Many of the farmers Aaron Bobeck works with see a return-on-investment from using precision technology. But the 31-year-old says he also encounters many who are frustrated and on the verge of turning their backs on it.

The United States Department of Homeland Security issued a report that states that precision agriculture is vulnerable to digital threats.

Agtech is a broad category ranging from farm-level analytics to genetics and biochemistry to food processing. This article focuses exclusively on farm-level analytics — which includes aerial and satellite imagery, farm-level profit optimization, field-level production optimization, and sensing — and for the most part has focused on improving machinery, input decisions, and economic decision-making. 

Near the Dutch village IJsselmuiden stands the world’s first robot sorting and packing line in cucumber cultivation. Last year, the Vahl brothers introduced this innovative robot line to improve the speed and quality of the sorting process and optimize personnel deployment.

It is a dynamic spectacle to see the sorting and packing line in full action in Vahl’s processing area. It starts with manually feeding the cucumbers, according to Dutch magazine In Greenhouses. The cucumbers slide over conveyor belts towards the weighing line. After determining the weight, the machine takes 3-dimensional photos of each fruit from above using vision technology. At that moment, the shape, thickness, length, and weight are recorded. This information is forwarded by the software to one of the seven robots hanging in a row above the conveyor belt. The gripper arms of these robots swiftly pick up each cucumber with their suction cups and stack them in crates next to the conveyor belt. The operator can set the desired crate and sorting via the machine’s dashboard.

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“With this system, we can easily switch between crates, which is beneficial as we serve many different customers. In the morning, we often use six or seven types of packaging,” says Kees Vahl. He knows it is efficient to process three sorts simultaneously. “If you set only one at a time, the robots stand idle too often.” The speed at which the robot arms move is astonishing. Picking and packing one fruit takes a maximum of one second. The sorting line can process twenty thousand cucumbers per hour and 140,000 per day when running at full capacity.

What is Holding Back Agricultural Robotics

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Labor savings

The choice for automation in greenhouse horticulture is largely about labor savings. As Vahl indicated: labor is becoming increasingly expensive, but reducing monotonous work is also a motivation for him. “This is the future. I prefer to deploy my people elsewhere rather than for packing. When the line runs optimally, we only need six people: two for feeding, two for manual packing, someone to prepare crates and boxes, and a process operator. Previously, fifteen people were sorting and packing.”

The Dutch National Experimental Ground for Precision Farming (NPPL) has selected 10 new farmers.
 
The second year of The Dutch National Experimental Ground for Precision Farming(NPPL) project started on the last day of November. 10 new participants have been selected and they will start in 2019. This brings the total to 16 farming businesses. In addition to the 6 arable farmers who started with precision farming in 2018, 3 dairy farmers, 2 bulb growers, 4 arable farmers and an open ground cropper participate in next year’s edition. 

The Drone Volt’s Hercules 20 heavy lift UAV features a spraying system option. Drone Volt is selling one of the world’s strongest mass-produced drones into the Canadian market, the Hercules 20 (H-20).

The EU is asking all European farmers to take part in a survey to get a better view on the use of precision agriculture technologies in European agriculture. Is technology the way to improve farming?

When policymakers talk about “green jobs,” they tend to default to examples in solar power, wind and other sources of renewable energy—or perhaps manufacturing and supply chain management. They’re less likely to talk about agriculture.

One of the most common ways this new technology is discussed for use in agriculture is helping to make seed selection recommendations for individual fields. How does this work? How can a computer be programmed to know what seed to plant? There are a couple key aspects needed to make this new selection process work.

Insects, diseases and weeds are a farmer’s worst nightmare — pests cause severe crop damage and jeopardize harvests.

The report says it “can be considered an interdisciplinary science leading to breakthroughs and incremental technology advances to improve agricultural productivity, efficiency, and/or sustainability.”

Technology and the Internet of Things (IoT) has made its way into our lives and businesses.

Africa may in recent years have seen a growth in the number of agritech services that offer things such as farmer advisory services or access to finance via smart phone.

Agriculture has always been a ripe market for tools that take the power of the computer out to where the action is — in the middle of a 1,000-acre field of corn, at an impromptu meeting in the farmer’s driveway, or out at the remote seed storage facility.

Technology which had been used to discover water on Mars, is now being applied to make agronomic maps faster, cheaper and better.

Technology has brought about so many advances in agriculture. 

With summer’s end, the savviest farmers plan to harvest more than crops alone.

Farmers have always been diligent data collectors, knowing approximately what each acreage yields or how much milk an individual cow produces.

As tech-savvy farmers who are ready for change prepare to reshape the ag industry, financial solutions need to keep pace.

Precision farming has been around since the '90s to help farmers monitor their yields.