AGRICULTURAL ROBOTS are being developed in a very unexpected way in Australia through a collaboration between Swarm Farm and the Queensland University of Technology (QUT). ‘Agbots’ are not too far away from the paddock.

Agbots happen to be a new field of endeavour for Central Queensland farmer Andrew Bate, who has been working in collaboration with QUT and the Australian Centre for Field Robotics to develop robots as, he said, “an enabling technology to do things farmers could not do before”. 

The agbot future, as Mr Bate envisions it, involves swarms of small task-specific robots managing vital processes in ways that humans cannot. Mr Bate’s agbot development company, SwarmFarm Robotics, illustrates his vision – swarms of agbots conducting plant and soil maintenance and improvement tasks such as bug and weed removal, at any hour of the day or night and in any weather conditions – superseding current chemical treatment systems.

Mr Bate said the ‘big’ automation programs for Australian farmers had gone about as far as they could go, with ploughing, planting and harvesting systems now so big that they created a range of counterproductive problems of their own.

In fact, it was while considering how to deal with the deep tracks cut across his land from these massive systems that Mr Bate began to contemplate better solutions through agbots.

FINDING A BETTER WAY

The traditional methods for boosting production, such as chemical treatments and doing everything on an ever-larger scale, were not cutting it anymore, Mr Bate said. He said Australia, because of its previous herbicide use, now had the “unenviable record” of having the second highest number of herbicide resistant weed species of any country.

“The cost (of extra herbicide use) to Australia’s grain industry alone is estimated to be $200 million a year,” Mr Bate said. “The technology that pushed agriculture for the past 20 years has plateaued. Along the way we have forgotten about slow farming – slow, accurate, precise – we have been dining out on a fast food burn.

“Thinking about this was how I got onto the world of agriculture, robotics and collaborations,” he said.

Mr Bate often illustrates his point by citing the 300 horsepower, 36m wide spraying machine used on his family’s Bendee Farm that got him thinking about “a better way” in the first place. He lamented that in every second of its operation that machine was passing over 28,000 individual plants.

“All equipment like this is the same,” he said. “You are dealing with wheel widths and there are limits caused by the compaction of the soil and the destruction of crop that results,” Mr Bate said.

 “Up until now, more efficient has meant larger and larger, but it’s wrecking the crop production. I’m convinced that every time we go bigger we go backwards.”

Mr Bate began developing a plan for swarms of small robots which could, if necessary, operate on an individual plant improvement basis. He felt the capability to do this was the Holy Grail of farm productivity and long-term sustainability.

“We want to slow down, assess every individual plant and tend to its exact needs on a plant-by-plant basis,” Mr Bate said. “This may mean applying fertiliser or fungicide only to plants that really need it, rather than applying treatment to entire areas of the field.

“Small robots also reduce the soil compaction (of current large machinery). We are talking about machines that weigh a couple of hundred kilos rather than a 21 tonne spray rig.”

AUSTRALIA HAS AGBOT ADVANTAGE

Mr Bate embarked on a global search for such technologies, focusing on the United States where, he figured, there must be developments that could be brought back to Australia and adapted.

Most of that research turned out to be directed at military and mining applications, not agribusiness.

On his return home he instead met with Hugh Durant-White from the Australian Centre for Field Robotics – now chief executive of NICTA – who introduced him to a fledgling program at QUT in Brisbane, which was set to lead the world in agricultural robotics development.  

Mr Bate’s swarm robotics system could form the experiential cornerstone of new QUT research area, headed by Peter Corke, it was realised, and an Australian Research Centre grant was successfully sought.

Mr Bate said robotics had the potential to dramatically improve the way Australia produced food, from managing microbiology in the soil through to how sunlight is absorbed into plant leaves.

“This is pull research, not push research,” Mr Bate said, describing his own family farming business as always being “an early adopter” of new technologies. The difference this time was that he was determined to fit the new technology to meet the farming problem, rather than the other way around.

“From the earliest days of industrialisation in agriculture, farmers have talked about the Holy Grail of farming – the driverless tractor,” Mr Bate said. “But in the modern world of agribusiness, the concept of a driverless tractor is already obsolete.”

He was also not overly enthusiastic about drone technologies, which was what many people associated with future farm automation.

“What are we going to use them for?” Mr Bate said. “Precision farming or ‘precision ag’ has been around for more than 20 years. The idea was that we could collect all this crop data and use it to better manage areas of our paddock. Big data may be a new thing in business, but we got it 20 years ago. We have been collecting data – crop yield, grain protein, near infra red images, satellite images, EM (electron microscope) scans – all sorts of data. Most farmers have got hard drives full of this stuff. Lots of pretty maps, but very few are using it for anything useful.

“Pretty much any data that we can get from drones we can already get from a piloted plane at a competitive cost. A thousand dollars will buy a lot of flight time in a piloted aircraft to collect whatever data you want, but few farmers are willing to do this. Still, everyone is excited by drones to collect more data that no-one seems to be bothered to use at the moment.

“More data doesn’t equal more productivity – we already have information overload.”

ULTIMATE PRECISION FARMING

Mr Bate was more concerned with the direct application of robots to precision tasks.

“What can we do with robots to increase yield, efficiency and improve the environmental impact of farming? The first thing people tend to say to me is that robots will save us so much on wages – but I don’t think so,” he said.

“We already have the labour saving devices now – they are the 36m spray rigs, the 60m planters … It’s getting pretty lonely on the farm – we only have about one person per 5000 acres now, and I don’t think we can do with any less people.”

Instead, Mr Bate said, his research of robotics for agriculture pointed towards agbots that were small, simple, inexpensive with very few moving parts and robust electronic systems. These agbots are all about helping farmers, big or small, to boost production and quality, he said.

SwarmFarm agbots are small, simple machines that do simple tasks very well. They are at a cost level accessible to all farmers and are able to be adapted to local conditions – plus, importantly, they are scalable.

“While governments in developing nations are eager to become self-sufficient, or at least produce as much food as they can, other nations are becoming more concerned about sustainability, environmental impact and the quality and health of the food they are consuming,” Mr Bate said.

“A potato farmer in Russia will want to have robots perform different tasks to a potato farmer in Victoria.”

He described a new microwave technology developed at the University of Melbourne that can be used to kill weeks accurately and efficiently. This is the kind of technology that SwarmFarm agbots could utilise, identifying weeds, ‘frying’ them, then moving on to the next one. Suitably powered, such robots could spend their entire time in the paddock.

“Even more exciting, I think, are the ideas that we have not even thought of yet – ideas that we will start having when they are out in the field and people start thinking more laterally about applications for robots,” Mr Bate said.

Mr Bate and his SwarmFarm team have been working with two QUT PhD students, Patrick Ross and Andrew English, along with project leader Dr David Ball. The project is also partnered with the Australian Centre for Field Robotics with Dr David Fysh and PhD student Tom Patten.

While most of the early work centred on object avoidance systems and swarm techniques, progress has been rapid and the project is just months away from releasing model prototypes. Mr Bate is eager to see Queensland lead the world in swarm farming agbots.

“Robots will give us increased yields, increased efficiencies and better environmental outcomes. Simple.”

www.swarmfarm.com.au

http://192.185.196.109/~swarmfar/

www.qut.edu.au

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AUSTRALIAN ownership advocate body AusBuy is attacking government decision makers over a Chinese company’s planned investment in “40 to 50 farms in Victoria including the Glenormiston Agriculture College”.

“What is wrong with our governments that they would consider allowing the Chinese Government’s State owned enterprise to buy 40 to 50 dairy farms, and the Victorian State Government to then lease the Glenormiston Agricultural College to them to train their people, who would enjoy private accommodation for 150 people?” asked AusBuy CEO Lynne Wilkinson ahead of a regional farmers meeting on the issue last month.

“Yet the Victorian State Government stopped funding for this facility, and Melbourne University and TAFE did not manage it well, leaving farmers with no access to this asset.”

But the dairy industry in Victoria seems broadly supportive of the move – at least in recent statements by the Victorian Farmers Federation and Australian Dairy Farmers – as the industry is badly in need of investment and must open up new markets.

Tasmanian group Linear Capital is orchestrating negotiations through a joint venture company supported by Chinese interests, Farm Gate 88 Pty Ltd, and has stated proposals were for “a major development of infant formula production plants in New South Wales and Victoria for the export of infant formula to China”.

The proposal is to take milk from farms in the region, including those proposed to be purchased by the group in a rumoured $400 million deal, then process and value-add to those products before export to China.

Statements on the Linear Capital website describe negotiations with ‘major Chinese state-owned enterprises’ to invest in dairy farms and processing plants in Victoria and New South Wales.

“Linear Capital has sourced substantial milk supplies direct from regional farms for long term contracts in Victoria and Tasmania and in conjunction with Farm Gate 88 Pty Ltd through their operational facilities in New South Wales substantial milk supplies from the Riverina region. Linear Capital through these strategic alliances are seeking further alliances with Chinese enterprises to co-operate in investment, production and technology.”

Linear Capital managing director Troy Harper told the regional The Standard newspaper the plan was to use the college to train Chinese and local people in best-practice animal husbandry.

“It will not be international workers versus national workers,” Mr Harper reportedly said. “The Chinese are very interested in our animal husbandry. We are some of the best in the world at it. The Chinese are not that good at it. The Chinese are coming to learn from us.”

AusBuy’s Ms Wilkinson said it was a sorry state for Glenormiston Agricultural College, which was donated to the government by the Black family to be held in perpetuity as an agribusiness training facility for the region.

“The long established Black family have farmed in the area for generations and donated the land and college to the state to be used in the interests of Australian agriculture and our farmers, and that it remained as an agriculture college,” Ms Wilkinson said.

“No Australian government is entitled to give priority to off shore interests as appears to be the case here. If Australia is to thrive again, why would we sell these dairy farms to the same country we are in a rush to sign Free Trade Agreements, so they effectively sell to themselves?

“Our governments seem to consistently give priority to off shore interests. We may be (in) ‘showing off’ time at the G20, but ‘open for business’ means whose business? No other developed country is so naïve as to allow the sale of strategic assets that were built by our own people to other countries, global companies or superannuation funds. What’s in it for Australia?”

Ms Wilkinson said the fears for the future shape of Australian dairy farming were real.

“Questions must be asked,” she said. “Will they meet Australian standards? Will they pay their imported workers the same as required of local businesses here under our employment laws? Will they determine the price our milk is sold off shore, and potentially drive down the income of our own farmers? Will they limit access for local processors to milk supplies for Australian consumers?”

Ms Wilkinson said AusBuy saw the situation as the latest flashpoint in a long-term decline in conditions for Australian farmers that mean the best way out is to sell for foreign interests – the only ones offering the right price.

“The question is often asked: Why are the farmers selling?” Ms Wilkinson said.

“Poor policies over decades have driven profits down and debt up, and we have not counted this since 1998. How can we make decisions as a nation if we do not look at the consequences of our decisions?

“A business that did not know its true financial position for over 16 years or know who really owns wealth creating assets for over 40 years would not survive, yet our governments tell our farmers and our businesses to be productive and competitive.

“Other countries do not have the answers. We need to engage and support our own people first to build our future. Those that have survived are among the most productive and competitive in the world, but they are required to play to a different set of rules to their competitors the local referees favour the other sides.

“More than 90 percent of our dairy brands are foreign owned. How does Australia benefit from assets generations of Australians have built? If it is not owned here, the decisions, profits, jobs, skills and reinvestment are at risk.”

www.ausbuy.com.au

www.lcpl.com.au

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THE SHAPE of things to come may be gleaned from the move by one of the world’s largest agricultural manufacturing companies, US-based AGCO, forming a joint venture with aerospace and agriculture machine control and technology developer Appareo Systems.

Formally, the partnership has been described as building on AGCO’s Intelligent Agricultural Solutions (IAS) program, which centres on data collection, wireless communication, advanced sensors and intelligent machine control.

But this is more than incremental technology gain for AGCO’s existing brands – they include Challenger, Fendt, GSI, Massey Ferguson and Valtra – this is a move seeking to discover what the next generation of precision agriculture and precision machine management should look like.

Appareo chairman and CEO, Barry Batcheller said he envisaged the partnership would enable “the unprecedented infusion of new to the world technologies into production agriculture”.

“Appareo is very excited about forming this exciting new partnership with AGCO, the world’s largest manufacturer focused strictly on agricultural equipment,” Mr Batchellor said.

The joint venture will be enacted through AGCO Technology Solutions.

“As the agricultural industry shifts, there is a greater need for more advanced technology, and we anticipate that this partnership will provide breakthrough innovation making our customers more profitable while supporting their mixed fleet operations,” ACGO senior vice president for advanced technology solutions, Eric Hansotia said.

www.agcotechnologies.com

www.appareo.com

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