tierra agrícola para sostener el constante crecimiento de la población mundial, esto a expensas del hábitat natural de los insectos y otros animales, y mientras también se necesite el uso de pesticidas y herbicidas, los cuales son perjudiciales para las abejas y los insectos, nuestra seguridad alimentaria necesita de un reemplazo tecnológico".
Después de recoger el polen, dos polinizadores mecánicos de Edete dispersan el polen seco en los almendros.
El proceso de polinización artificial de Edete incluye tanto la recolección como la dispersión del polen. Primero, las flores se cosechan mecánicamente; el polen es separado cuidadosamente para mantener su capacidad de germinar semillas.

"Cuando llega la época de floración, los polinizadores mecánicos de Edete dispersan el polen seco y cargado electrostáticamente en los árboles, siguiendo el contorno de cada árbol mediante sensores lidar [luz láser] y vectores de aire controlados, lo que permite que se produzca la fertilización", explica Mimran.

Con base en cuatro años de pruebas de campo, Edete ha demostrado que sus polinizadores mecánicos pueden asegurar y aumentar el rendimiento de los cultivos. Edete espera que sus polinizadores eviten la exposición de las abejas a pesticidas y herbicidas, así como prevenir el que los apicultores deban transportar a las abejas por largas distancias, un viaje que las aleja de fuentes de nutrición establecidas y que genera angustia para colonias enteras.

Edete está financiada por inversores ángel, por una comunidad colectiva de kibutz en Israel, y por subvenciones de la Innovation Authority (Autoridad de innovación) de dicho país. En 2017, a manera de programas piloto, expandió sus pruebas a varios acres en Israel y Australia. En agosto de 2018, la compañía comenzó a trabajar en Australia debido a que es el segundo lugar en cultivo de almendra, solo detrás de Estados Unidos; y a que su ubicación en el hemisferio sur también le permite a Edete duplicar sus periodos de prueba, ya que los almendros florecen solo una vez al año en cada hemisferio.

"En pruebas de campo a pequeña escala en Israel, hemos conseguido aumentar la producción de almendras como manera de reemplazar totalmente la polinización por abejas y hemos conseguido demostrar un aumento en la producción de almendras como complemento de la polinización por abejas en un huerto de pocos acres en Israel", dice Mimran. Edete produjo un banco de polen por primera vez en Australia, en agosto de 2019, y había planeado un piloto completo de polinización artificial en agosto de 2020; pero este se pospuso debido a la COVID-19. A pesar de los contratiempos por la pandemia, Edete planea recurrir a contratos remunerados con productores de almendra para 2023.

Durante la pandemia, Edete ha medido su éxito al probar su tecnología patentada; al aumentar la escala de sus pruebas de ramas a árboles completos, de medio acre a acres completos, y al mostrar resultados reiterados de crecimiento de la producción.

Sin embargo, las nuevas tecnologías generan advertencias e incertidumbres. Mark Winston, biólogo de la Universidad Simon Fraser, quien ha dedicado su carrera a estudiar a las abejas, menciona que a menudo se introducen nuevas prácticas agrícolas antes de que se hayan estudiado sus efectos secundarios.

Una de las preocupaciones es la sensibilidad de las abejas al movimiento. "Máquinas que zumban del tamaño de un depredador afectarían a las abejas en su búsqueda de flores", apunta Winston. Depender de manera excesiva de la tecnología también puede tener sus peligros. "Para la polinización, las abejas han evolucionado junto con las flores por más de 100 millones de años. Durante ese tiempo, su servicio de polinización se ha perfeccionado", dice Winston. "Quizá, una mejor estrategia sería optar por sistemas agrícolas más sustentables que integren a las poblaciones de abejas sanas con el manejo de los cultivos."

No es sorpresa que el mercado para asegurar y mejorar el rendimiento de los cultivos sea enorme. Tan solo en el Valle Central de California, en el verano las abejas producen una cosecha que genera más del 80% de la producción mundial de almendra. En 2018, California produjo más de 5 mil millones de dólares en almendras, según el departamento de alimentos y agricultura.

Y ese es solo un cultivo. El proceso de polinización artificial de Edete podría potencialmente ser utilizado para polinizar cultivos de cereza, manzana y pistachos, mientras protege y salva a miles de abejas en el proceso.

Luke O'Neill es el propietario de Genuine Communications. Ayuda a los directores de marketing, a los fundadores y a sus equipos de marketing a crear marcas comerciales y atraer clientes ideales.

Traducción del artículo Saving the Honeybees por Leticia Arlet Neria Durán. Como becaria Conacyt, obtuvo su doctorado por la Universidad de St Andrews, Escocia, con una tesis relacionada con el humor y la resistencia política durante la guerra sucia en México. Sus temas de interés son la argumentación, los estudios culturales, de medios de comunicación y la relación de todos estos con la historia.

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Una tercera parte de la dieta humana, según el Departamento de Agricultura de los Estados Unidos (USDA por sus siglas en inglés), depende de plantas polinizadas por insectos. Y las abejas hacen la mayor parte de ese trabajo. Pero las abejas productoras de miel están en peligro.

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It's a cloudy day in early October and I'm circling my rented around a maze of industrial buildings in Hamilton, Ohio. Hamilton is a small city 30 miles north of Cincinnati with a population of just over 62,000 people. Like much of Ohio, farming is important here.

I'm on my way to a farm called 80 Acres, but it isn't the sprawling midwestern wheat field you're picturing in your mind. This tech-centric farm is indoors, housed entirely in a nondescript 10,000-square-foot warehouse.

Food and agriculture are the top contributors to Ohio's economy. There are about 78,000 farms in Ohio, putting it near the top of every list ranking US states by number of farms. Its biggest crops are soybeans, corn and wheat.

But US farming is in trouble. There are roughly 2 million farms in the country spread across 900 million acres and they earned a total of $389 billion in sales in 2017, according to the 2017 Census of Agriculture, released in April 2019. All three of those numbers are lower than they were five years ago. There are fewer farms, there's less land dedicated to agriculture and the remaining farms are making less money.

There are a lot of reasons for these declines, from dropping commodity prices, to climate change and a trade war with China. There's also a growing trend of larger farms making the majority of the profits. Less than four percent of US farms made more than two thirds of agriculture sales in 2017.

80 Acres Farms doesn't just want to make fresh, local produce for Cincinnati and neighboring areas; it wants to completely overhaul the food system in the US.

"We decided that the [food] industry was really broken and that it had to be fixed from within. Farmers are struggling and theydon't want their kids to be in farming," 80 Acres CEO Mike Zelkind explains as we watch a robot named "Sam" expertly maneuver containers of leafy greens around a series of stacked shipping containers inside the Hamilton warehouse.

I'm here to see how 80 Acres is changing farming for this corner of Ohio -- and how its sister company, Infinite Acres, is selling its sustainable technology to other farms with an ultimate goal of "feeding the world."

A plan to feed the world

Zelkind and Tisha Livingston, the president of 80 Acres and CEO of Infinite Acres, came up with the idea for their farm in 2015. Back then, "controlled-environment agriculture" -- more commonly known as indoor or vertical farming -- was a relatively new industry. Indoor farming is a type of climate-controlled agriculture that typically relies on artificial lights and other technology to grow crops indoors.

Zelkind has a lot of respect for early indoor farming pioneers, but he says there's one thing they don't have that sets 80 Acres Farms apart: He and Livingston have over 50 years of combined experience in the food industry.

Zelkind worked for General Mills from 1991-1996. He later transitioned to VP and SVP roles at ConAgra Foods, Bumble Bee Foods and AdvancePierre Foods. He was the CEO of Sager Creek Vegetable Company before he and Livingston co-founded 80 Acres.

Livingston held various roles at Pierre Foods and AdvancePierre Foods from 1995-2014, before becoming a VP and then COO at Sager Creek Vegetable Company.

We're exhilarated and we're scared and we've gotten further than anybody else we know. And we're absolutely nowhere. We know that this won't cut it, and this is yesterday. We're working on tomorrow.

The duo witnessed firsthand the systemic problems with the food industry for decades. Zelkind says three things need to happen for any long-lasting, positive change to take place: We need to grow things differently, change the supply chain and distribution channels and merchandise differently.

For 80 Acres Farms, "growing things differently" translates to indoor farming.

Indoor farms can grow produce without pesticides, year-round. That immediately negates concerns about any of the synthetic or natural pesticides used in commercial and organic agricultural production and the inherent seasonality of traditional outdoor farming, as well as weather-related issues due to climate change such as droughts and floods.

"Even if you grow it differently, you can't stick it on some broken supply chain," Zelkind adds. Tomatoes and strawberries are bred for transportation -- and food in the US travels at least 2,000 miles on average to get from the farm to your grocery store shelf, he explains.

Tomatoes and strawberries are specifically bred to have thicker skins and they're picked from farms before they're ripe -- just so they will survive the 2,000 journey to your town. When you factor in the travel time, the shelf life of produce is significantly lower than it would've been if it were picked at peak ripeness and sent to a local store.

80 Acres puts its farms near the stores it serves and currently has six fully operational facilities. There's one in Alabama, one in North Carolina, two in Arkansas and two in Ohio, including the one I'm visiting today.

The name 80 Acres comes from their other Ohio farm, which is located on a quarter acres of land and grows the equivalent of 80 acres worth of crops.

The Ohio farms supply local grocery stores including Kroger, Whole Foods, Jungle Jim's and Dorothy Lane Market (a Dayton, Ohio-based store that also happens to make the best brownies I've ever tasted).

The final hurdle for 80 Acres is how to merchandise their food, which they package locally in-house. For this, they forget about the tech powering 80 Acres and lean on the taste. "We are sampling in the store aggressively because once you taste it, you know," says Rebecca Haders, vice president of creative and marketing at 80 Acres, who's tagging along with us today.

Of course, the tech really doesn't matter if the produce doesn't taste good -- but Zelkind, Livingston and Haders are unanimous: You really *can* taste the difference between typical grocery store produce and produce from 80 Acres Farms.

I bought a carton of their "Fireworks Tomatoes" at a Kroger in downtown Cincinnati and they were right; they were delicious. They tasted better than standard grocery store tomatoes, but on-par with the freshest, most flavorful produce at your local farmers market.

One drawback is the price. The 9-ounce carton of 80 Acres cherry tomatoes cost me $3.99. Kroger-brand conventional cherry tomatoes come in a 10-ounce carton and cost $2.49; Kroger's Simple-Truth-brand cherry tomatoes cost $2.99 for a 10-ounce carton. Even Whole Foods, a brand known for its higher pricing, sells packaged tomatoes for less than 80 Acres.

While 80 Acres' tomatoes were better, I wouldn't want to spend over $1 more on them each time I went to the store. I asked 80 Acres why budget-conscious customers -- or any customers, really -- should buy their produce when it costs more. Haders tells me the retailer sets the price, not 80 Acres.

"We know, based on consumer feedback, that the customer highly values our consistent flavor, truly pesticide-free, local, just picked-fresh tomatoes. Pricing is at par today with local, organic, but with efficiencies of scale, we intend to bring prices down without compromising product quality, freshness, or flavor," Haders adds.

Their focus may be on taste, but the truth is, Zelkind and the rest of the team care deeply about the tech. It's the crucial piece that has enabled 80 Acres Farms to grow so quickly. It's also the key component in solving the challenges associated with overhauling the food industry.

A top secret facility

"This facility is kind of top secret," Zelkind says as we stand in front of ten stacked shipping containers. "Everything in here is proprietary." I'm the first reporter to see it, I learn, and Zelkind, Livingston and Haders talk about the technology here in hushed, excited tones. While other indoor farms rely on tech, 80 Acres says it has taken a more holistic commercial approach with fully-automated robots loading produce for shipping and computer systems to help monitor the crops and manage their lighting schedule.

The team has spent five years on intensive trial and error to build this farm. They've brought in tech from other companies and also experimented by building their own to get as close as they can to an "optimal" indoor farm. Each new farm they build benefits from the things they learned the last time around -- and this facility in Hamilton is their newest and most high-tech farm.

"We're exhilarated and we're scared and we've gotten further than anybody else we know. And we're absolutely nowhere. We know that this won't cut it, and this is yesterday. We're working on tomorrow," Zelkind explains.

80 Acres' Hamilton farm has 10 shipping containers that measure 40 feet long, eight feet wide and eight feet tall. Each shipping container has between four to six levels and can accommodate roughly 4,000 plants. If every shipping container is filled to capacity, that's 40,000 plants total. This facility focuses on lettuces and other leafy greens.

There's a reason why 80 Acres and other indoor farms focus on these types of crops, explains Erik Runkle, professor of horticulture at Michigan State University. Customers want them year-round, despite seasonal availability -- and leafy greens are typically transported long distances, despite being perishable. Their nutritional content can also decrease during shipping.

Then the question becomes: How economically viable is indoor farming really? In short, we don't exactly know yet, Runkle tells me. He and colleagues from Michigan State and other universities received a grant from the USDA (the US Department of Agriculture) to study this exact thing, but even after the four-year study, Runkle doesn't expect the answer to be a simple "yes" or "no."

Commercial indoor farming in the US got started about 8-10 years ago, Runkle explains. He estimates that less than 1% of US produce farming comes from indoor farming today. Most of the early companies have gone out of business. Some well-known pioneers, like New Jersey's AeroFarms, are still around.

"Indoor farming is always going to be much more expensive than anything grown in a field," Runkle adds. He doesn't expect indoor farming to replace traditional farming anytime soon -- or perhaps ever. But he does see it as a potential solution in places where water is a limitation and field irrigation is either unrealistic or impossible.

Fortunately, some technological advancements have reduced the cost of indoor farming, making at least a little more viable today than it would've been a decade ago.

LED lights have been one of the most significant technological advancements that made 80 Acres possible. Older lights cost more money, used more energy and made the environment too hot for plants. Now, with LEDs, 80 Acres has customizable, automated lighting systems in place to simulate daylight with different color temperatures. They use less energy, spend less money and the plants are happier too.

This farm also relies on two robots, Sam and Barney, to handle most of the heavy lifting. The bots load and unload pallets of plants from each shipping container on a set schedule -- or manually, as needed. Other companies still hire people to go up on scissor lifts and move these heavy plant containers, Zelkind explains.

There are cameras inside each container, too, so the team can check in on their plants whenever they want. And 80 Acres is developing machine learning to identify irregularities -- pests, color deficiencies, variations in plant sizes and much more -- so that growers don't have to watch the plants 24/7.

When the cameras find an irregularity, it can be shared across the 80 Acres team to more quickly identify the potential issue and work toward a solution.

"We use all of that [technology] to assist growers, not to replace growers," Zelkind says. The AI tech today isn't anywhere near where it would need to be to take over the job of a grower, but making room for technology has definitely changed how growers interact with plants. 80 Acres even offers its own training classes to teach employees how to use their technologies.

Controlled-environment agriculture is becoming an increasingly prevalent area of study in agriculture departments at the University of Arizona, Cornell University, University of Nebraska and many other schools.

Tim Brobbeck started out as a grower at 80 Acres three years ago. Now Brobbeck's the plant manager. Brobbeck says it can be tricky to gauge what's going on with a certain plant when you can't climb up and access it easily. The cameras help, but it can still be difficult sometimes to tell what exactly is happening. This tech learning curve is exactly what Livingston is focused on as the CEO of Infinite Acres.

To Infinite Acres -- and beyond

Infinite Acres is 80 Acres' tech company. As head of Infinite Acres, Livingston works to make the tech as smart as possible, in order to support the growers and the rest of the team here. But there's another goal that goes way beyond the Hamilton farm or even 80 Acres' five other farms: She wants to take what they've learned about indoor farming tech from 80 Acres and sell it to other farmers all over the world.

80 Acres is open to selling its technology to other farms and helping them run things or simply selling the tech, training the existing staff to use it and leaving them to it, Livingston explains. They're eager to share what they know about lighting, sensors, vision systems, robots and automation with other farmers -- and there's a big demand for it.

I ask the 80 Acres team what makes them special, how they managed to keep going. "Our pedigree is grit," Zelkind chimes in. Their failures, coupled with their existing knowledge of the food industry and genuine passion for the work keep them going.

"We say, 'fail fast and cheap with tremendous insights,'"Livingston adds. It's kind of their motto. They've made a lot of mistakes, they readily admit.

They've killed a lot of crops. They've had so much humidity in grow zones that it literally rained, and killed everything. "We were in the process at one point where we were just continuing to seed knowing that we were gonna kill all of the crops that we had," Zelkind says with a chuckle.

But they've come this far and they're determined to train a new generation of farmers, just like Tim Brobbeck, to make healthy produce more accessible than ever before. "I love the scalability of [80 Acres] and the idea that we can go out and maybe feed the world someday," says Brobbeck. That sounds pretty good to me.

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Robots are changing the future of farming

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It's a cloudy day in early October and I'm circling my rented around a maze of industrial buildings in Hamilton, Ohio. Hamilton is a small city 30 miles north of Cincinnati with a population of just over 62,000 people. Like much of Ohio, farming is important here.

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Agricultura de precisión, genómica, GPS, medio ambiente

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In various guises, information technology is taking over agriculture

ONE way to view farming is as a branch of matrix algebra. A farmer must constantly juggle a set of variables, such as the weather, his soil's moisture levels and nutrient content, competition to his crops from weeds, threats to their health from pests and diseases, and the costs of taking action to deal with these things. If he does the algebra correctly, or if it is done on his behalf, he will optimise his yield and maximise his profit.

The job of smart farming, then, is twofold. One is to measure the variables going into the matrix as accurately as is cost-effective. The other is to relieve the farmer of as much of the burden of processing the matrix as he is comfortable with ceding to a machine.

An early example of cost-effective precision in farming was the decision made in 2001 by John Deere, the world's largest manufacturer of agricultural equipment, to fit its tractors and other mobile machines with global-positioning-system (GPS) sensors, so that they could be located to within a few centimetres anywhere on Earth. This made it possible to stop them either covering the same ground twice or missing out patches as they shuttled up and down fields, which had been a frequent problem. Dealing with this both reduced fuel bills (by as much as 40% in some cases) and improved the uniformity and effectiveness of things like fertiliser, herbicide and pesticide spraying.

Since then, other techniques have been added. High-density soil sampling, carried out every few years to track properties such as mineral content and porosity, can predict the fertility of different parts of a field. Accurate contour mapping helps indicate how water moves around. And detectors planted in the soil can monitor moisture levels at multiple depths. Some detectors are also able to indicate nutrient content and how it changes in response to the application of fertiliser.

All of this permits variable-rate seeding, meaning the density of plants grown can be tailored to local conditions. And that density itself is under precise control. John Deere's equipment can plant individual seeds to within an accuracy of 3cm. Moreover, when a crop is harvested, the rate at which grains or beans flow into the harvester's tank can be measured from moment to moment. That information, when combined with GPS data, creates a yield map that shows which bits of land were more or less productive-and thus how accurate the soil and sensor-based predictions were. This information can then be fed into the following season's planting pattern.

Farmers also gather information by flying planes over their land. Airborne instruments are able to measure the amount of plant cover and to distinguish between crops and weeds. Using a technique called multispectral analysis, which looks at how strongly plants absorb or reflect different wavelengths of sunlight, they can discover which crops are flourishing and which not.

Sensors attached to moving machinery can even take measurements on the run. For example, multispectral sensors mounted on a tractor's spraying booms can estimate the nitrogen needs of crops about to be sprayed, and adjust the dose accordingly. A modern farm, then, produces data aplenty. But they need interpreting, and for that, information technology is essential.

Platform tickets

Over the past few decades large corporations have grown up to supply the needs of commercial farming, especially in the Americas and Europe. Some are equipment-makers, such as John Deere. Others sell seeds or agricultural chemicals. These look like getting larger still. Dow and DuPont, two American giants, are planning to merge. Monsanto, another big American firm, is the subject of a takeover bid by Bayer, a German one. And Syngenta, a Swiss company, is being bid for by ChemChina, a Chinese one.

Business models are changing, too. These firms, no longer content merely to sell machinery, seed or chemicals, are all trying to develop matrix-crunching software platforms that will act as farm-management systems. These proprietary platforms will collect data from individual farms and process them in the cloud, allowing for the farm's history, the known behaviour of individual crops strains and the local weather forecast. They will then make recommendations to the farmer, perhaps pointing him towards some of the firm's other products.

But whereas making machinery, breeding new crops or manufacturing agrochemicals all have high barriers to entry, a data-based farm-management system can be put together by any businessman, even without a track record in agriculture. And many are having a go. For example, Trimble Navigation, based in Sunnyvale, at the southern end of Silicon Valley, reckons that as an established geographical-information company it is well placed to move into the smart-farming market, with a system called Connected Farms. It has bought in outside expertise in the shape of AGRI-TREND, a Canadian agricultural consultancy, which it acquired last year.

By contrast, Farmobile of Overland Park, Kansas, is a startup. It is aimed at those who value privacy, making a feature of not using clients' data to sell other products, as many farm-management systems do. Farmers Business Network, of Davenport, Iowa, uses almost the opposite model, acting as a co-operative data pool. Data in the pool are anonymised, but everyone who joins is encouraged to add to the pool, and in turn gets to share what is there. The idea is that all participants will benefit from better solutions to the matrix.

Some firms focus on market niches. iTK, based in Montpellier, France, for example, specialises in grapes and has built mathematical models that describe the behaviour of all the main varieties. It is now expanding into California.

Thanks to this proliferation of farm-management software, it is possible to put more and more data to good use if the sensors are available to provide them. And better, cheaper sensors, too, are on their way. Moisture sensors, for example, usually work by measuring either the conductivity or the capacitance of soil, but a firm called WaterBit, based in Santa Clara, California, is using a different technology which it says can do the job at a tenth of the price of the existing products. And a sensor sold by John Deere can spectroscopically measure the nitrogen, phosphorous and potassium composition of liquid manure as it is being sprayed, permitting the spray rate to be adjusted in real time. This gets round the problem that liquid manure, though a good fertiliser, is not standardised, so is more difficult than commercial fertiliser to apply in the right quantities.

Things are changing in the air, too. In a recapitulation of the early days of manned flight, the makers of unmanned agricultural drones are testing a wide range of designs to find out which is best suited to the task of flying multispectral cameras over farms. Some firms, such as Agribotix in Boulder, Colorado, prefer quadcopters, a four-rotored modern design that has become the industry standard for small drones, though it has limited range and endurance. A popular alternative, the AgDrone, built by HoneyComb of Wilsonville, Oregon, is a single-engine flying wing that looks as if it has escaped from a 1950s air show. Another, the Lancaster 5, from PrecisionHawk of Raleigh, North Carolina, vaguely resembles a scale model of the eponymous second-world-war bomber. And the offering by Delair-Tech, based in Toulouse, France, sports the long, narrow wings of a glider to keep it aloft for long periods.

Even an endurance drone, though, may be pushed to survey a large estate in one go. For a synoptic view of their holding, therefore, some farmers turn to satellites. Planet Labs, a firm in San Francisco, provides such a service using devices called CubeSats, measuring a few centimetres across. It keeps a fleet of about 30 of these in orbit, which it refreshes as old ones die by putting new ones into space, piggybacking on commercial launches. Thanks to modern optics, even a satellite this small can be fitted with a multispectral camera, though it has a resolution per pixel of only 3.5 metres (about ten feet). That is not bad from outer space, but not nearly as good as a drone's camera can manage.

Satellite coverage, though, has the advantage of being both broad and frequent, whereas a drone can offer only one or the other of these qualities. Planet Lab's constellation will be able to take a picture of a given bit of the Earth's surface at least once a week, so that areas in trouble can be identified quickly and a more detailed examination made.

The best solution is to integrate aerial and satellite coverage. That is what Mavrx, also based in San Francisco, is trying to do. Instead of drones, it has an Uber-like arrangement with about 100 light-aircraft pilots around America. Each of the firm's contracted planes has been fitted with a multispectral camera and stands ready to make specific sorties at Mavrx's request. Mavrx's cameras have a resolution of 20cm a pixel, meaning they can pretty much take in individual plants.

The firm has also outsourced its satellite photography. Its raw material is drawn from Landsat and other public satellite programmes. It also has access to these programmes' libraries, some of which go back 30 years. It can thus check the performance of a particular field over decades, calculate how much biomass that field has supported from year to year and correlate this with records of the field's yields in those years, showing how productive the plants there have been. Then, knowing the field's biomass in the current season, it can predict what the yield will be. Mavrx's method can be scaled up to cover entire regions and even countries, forecasting the size of the harvests before they are gathered. That is powerful financial and political information.

A truly automated, factory-like farm, however, would have to cut people out of the loop altogether. That means introducing robots on the ground as well as in the air, and there are plenty of hopeful agricultural-robot makers trying to do so.

At the University of Sydney, the Australian Centre for Field Robotics has developed RIPPA (Robot for Intelligent Perception and Precision Application), a four-wheeled, solar-powered device that identifies weeds in fields of vegetables and zaps them individually. At the moment it does this with precise, and precisely aimed, doses of herbicide. But it, or something similar, could instead use a beam of microwaves, or even a laser. That would allow the crops concerned to be recognised as "organic" by customers who disapprove of chemical treatments.

For the less fussy, Rowbot Systems of Minneapolis is developing a bot that can travel between rows of partly grown maize plants, allowing it to apply supplementary side dressings of fertiliser to the plants without crushing them. Indeed, it might be possible in future to match the dose to the plant in farms where individual plants' needs have been assessed by airborne multispectral cameras.

Robots are also of interest to growers of fruit and vegetables that are currently picked by hand. Fruit-picking is a time-consuming business which, even though the pickers are not well rewarded, would be a lot faster and cheaper if it were automated. And robot pickers are starting to appear.

The SW6010, made by AGROBOT, a Spanish firm, uses a camera to recognise strawberries and work out which are ripe for the plucking. Those that are have their stems severed by blades and are caught in baskets before being passed on by a conveyor belt for packing by a human operator sitting on the robot. In the Netherlands, researchers at Wageningen University are working on a robot harvester for larger produce such as peppers.

All these devices, and others like them, still exude a whiff of the Heath Robinson. But robotics is developing rapidly, and the control systems needed to run such machines are getting better and cheaper by the day. Some think that in a decade or so many farms in rich countries will be largely robot-operated.

Yet others wonder just how far farmers will let their farms be robotised. Self-guiding agricultural machinery such as that sold by John Deere is all but robotic already. It is like an airliner, in which the pilot usually has little to do between landing and take-off because computers do the work for him. Yet Deere has no plans to hand over complete control to the cloud, because that is not what its customers want.

Tunnel vision

If total control still seems some way off in outdoor farming, it is already close for crops grown in an entirely artificial environment. In a warren of tunnels beneath Clapham, in south London, Growing Underground is doing exactly what its name suggests. It is rearing around 20 types of salad plants, intended for sale to the chefs and sandwich shops of the city, in subterranean voids that began life as second-world-war bomb shelters.

In many ways, Growing Underground's farm resembles any other indoor hydroponic operation. But there is one big difference. A conventional greenhouse, with its glass or polycarbonate walls, is designed to admit as much sunlight as possible. Growing Underground specifically excludes it. Instead, illumination is provided by light-emitting diodes (LEDs). These, in the minimalist spirit of hydroponics, have had their spectra precisely tuned so that the light they emit is optimal for the plants' photosynthesis.

As you would expect, sensors watch everything-temperature, humidity, illumination-and send the data directly to Cambridge University's engineering department where they are crunched, along with information on the plants' growth, to work out the best regimes for future crops.

For now Steven Dring, Growing Underground's boss, is confining output to herbs and vegetables such as small lettuces and samphire that can be brought to harvestable size quickly. He has reduced the cycle for coriander from 21 to 14 days. But tests suggest that the system also works for other, chunkier crops. Carrots and radishes have already been successfully grown this way, though they may not command a sufficient premium to make their underground cultivation worthwhile. But pak choi, a Chinese vegetable popular with trendy urbanites who live in inner-London suburbs like Clapham, is also amenable. At the moment growing it takes five weeks from start to finish. Get that down to three, which Mr Dring thinks he can, and it would be profitable.

The firms that make the LEDs could also be on to a good thing. Mr Dring's come from Valoya, a Finnish firm. In Sweden, Heliospectra is in the same business. Philips, a Dutch electrical giant, has also joined in. In conventional greenhouses such lights are used to supplement the sun, but increasingly they do duty in windowless operations like Mr Dring's. Though unlike sunlight they do not come free, they are so efficient and long-lasting that their spectral advantages seem clinching (see chart).

This kind of farming does not have to take place underground. Operations like Mr Dring's are cropping up in buildings on the surface as well. Old meatpacking plants, factories and warehouses the world over are being turned into "vertical farms". Though they are never going to fill the whole world's bellies, they are more than a fad. Rather, they are a modern version of the market gardens that once flourished on the edge of cities -in places just like Clapham-before the land they occupied was swallowed by urban sprawl. And with their precise control of inputs, and thus outputs (see Brain scan, below), they also represent the ultimate in what farming could become.

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In various guises, information technology is taking over agriculture ONE way to view farming is as a branch of matrix algebra. A farmer must constantly juggle a set of variables, such as the weather, his soil's moisture levels and nutrient content, competition to his crops from weeds, threats to their health from pests and diseases, and the costs of taking action to deal with these things.

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Somos un grupo de profesionales que desde hace más de 26 años trabaja en desarrollar medios de comunicación y eventos de excelencia en el sector agropecuario

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Revista de la Federación de Palmicultores

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Número actual

La edición inicia con un informe sobre costos de producción de las empresas con mejores prácticas, tanto en sus cultivos como en las plantas de beneficio. Este benchmarking, realizado en 2021 por Fedepalma y Cenipalma, expone los costos de producción de 2020 en diferentes zonas del país, permitiendo al palmicultor y a las organizaciones saber el costo de emplear las distintas tecnologías disponibles para el cultivo y comparar su experiencia. Además se presenta un trabajo enfocado en el mejoramiento de la gestión de la cadena de suministro con miras a consolidar un negocio de aceite de palma sostenible. Esto enmarcado en los conceptos lean (relacionado con el objetivo reducir los costos y aumentar la eficacia de la cadena de suministro) y green, que hace referencia a que el proceso tenga un buen efecto sobre el ambiente.
Otro de los artículos expone el análisis realizado sobre seguridad inherente para un proceso de aceite de palma crudo en la Zona Norte de Colombia. Y en cuanto a las certificaciones, esta edición presenta un comparativo entre las compensaciones offsetting e insetting, explicando sus ventajas y desventajas, y en qué condiciones pueden ser aplicables y recomendables para cada empresa. Por último, en temas de la salud y nutrición, la revista expone un análisis de las características del aceite de palma y de la oleína de palma como aceite de fritura.

Ver todos los números

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La edición inicia con un informe sobre costos de producción de las empresas con mejores prácticas, tanto en sus cultivos como en las plantas de beneficio. Este benchmarking, realizado en 2021 por Fedepalma y Cenipalma, expone los costos de producción de 2020 en diferentes zonas del país, permitiendo al palmicultor y a las organizaciones saber el costo de emplear las distintas tecnologías disponibles para el cultivo y comparar su experiencia.

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Revista de la Federación Naiconal de Arroceros

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Si deseas recibir en tu correo electrónico las ediciones de la Revista ARROZ y el Boletín CORREO, donde encontrarás información de importantes actividades para el desarrollo tecnológico del cultivo, y todas las noticias de interés para el sector arrocero colombiano, da clic en los siguientes enlaces:

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Revista de la Federación Nacional de Cultivadores de Cereales, Leguminosas y Soya (Fenalce). Último ejemplar Noviembre 2020

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Revista de

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Agricultura de precisión SMART

Tecnología postcosecha

Cadenas de valor hortícola

Robótica

Mitigación impactos ambientales, ganado

Tecnología geoespacial