PassWord – 27th April 2016

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Speaker B: Hello and welcome to Password on Resonance FM with me, Peter Warren, the technology program that gets to the roots of our new high-tech existence. Now that Easter’s been and gone and the first buds and blossoms of spring have appeared, it’s an ideal time to see what impact the high-tech world is having on that traditionally most conservative of areas, Farming. So we’ve spoken to politicians, scientists, and farmers about the technology that is knocking the stereotyped image of Farmer Giles for six and replacing it with something more like I, Robot. Here’s Sir James Pace, David Cameron’s first agriculture minister, on the new world of the robot farmyard.

Speaker C: We’re going to see a continued advance of technology, the use of robotics, the use of satellites, um, in growing our crops. Of robotics in both crop production and in livestock production, where we’ve now got automatic milking parlours, so there is no man involved in milking dairy cows. The cow puts itself into a machine, and the machine operates and milks the cow, and the cow walks out again. I’ve seen that happening. We’re seeing a dramatic change like that happening. We’re going to see more.

Speaker B: We’ve got to see advances in science Former Conservative Agriculture Minister Sir James Pace on Robot Farm. Unlike the old farm that it is replacing, with its tumble-down buildings and rusting farm machinery, Robot Farm is hyper-efficient, environmentally friendly, and like nature, it does not believe in waste. On Robot Farm, the nerve centre is the laptop the farmers have exchanged for their mucky overalls, and breakfast The time when decisions are made with data collected from their farms that has been analysed in the cloud or on combine harvesters like arable farmer Chris Ray’s that are part computer, part robot.

Speaker D: It’s got a huge amount of autonomy on it and I often joke that it’s a bit like driving a laptop. It steers itself, it knows exactly what it’s doing.

Speaker B: That was Chris Ray, one of a new breed of state-of-the-art farmers. His combine harvester can not only gather in the harvest. It can tell whether it should be cutting a particular part of a field and can make recommendations on how to improve soil conditions.

Speaker D: Everything we do is very calculated these days. We, I suppose we can’t afford to be throwing stuff around left, right and centre hoping for the best. But how do you get the information these days? The combine itself, it’s constantly monitoring things like whether the crop’s fit and ready to go and also how much yield, how much actual grain or whatever we’re getting off that part of the field. We can then use that information to decide that yield did well, we might feed that a bit better, or to the contrary. But then when we come to apply that fertiliser as well, those machines have special sensors which are constantly looking at the crop, assessing how green it is basically, and the greener it is, depending on what we tell it to do, it will put more or less on. So we’re constantly looking at what we’ve done, what’s happened, and trying to work out exactly what that plant needs at that point in time.

Speaker B: So are you then taking—

Speaker D: so you’re taking information from this yield and what your cross-referencing that with satellite imagery, and then a tractor goes out after the crop has been harvested and addresses particular parts of the field? Generally what would happen is we’d have a sat— the information collected from the combine is satellite-linked, basically a GPS map. We’ll have satellite images of the field for different things. We also have the fields, what they call, conductivity mapped, or that type. It’s a bit like Time Team on television when they produce those maps, which tells us the soil types and things like that., and we know the different parts of the field, the zones. All that lot’s compacted into a map, if you like, of multiple layers, and then any other effects that we think relevant, and we will work out a plan based on that. The worst bits of the field, how much to put on there, how much on the other, and then we might tweak that with the sensors at the time on the tractor. Normally you’ll go over the whole field and apply some everywhere, but you’ll just adjust it depending on those variables.

Speaker B: Chris Ray on a combine harvester that literally doubles as a combined harvesting and analysis system. And it’s not just crops that are receiving such intensive data analysis. The farm animals are also subjected to massive surveillance so that they can yield the optimum results, as Tim Gibson, a robot salesman, farmer, and consultant, points out.

Speaker D: Tim, robotic milking, what is it? It sounds rather alien.

Speaker E: It’s basically a system whereby a cow can freely choose to go be milked. She’s totally at liberty to go into a milking stall, and she gets fed a small amount of feed while she’s in there, and a robotic arm with the milking cups swings underneath the cow and attaches the cups to the cow’s udder and begins milking the cow in the way that cows have been milked for 60, 70 years with mechanical vacuum systems, but this has brought it on one step further that an actual robotic arm connects the cups to the cow to serve the twice-a-day milking routine of putting the cows through a milking parlour. The cows are allowed to just freely amble into the machine and the cups are attached to her by the robot.

Speaker D: So why are people doing this?

Speaker E: What is the benefit? There’s a multitude of benefits. The main benefit that most farms are opting for this system for is the increased welfare, the fact that the cows on the robot are a lot more relaxed, they have less veterinary ailments, mastitis being one of the biggest problems on conventionally milked cows and conventional herds. With robots, many almost say that mastitis is virtually eliminated because the cow is milked in a manner which she wants to, when she wants to get milked, and she’s milked out cleanly and quickly and routinely. So animal health is a key issue to farmers. They can’t afford to have cows that are sick or poorly because they don’t produce very much milk, and obviously that’s economics of agriculture now as such that you just can’t afford to have problems and poor production. You’ve got to have the best of everything. And so the highest yielding cows are those that are the most healthiest. So animal health, labor saving, the fact that you don’t need to have somebody milking the cows twice a day in a milking parlor.

Speaker D: Isn’t one of the problems there though going to be that if it’s remote, you won’t be able to look at them in the way that you can if you have that personal contact?

Speaker E: Yeah, no, the systems are far more sophisticated than that. With applications like iPads and phones, you actually get alerts to an app or a text message or a phone call from the system to say if it believes that a cow isn’t well, either because it’s got a temperature that’s raised or the milk quality isn’t that great, there’s something not quite right in the milk, the system automatically disregards that milk from going into the main milk storage vessel. The systems on the market today now can identify if there is a problem in the milk. It can separate the milk from going into the main tank, and it can also separate the cow by using a gate on the exit to the robot and guiding her into a pen ready for the farmer to come and have a look at her and see if there is something wrong. So the modern dairy farmer with a robot would first off in the morning be consulting probably his iPad over his cornflakes, checking how many cows have been milked through the night, how much milk they’ve yielded, any cows that the system thinks may be suffering from any problems. It can tell him if there’s any cows that are in season and need to be inseminated or put to the bull, and it can also highlight any deviations in the sort of running of the farm in general, if the feeding levels need to be increased, or if cows seem to be hungry, or if cows have been fed too much. So there’s a lot of information that the system gathers, and it analyzes that in the background through computers and software now, where key lists of information are just brought up for the farmer to look at. Basically, they’re on his laptop or his iPad first thing in the morning that he can look at without even leaving the house.

Speaker B: That was Tim Gibson, an expert on the robotic milking parlours that are milking 60,000 of the UK’s 1,883,000 cows in 500 farms that have sprung up across the country in the last 5 years. But why do we need this world? Surely life was better when we were in tune with nature and the soil. Apparently not so. According to Gibson and other experts, the cows prefer robots to us and feel happier with them.

Speaker E: The cows are so settled to it, and it’s very, very common for most people to say that cows on robots are the most relaxed animals or the most relaxed cows you’ll ever find. You can walk amongst them as a herd and they don’t flinch, they don’t fight, they don’t run away from you. They just kind of think, well, you know, what are you there for, Mr. Human? Because I’m catered for here. I get my feed here, I get my bed there. And I get milked over there. I don’t need you, Mr. Human.

Speaker B: That was Tim Gibson, a dairy farmer and robot expert from Yorkshire. And fellow Yorkshire farmer Peter Dowson of Furness Farm, another technology advocate, also makes the case that technology is allowing him to lavish more care on his animals and find out more about them than he was able to before, because he has installed cameras in his cowsheds that he has connected to screens in his house by Wi-Fi.

Speaker A: It can be a bit of a waiting game, especially on an evening. You just want to settle down and sit down for a couple hours, and whereas if you have this thing just sat there on a screen, you can keep peeking at it and, you know, you’re not having to go out in the cold and wet and miserable. You can stay over the fire a bit longer. We find it good to watch sometimes just to see the activity of the animals and what they actually do, just to keep an eye on them for all sorts of reasons, you know, see if the cows are okay We’ve had one, a heifer that calved 2 or 3 nights ago, and she was a little bit off colour and we wanted to watch her a little while, so Chris recorded her that particular night to see whether she got up during the night and whether she ate or whether she went to the water trough to drink. Whereas it’s these things you would never notice, you can’t be with them 24/7. You know, you try to be at certain times, like the calving time, we try to spend as much time as we can among the animals so we know what’s going to calve So you can identify them and put them in these areas ready for calving because they’re all lovely clean boxes, you know, and you can see what’s going on.

Speaker B: Easy to manage. It might sound a little bit of a stupid question, but because obviously you look at, watch animals all of the time, but does it give you a different sort of insight into them? Do they behave differently?

Speaker A: I think they do actually, yeah, yeah. I think going out in amongst them can be a little bit disturbing for them. You know, somebody coming wandering about. I mean, but it does sometimes, when you’re watching them, you do see things that you wouldn’t normally see, you know, the behavior, how they interact with each other, how the calves interact with other animals, the cows. I mean, there is some calves, they’re cheeky little monkeys, they’ll come and try and suckle other cows other than their own mother, which is quite, you know, it’s quite entertaining sometimes. You see this mother thinking, what’s going on here, you know? Then she’ll give it a nose and push it away type thing. It’s just another tool that we have that makes our life a little bit easier. It’s like a lot of equipment we have on the farm, it’s to try and make life that little bit easier. Good for us, good for the cow. My son has it via, he can pick up the signal on his mobile phone as well, so when he’s at work at another farm he can have a quick peep at it himself, or if he’s not on the farm he can use it on his mobile phone.

Speaker B: Peter Dowson on the surveillance system that lets him look after his animals’ best interests, become more efficient and more environmentally friendly. Though opponents of the systems being developed point out that this is the ultimate in factory farming and the only reason the animals are looked after so well is to exploit them. It’s an argument that Sir James Pace rejects. The techno-farm is now essential, he claims, because of global warming and population growth. We either increase efficiency or we face food shortages.

Speaker C: Farming through technology is— well, it’s going to have to use technology to meet the huge challenge of food supply in the future. I don’t think as a society, and certainly as— I don’t think the government of the country, which actually includes the whole of the governing body, has fully understood understood what’s going to happen in the next 30, 40 years with the growth in world population, the impact of climate change on many parts of the world’s ability to produce food. And we’re not helping it back at home with some of our energy policies and other land use policies, where the whole thing means we’re going to be— there’s a serious risk we could be short of food in the the next 30 or 40 years, and I don’t think people have fully woken up to that.

Speaker B: And Sir James does not want it to end there. We need constant innovation, he says, in an area that we have ignored for too long. So as a result, soon robots will be tending our fields and only harvesting plants when they need to, instead of bringing the harvest in all in one go and risk possibly losing 60% of it.

Speaker F: Well, What happens at the moment is that where we’ve got the row crops, the vegetables and lettuces and so on, they harvest the whole crop and is then graded afterwards for quality. And up to 60% of the crop is then rejected because it’s not, maybe not the right size. We might use the machine vision and the laser scanners to be able to recognize the size of the crop and the quality of the crop. And so that we only harvest 100% marketable quality. And the idea is then that if the lettuce is a little bit too small, then we can leave it there for another couple of weeks and come back and harvest it when it is the right size.

Speaker B: Professor Simon Blackmore of the specialist agricultural university Harper Adams. It’s a principle that Simon Ray’s combine can even adopt for cornfields. If the corn is not ripe, it leaves it after cutting lanes through it that help to dry it out quicker. Raised tractors even have intelligent weeding hoes that can identify weeds and dig them up. Soon, says Professor Blackmore, they will have lasers.

Speaker F: Well, now, laser weeding is where we can use cameras and machine vision to be able to recognise the difference between the crop plants and the weeds. We can then identify up to 26 different species of weeds. We know the leaf area, the biomass, and the position of the weed. We can also measure or locate the meristem, the growing point of the weed. And if we then heat up that little growing point to 96 degrees C, the cell walls rupture and the plant, the little weed plant, then is not killed, but it goes dormant. And so we can then actually bypass the whole concept of using chemicals and herbicides to kill weeds and just use a very tiny amount of heat delivered through a steerable laser to be able then to control weeds.

Speaker B: One of the industry’s leading innovators, Professor Simon Blackmore of Agricultural University Harper Adams. This move to more flexible farming should see the massive farmyard tractors and combines evolve into smaller more adaptable and nimble drones and robots, a development that arable farmer Chris Ray thinks is inevitable.

Speaker D: I think we’re going to see another channel of thought coming along where we’re going to have a number of much smaller automated robots that can go in a field with very simple commands. We’ve got machinery now which at the minute we pull it behind a tractor, but it goes along and it’s just like when you hoe in your garden, round your flowers. And you hoe all the little weeds out around it. Well, it knows, it sees the plant and it automatically hoes all the way around it as you’re going along. And you start putting that together with the steering that we’ve got and all the other controls, and if we can condense that down to a small automated machine, well then you can have multiple machines, much lighter, much more variable as to what they can do, and probably go out into wetter conditions. It’s got to be an inevitability long term.

Speaker B: Here’s Professor Blackmore of Harper Adams University again.

Speaker F: Normally tractors in the UK are quite big machines, big heavy machines, but as we know, we’ve had a very wet winter and the farmers then will want to put seed into the ground in the springtime. But because the soils are so wet, the big tractors can’t actually go out into the fields to put seed into the ground.. And so we’re being restricted, the farmers are being restricted by these big machines. But I’m currently developing a very small lightweight seeding robot that can go out into the field at any weather condition and particularly when the soil is at field capacity, which it is probably at the moment, to be able to put seed into the ground when the farmers want. Seed to go into the ground, not when it’s dry enough to carry the big tractor. So a lot of farmers are very interested in this new concept.

Speaker B: Robotic developments that will inevitably mean that even more jobs are taken over by robots that are more efficient and cheaper than people.

Speaker F: The, um, we’ve seen a dramatic decline in agricultural employment over the last 50 years. Most of that is actually through the large tractors If you think about it, the farms years ago would have 20 men and 20 horses, and then the tractors came in, they replaced one for one, and then the tractors have been getting bigger and bigger. So quite often on farms you then will have a farm manager, an agronomist, and a few people actually then looking after the machines. So I don’t think that there’s going to be any reduction of overall full-time employment in British agriculture by the use of robots. But what we will do is have to increase the skill of these people to be able to deal with the high technology. But the areas where we might see the robots replacing people will be in the very low-skilled or semi-skilled area where they’re doing things like highly repetitive tasks like harvesting or weeding, where we are currently employing a lot of people, dare I say cheap labor from other countries, to come and do this work. These are the people that may well then be replaced by robot machines doing the same task. If many people in this country like to have organic foods, but organic foods are significantly more expensive because it then requires hand weeding or requires systems for taking out the weeds without any chemical, and that is a very expensive process.. And so we certainly could see that machines doing the weeding, or the robots doing the weeding, will probably be significantly less expensive than employing people to go out doing the weeding.

Speaker B: Harper Adams, Professor Blackmore. And as the Internet of Things spreads, more and more sensors will be deployed in our landscape for the robots to analyse, because the data from fields and farm animals is now being uploaded to the cloud for online, real-time analysis and comparison. Here’s Dr.

Speaker G: Gordon Blair of Lancaster University on the rollout of sensors on sheep. There’s many beneficiaries for this. Our main beneficiaries initially are scientists to try and understand things better, but there’s also people that want to manage the land better. And as you said, smart agriculture is a huge area of growth. What we’re doing is we’re taking very cheap sensors. There’s a new sensor technology called Arduino, and Arduino is very, very cheap, but it’s a complete computer in its own right, and can interface to different sensors. So with that kind of technology, we can develop fairly cheap sensors, which we can then put in a flock of sheep, and we can then put in various parts of the land to understand soil moisture content and so on. So we can deploy a reasonable number of these sensors across different geographic areas to get a feel for what’s really happening in the natural environment.

Speaker B: And so how are you actually picking this information up then? Because presumably you have the sensors on the sheep, there has to be a radio field that they’re moving through.

Speaker G: What actually happens is the different sensors form a mesh network. So they’ll all look out for sensors near them and work out what they’re connected to and form a mesh. And then when we want data out, they’ll communicate with something nearby, which will communicate with something nearby and so on until it gets to a point. We’ll have some base stations which are connected to the greater internet.

Speaker B: And it’s not just sheep that have been caught up in the web. The Internet of Things is bringing everything into the information age. Even the ears of cows can speak volumes, as robot advocate Tim Gibson points out.

Speaker E: So that they’ll have a chip in the cow’s ear that would identify the cow throughout its lifetime. And so wherever it goes, from one farm to another, it knows that that’s the actual cow. If it goes to a reader on a even from a calf feeder right through to the robot. And also when the cow maybe goes to the auction mart and it’s sold through an auction mart and possibly transfers on to an abattoir, and the abattoir has a reader, it will know exactly who that animal is from birth right through the system. And those tags are also now becoming available with further information, the movement sensors to check that the animal is moving as it should. I’ve been dealing with one recently where the actual movement sensor is in the ear tag, and it can check how much the cow is chewing its cud because the ears move in the same way every time a cow chews its cud. And if something is wrong with one individual animal in a big batch, it can highlight that to the farmer straight away, which it would have— it would be totally impossible for the farmer to see that himself, even if he only milked 20 cows in a small, small traditional farm, but now we’ve got these sophisticated sensors and simple things like an ear tag that can tell how often a cow has chewed its cud in the day, and then multiply that up by all of the herd, make sure the herd are either chewing the cud by the right amount per day, and if there’s deviations in individual animals, highlight those cows and give the farmer a text message or an email that says, These cows haven’t done what they normally would do. Just that level of information coming to the farmer is a very, very powerful tool.

Speaker D: So this is the sort of, it’s the internet of things hits agriculture, isn’t it? I mean, you mentioned two things. You mentioned the cloud and you mentioned big data.

Speaker E: Yeah, you get to see the typical behavior. The tag that I was describing there is even able to predict a cow’s calving because when a cow is about to give birth, she starts circling and making a nest. There’s maybe once over an old wives’ tale that when a farmer could lean on a gate and study half a dozen cows all day long and look in and say, “Oh, that one over there, she looks like she’s going to calve because she’s starting to go around in circles and make a nest.” But the time that people have nowadays to do that observation is gone. If they’re swishing their ears around a lot and hanging around on hilltops, it would determine that the flies are bothering the cows and it would maybe be an idea to fly spray the cows to stop flies from biting them because they’re obviously flapping their ears to get rid of flies and they’re stood all on the top of a hill to get a bit of wind.

Speaker B: Soon, even those insects bothering the cows’ heads could be caught on the Internet of Things. It’s even possible they could be attracted to fake cows’ ears and trapped for food. Because in the future even insects will be harvested. It’s a possibility Sir James thinks may be with us at some point, but not in the immediate future. Though it’s something that Dr. Daniel Glaser, director of the King’s College Science Gallery in London, which recently featured an edible exhibition on the food industry, thinks is an inevitability.

Speaker H: And of course, the fact that meat is unrecognisable as meat does in fact present great opportunities for those cultures in which, for example, the consumption of insects is not considered is considered normal. So insect protein, by contrast with, let’s say, beef, is rather efficient in terms of the water it requires and the situations in which it can be grown. Now clearly, most of us in London didn’t grow up in a situation where eating whole insects was a normal part of what we do, although in fact there are plenty of people in London who did grow up in those kinds of environments and cultures. But if you’re not concerned about whether what you eat looks like what it came from, then insect protein is an extremely efficient and sensible route to take because of its sustainability and in fact its health benefits. So this is definitely something which we think young people today and all consumers ought to be considering.

Speaker B: That was Dr. Daniel Glaser of London’s King’s College on the foods of the future. At King’s, there are even students who are working on carnaries, factories that will actually grow meat. So who knows, in the future we might even see farm animals being phased out by technology as the robots chasing people out of the farm and the factory turn their hands to making meat. The changes technology is wreaking on the world we live in now is even concerning policymakers. At the think tank Chatham House at the end of June, they are meeting to discuss how they can harness the potential of technology to support growth and job creation. Let’s hope they don’t take up the comment of Marvin Minsky, one of the fathers of robotic artificial intelligence, who said, “If we’re lucky, they might keep us as pets.” You’re listening to Password on Resonance FM, and if you’ve just joined us, I’m afraid you’ve missed it, but you can find out more about the issues involving future food on our website www.futureintelligence.co.uk.

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