IOT, powering the digital economy.
Brought to you by Schneider Electric.
[MUSIC PLAYING]
Farming is the hand that
feeds us, but as an industry,
agriculture is something
we often take for granted.
The land is plowed, the crops are
grown, and the livestock raised,
but pressures on farmers to feed our
booming population are increasing.
By 2050, it's estimated there'll
be over 9 and 1/2 billion of us,
and that's a lot of mouths to feed.
Farming has long been considered a risky
investment, with tight profit margins
and often unpredictable yields.
But it's a sector with
enormous potential.
According to the World Bank Group,
it accounts for about a third
of global GDP.
And by 2050, it's thought that
productivity in agriculture
will need to rise by 70%
just to keep up with demand.
In their efforts to meet
rising demand, food producers
are now turning to digital innovations
to increase their yield and farming
efficiency.
Agricultural technology, or agri-tech,
is thriving and attracting investment
like never before.
Digitization along
the entire value chain
is seeing tech companies
forge new relationships
with agricultural business, with
even digital heavyweights like Google
and Amazon starting to dig in.
So how is farming changing in the
face of the digital revolution?
And what business opportunities
and challenges lie ahead?
In this program, I'll be
looking at the companies that
are tackling the problems
of 21st-century farming
head on, with the use of new
digital tools and innovations.
I'll be finding out how one
of our oldest industries
is overcoming its newest
challenges and asking experts
in agricultural technology about
the obstacles we face on the road
to the farms of the future.
[MUSIC PLAYING]
It's hard to talk about
the agriculture business
without mentioning Monsanto,
the notorious farming
giant and the world's
biggest supplier of seeds,
with around a quarter of global sales.
However, as the use of agri-tech
grows, traditional farming companies
like Monsanto are vying
for a share in the market.
In 2013, Monsanto acquired the
Climate Corporation, a company
specializing in digital farming.
The cost of the takeover?
Close to a billion dollars.
I've come to the head offices
of Climate Corp in San Francisco
to find out why the company is
proving such a frontrunner in the race
to digitize farming.
Mike Stern is CEO of
Climate and vice president
of America's Row Crops at Monsanto.
Hey.
Hi.
It's a pleasure to meet you.
Nice to meet you.
Welcome to the Climate Corporation.
Thank you.
Let's go to the office.
He's also the man behind more than 50
scientific publications and US patents
related to agriculture technology.
One of Climate's key products
is FieldView, an online platform
that gathers and analyzes data to
predict weather and field health,
providing farmers with a
wide range of digital tools
to help maximize their yields.
Here are all my fields.
They're all organized.
It's a digital notebook.
And it's telling us
about, OK, how much rain
fell on my farm in the last
24 hours, season to date,
and how does that compare
to the 10-year average?
OK.
And then if they want to dig into more
detail, on a field-by-field basis,
they can go specifically to a field.
Oh, this-- this looks like a
satellite map of the field.
This is actually a yield map.
This is called Split View.
And you can begin to see that--
Oh, it matches.
--that this is a soil map
that actually is helping
understand what this variability is.
Red are areas of the field
that are not doing too well.
And green are areas of the field
where the yields were much higher.
And so within the app
now, for the first time,
a grower can begin to understand, well,
what might be causing this variability?
FieldView is a digital
ag platform that really
provides three benefits to growers.
One, it helps them digitize
their fields and allows
them to organize their
data around their fields
and begin to do analytics and
cause-and-effect analysis.
It's a conduit for us to be
able to give recommendations
based on our investment
in data science to help
growers make more informed decisions
about how to manage their crops.
And it's also a conduit for growers to
go and connect with other innovators
on our platform.
That allows them to access
other digital ag tools
to bring innovation to their farm.
What about any B2B collaborations
and benefits to other businesses?
Are other companies getting
on board with the system,
and are there any
examples you can share?
Absolutely.
We have established
FieldView as a platform,
and so we've opened
up our infrastructure
to allow other companies to develop
technology and bring technology
to growers through FieldView.
And we have about 30 partners right now.
So let me give you an example.
One of our first platform partners
is a company called Veris.
And Veris makes very sophisticated
soil-sampling equipment
that gets taken across the field.
And it does a meter-by-meter assessment
of some critical soil components.
Now, by itself, that's
important for a grower,
but what a grower really
wants is to have that soil
layer in the context of everything
else that they're doing on their field.
So it's not so now we have a soil layer.
That's in context of, hey, this is the
corn hybrid that I might have planted,
this is the density I planted,
this is the weather on the field,
this is how nutrients have
been applied to that field.
It's a very symbiotic relationship.
And with population growing so
rapidly and the world's agriculture
needs growing, how does this help?
How is efficiency important?
Well, if you project out
into the future, in 2050,
there's going to be 10
billion folks on the planet.
So another 3 billion
from where we are today.
And we're going to
have to figure out how
to produce more food on less
land with fewer natural resources
with a changing climate.
And that's a challenge.
And we're going to need
all sorts of technology.
It's not going to be
one technology that's
going to help us solve these problems.
We've seen these types of
step changes in technology
before, whether it was the mechanization
of the farm in the late 1800s
or the Green Revolution, where breeding
and understanding about fertility
helped improve yields in wheat.
And I think digital agriculture is
going to be this next wave of innovation
that we'll be able to
apply to these problems.
Helping farmers adapt
to the changing climate
will surely have a positive
impact on global productivity.
However, another major
problem facing today's farmer
is the shortage of seasonal labor.
Many farms are losing money,
because they simply can't
find the workers to pick their produce.
[MUSIC PLAYING]
The Oxnard Plain in Southern California
is famous for strawberry production.
About a third of the state's
strawberries are grown and picked here.
The harvesting of soft fruits has
always been a delicate, time-consuming
operation.
Traditionally, farmers have relied
on hand-picking by migrant workers,
but times are changing.
And as worker numbers fall,
fruit growers in particular
are searching for new methods
to gather their precious crops.
Say hello to the Agrobot, one of the
world's first strawberry-picking robots
designed from the ground up to
gather this especially fragile fruit.
It uses a sophisticated
set of sensors to scan
and delicately harvest the strawberries.
And it's the brainchild of Agrobot's
founder and CEO Juan Bravo.
Juan was previously head of production
at Spanish engineering and construction
company Joca but has been refining
and developing the Agrobot since 2010.
So Juan, you've developed this
Agrobot to pick strawberries.
Tell us a little bit about
how it works and what it does.
We have 24 robotic arms.
Each one is fully
independent from the other.
And each one have a
camera, with a system
that is scanning for ripe strawberries.
And when we find a ripe
strawberry, we grab it by the stem
and we leave it in a container.
If we compare the picking
side of the harvester,
we need about 1.2 human
harvesters for cleaning one acre.
With one harvester, we can harvest
about 20 acres in three days.
So how is the machine controlled?
Do you ride on it, or is it just
a screen to push buttons on?
So everything is fully autonomous.
We just select the--
press the Start button,
and the harvester and
the robotic arm stops.
The self-guiding system
will guide the harvester.
When the harvester reaches the end
of the rows, it will stop by itself
and will send the
information to the humans.
We can control with a
screen on the harvester.
We can control with our phone
or with a remote controller.
So what kind of interest
have you seen in the product?
Who's investing?
Well, right now the main
investor are growing companies.
They need a solution, because
in the next following years,
the shortage of labor for these kind of
jobs is going to get harder and harder.
Even the people that are currently
harvesting the strawberries
are getting older.
So they are investing in
this kind of technology,
because they need a solution
to keep growing strawberries.
[MUSIC PLAYING]
The main business investor in the
Agrobot is the international berry
growing company Driscoll's.
Hey, John.
Hi, [INAUDIBLE].
It's so nice to meet you.
Nice to meet you.
Yeah.
I asked John Erb, their VP of
Social and Environmental Impact,
about the benefits of agri-tech
investment and what kind of problems
it can solve.
What it solves is really
trying to take some
of the kind of non-value-added
type movements that are difficult
and things that people really don't want
to do, and automating those aspects.
We really want to try to create the
type of opportunities for the workforce
to focus on the things that
require higher intelligence
and things that aren't necessarily
just repetitive in nature,
and that really kind of wear
people out, and that type of thing.
And what do you say to
farmers or people who
might be concerned that technology
and robots are taking jobs away?
Well, really, it's
creating job opportunities.
One of the biggest
challenges that we have
is that there's really not youth
coming into the farming industry.
And so with the
technological advancements,
there's a lot of opportunities that
really are attractive to the youth
and can also kind of tap just
the acumen that kids have today.
They grew up with the
technology, et cetera.
And so it's exciting to create
those type of opportunities.
How important is increasing
the use of digital technology
to Driscoll's and to the
agriculture industry?
Well, increasing the use
of digital technologies
is super important, and not just
in terms of automating the harvest,
but there's other applications as well--
for example, using visual technology
to assess how much of
the crop is coming in,
as well as what's the state of the crop.
And so you can detect
where there is hotspots
in the field, where there
may be some insect pressure,
or the plants aren't as vigorous,
and those types of things.
And so the visual technology can
unlock all kinds of opportunities.
Developments in agri-tech
are gathering pace,
and farmers are already
reaping the benefits.
But with mounting pressures
on food production,
what other innovations are needed?
Join me after the break when I'll
be asking an expert in agri-tech
about the cutting-edge
developments in the industry.
[MUSIC PLAYING]
Modern farming is more and more
reliant on digital technology
to keep up with global demand.
Disruptors and adapters
alike are staking their claim
in the farms of the future
and, in the process,
pushing forward the
frontiers of new technology.
Harper Adams University
in Shropshire, UK
is a world leader in agricultural
technology and digital research.
Part think tank, part
farm, part laboratory,
it's a center of
excellence in the sector.
One of its recent flagship
projects is a hands-free hectare,
a field of barley planted,
tended, and harvested entirely
by unmanned machinery.
Simon Blackmore is professor of robotic
agriculture at Harper Adams University,
a member of the American Society of
Agricultural and Biological Engineers,
and a fellow of the Institution
of Agricultural Engineers.
His research has been breaking
new ground in digital farming.
Simon believes we need to entirely
rethink our approach to farming
in the 21st century.
There's a lot of pressures
on crop production
around the world at the moment.
Obviously, we've got an increasing
population that we need to feed.
But there's also
environmental pressures.
And the current system that
we've got for crop production
uses a lot more energy than we need.
And that energy comes
in all different forms,
from fertilizer, pesticide,
tractors, diesel, and so on.
To be able to meet society's
requirements for these things,
we need a new production system.
And that new production system
needs to have a new set of tools
to allow us to do what we
want the farmers to do.
The opportunity that I see is to come
up with a complete new mechanization
system that moves away from an
industrial-type model, which
is where we are at the moment, which
is like a big production line doing
the same thing everywhere,
trying to just increase
the yields the whole time, into
a much more flexible, dare I say,
manufacturing system,
like industry has done.
But the farmers don't currently
have the tools to do it.
Or the industry has moved over
to flexible manufacturing.
I think farmers should move
over to flexible manufacturing.
But we need the small smart
machines to be able to do that.
One of Harper Adams' latest
experiments in new smart machinery
is Project Norman, a
remotely controlled tractor
designed for precision crop spraying.
This type of machine
is what I think to be
about the right size
for agricultural robots.
When we get to the
tractor, big tractors,
they are too heavy, they
sink into the ground.
If we make them much
smaller, we have a problem
with what's called the
energy density problem--
how much power can you get into
a battery or a small engine.
But this is about the right size to
deal with agricultural conditions.
When a normal tractor
would sync up to its axles,
this machine can go out
and not do any damage
to the soil to be able to
carry out the operations
and not to compact the soil in any way.
Agriculture is an ancient industry
and the backbone of our society.
But if it's to withstand the
pressures of the 21st century,
then investment in
digital technology is key.
In recent years, capital has
started flowing to the sector.
But where is a river
of investment going?
There is a lot of interest
from the commercial sector
now, and the investment, and
governments around the world
to make use of these technologies.
The interesting thing, really,
is that it's very disruptive.
And a lot of the big
machinery manufacturers
are not investing in
this area, because it's
too disruptive to their
very linear business model
that they've had for
the last 50, 60 years.
So the opportunity is really
coming through startup companies.
So we're working with a
number of start-up companies
now who have no legacy in terms
of what has gone on before,
but are only interested in
coming up with the right machines
to meet today's requirements.
So the stage really is where we've
got a lot of, in some respects,
crazy ideas, new ideas,
new ways of thinking.
We're not totally sure
which ones are going
to pan out, which ones are
going to be the most successful,
but we're evaluating
those ones, and we're
seeing a lot more private
investment coming into this area
now to bridge the gap.
Eric Lemaire is the food and
beverage solution marketing director
at Schneider Electric.
Schneider are one of the
more established players
who are partnering with
other businesses to explore
the potential of digital farming.
I think the main work that he's done
at the present time in agri-tech
is developing new capabilities to
get information about the field,
about the culture, and about
the environment of the field.
Smart farming is now something
which is clearly efficient.
And we can control the
different equipment in the field
based on the productivity, the
yield of each part of the parcels.
I see new opportunities
with the usage, for example,
of artificial intelligence.
We are working with b.digital,
a small company in Italy.
They have applied the artificial
intelligence on the agricultural data.
So they use drones with
a high-resolution camera
in order to have a map of the fields.
And with artificial
intelligence, they are
able to detect the presence
of bugs in the field.
And from this, the farmer
can have manual removal
of the bug, so a local treatment of
the parcel which is contaminated.
Heavy investment in automation,
robotics, and new sources of data
are all helping to make farms
more productive and less
harmful to the environment
than ever before.
But is it enough for farming to meet
the needs of our growing population?
Join me after the break
when I'll be finding out
what new innovations are in store.
Agriculture is in the throes
of a digital revolution,
helping millions of the world's farmers
reduce their environmental impact,
improve efficiency, and drive up yields.
But this revolution is
only just beginning.
So what does the future hold?
When you visualize the
farm of the future,
what are some of the things you see?
How is it different?
Well, for one, it's
optimizing air and light.
How do we make the plants as
happy as they can be, basically?
And they're going to give
you the best result possible,
but also make it accessible
for people to harvest
big, juicy fruit that's
easily accessible;
it's not hidden under the leaves.
We want to be able to
harvest every berry
and not leave anything behind,
which, in today's environment,
that's not possible.
There's probably about 30%
waste in the system today.
That's not all happening on farm.
That's also within the supply chain.
But basically, it's maximizing air and
light, harvesting 100% of the berries,
and really setting up the plants
to be as happy as possible
so that they produce the best crop.
But how?
How does that change?
What needs to be done
for that to happen?
For example, on
watering, let's just take
that, for example, well, natural
resources are obviously scarce
and oftentimes finite.
One of the exciting things
that more precise farming
practices and innovation unlocks
is the better stewardship of water.
And so we're seeing that, in
some of these advanced production
techniques that we're implementing,
that we're using up to half the water
that we have otherwise, because we're
giving little, small shots of water
exactly when the plants need it.
We actually have scales in the
field in the container production,
in the tabletop production
that you see here.
We'll have scales in the field
that are weighing the plants.
And they can tell how much
water or evapo-transpiration
is happening, how much water
needs to be put back to the plant.
And then that automatically
triggers the irrigation.
And so we might have 30 to
40 irrigations in one day,
but it's only very, very small amounts
and exactly what the plant needs.
For Professor Simon Blackmore
of Harper Adams University,
the future lies in our mastery
of new smart machinery.
As an agriculture engineer,
I'm looking at agriculture
from the machinery point of view.
And I believe, with the opportunities
that we got in this new technology,
we're going to get a new revolution
in agriculture and crop production
that is going to take advantage
of these technologies.
We will need new skills to do it.
We'll have to have better
understanding of the technologies.
I still think it's going to
be people making decisions,
but it will certainly be supported
by information-intensive data,
by artificial intelligence,
by decision support systems.
But effectively, it comes
down to people, in the end.
But we will have a new set of
tools that farmers have never
had before to allow those decisions
to be implemented in the field.
There's still a person in
control of it, in charge of it.
Out behind me, I could have a
tractor that is then running,
but I am in control of it,
because I've got a smartphone now,
and there is a heartbeat
going backwards and forwards
between my smartphone and the tractor.
But it may not be sitting
on the tractor anymore,
but can be within close
proximity to the tractor.
For Mike Stern of Climate Corp,
it's the gathering and interpreting
of data on farms that could
bring the biggest change.
The farm of the future, I think,
could be very, very different
than the farm of today.
So there's no doubt that there will
be more automation on the farm.
There will be many, many
more sensors measuring
all sorts of different elements
of how to manage a crop on a farm.
There'll be integrated solutions,
where all sorts of different inputs
will be brought together in an
operating plan to optimize productivity
around a field.
We think there's tremendous
opportunity to bring value
to growers with these digital
tools, so we're investing heavily
in fundamental science here.
I have no doubt that these
technologies are fundamentally
going to change the way that we use
our natural resources to produce food.
And even today, I am sure we can't even
articulate where these technologies
wind up 10 years from now.
What would you say to the farmer
who hears this and then is concerned
that there will be no
more room in the farm
of the future for the human worker?
I think local knowledge and
then the historic knowledge
that farmers have around their field
is always going to be important.
And these are very, very
complicated problems.
And even today, we see, as we're
rolling out our digital tools,
our farmer customers are typically
working with their trusted
advisor with this
information, whether that
be an ag retailer, or a seed seller, an
agronomist, a consultant on their farm.
So I think that local knowledge
and the knowledge and the passion
that the farmer has about
their land and their field
is always going to be
an important component
in the development of new technology,
including these digital tools.
[MUSIC PLAYING]
For centuries, agriculture has been
the dependable friend of progress,
supplying a growing population
with food and drink.
But as environmental and economic
pressures on farming mount,
the time is ripe for progress
to give something back.
Global investment in agri-tech is
having a massive impact on the sector.
Automation and data-driven
farming are helping food producers
increase their yields and efficiencies.
Farming methods as we know them
are fundamentally changing,
promising a healthier, more
sustainable future for us all.
[MUSIC PLAYING]
IOT, powering the digital economy.
Brought to you by Schneider Electric.
