Canada faces a skills and labour crisis in agriculture, with a projected domestic shortage of 123,000 workers within a decade. One-quarter of Canada’s farmers will be 65 or older by 2025. That means there’s a growing need for a new generation of seed customers — what a recent report from the Royal Bank of Canada calls Farmer 4.0.
The report lays out how the farmer of the future will need to focus on strategy and systems, leaving past tasks to a new generation of smart machines. Farmer 4.0 will be working in office towers, data centres and engineering labs around the country, plugging into the people and machines that can turn our land and water into a hyper-efficient, and sustainable, food source for the planet, RBC says.
If this futuristic scenario comes to pass, they could be leaning on a robot named Solix, which utilizes Solinftec’s ALICE AI Platform, and similar technologies to help them.
Growers currently spend a lot of time figuring out not only what seed to buy, but how to make the best use of it. Whether it’s understanding where to put that seed, whether to apply a seed treatment, proper seeding rate and the like, a lot of data-based decisions go into the process.
Using raw data, of course, is fraught with potential errors. But technology is helping change that.
“Growers need tools to show them the best decision at each step of the way, even if conditions change every hour,” says Daniel Padrão, chief operating officer for Solinftec, an artificial intelligence technology developer with operations around the globe including the United States and Canada.
“Currently, growers don’t pay much attention to the field as an ecosystem. The challenge is bringing all that data together properly and also taking into account weather patterns, which are constantly changing.”
Enter ALICE, an artificial intelligence platform connected into the new robot that receives over 10 billion pieces of information from the field per day.
“The robot will take in information on the seed that you planted, whatever traits are present in that seed, the crop protection that applied to it, the weather forecast, current weather conditions and what they are at the moment that you’re seeding that product,” he explains.
ALICE then runs an algorithm to create a work plan for that specific field based on the seed variety that was planted on a given day at a given time and whatever product may have been applied to it.
“ALICE helps you to adapt to change what you’re doing. The idea is to put all of the data a grower and agronomist is gathering, create a plan and make that plan happen in the field. ALICE helps make the most of the inputs that they are buying, including seed.”
The new robot is essentially built to scan and monitor fields. This, connected with Solinftec’s ALICE AI platform, works together to orchestrate machine operations. Programmed with a neurological network featuring a complex detection algorithm, the new in-field robotic device has the ability not only to scan for crop health and nutrition, insects, and weeds, but is built to monitor the entire field ecosystem and provide real-time insights, according to the company.
Illinois-based GROWMARK will collaborate with Solinftec in the U.S. to run the robot throughout the entire 2022 season where it will fine-tune the technology of agriculture operations in North America from planting to harvesting.
Rise of the Robot
The global agricultural robots market size is expected to grow from USD$4.9 billion in 2021 to USD$11.9 billion by 2026, at a CAGR of 19.3%, according to a recent market analysis report.
“Agricultural robots automate slow, repetitive, and dull tasks for farmers, allowing them to focus more on improving overall production yield,” markets research firm MarketsandMarkets notes.
Agricultural robots include unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) or drones, automated harvesting systems, driverless tractors, and other robots, such as unmanned ground vehicles (UGVs), robots used in nurseries or greenhouses, sorting and packing robots, and weed control robots.
While drones currently dominate the agricultural robots market, with the high rate of commercialization of driverless tractors, the latter is expected to overtake drones within the next three to four years, the report goes on to say. An increasing labour shortage and the COVID-19 pandemic have also accelerated the use of robots in the ag sector.
Solinftec’s goal is not to replace agronomists or salespeople, but to empower them with information. The robot will be in the field scanning conditions 24 hours a day, seven days a week, measuring what’s happening with every single plant and what’s happening with that field ecosystem — something humans simply can’t do.
“Our goal is to measure every single operation that you carried out, to be able to enable phenotyping on a large scale to eventually empower seed professionals, agronomists, retailers and growers to prescribe seeds and chemistry for every farm. That’s the future,” Padrão says.
