AGRICULTURE
Sowing the seeds of digital tech
Farmers are starting to reap the rewards of robotics and machine vision, as Keely Portway finds out
T
he United Nations Department of Economic and Social Affairs predicts the global population will reach
8.5 billion by 2030 and 9.7 billion by 2050. Tis means, according to research from the World Resources Institute, the planet will need to produce 56 per cent more food than now. Tis would require 593 million additional hectares of agricultural land, and it needs to be achieved in parallel with a reduction of agriculture’s impact on climate, ecosystems and water. A widely held belief in the agricultural
community is that we are about to enter the fourth agricultural revolution. Te first was around 12,000 years ago, when farming began, and the second was from the 17th century with the reorganisation of farmland. Te third, which was also known as the green revolution, came in the 1950s and 1960s with the introduction of chemical fertilisers and pesticides, as well as engineered high-yield crop breeds and the use of heavy machinery. Te fourth agricultural revolution involves
the use of new technologies, such as AI, to make smarter planning decisions and power autonomous robots. Developments such as these could be used in applications such as growing and picking crops, weeding, milking livestock and distributing agrochemicals via drone – and machine vision is a crucial component in their development.
Cleaning up According to Simon Pearson, director at the Lincoln Institute for Agri-Food Technology (LIAT), based at the University of Lincoln, a good deal of work for the fourth revolution is to change much of what took place during the third. He explained: ‘Our challenge is almost cleaning up a bit. Te
Outfield analyses aerial images of orchards using machine learning to predict crop yield
third revolution worked almost too well, and while people obviously need to eat food, we also need to reduce the use of pesticides to get towards net zero.’ Te LIAT is home to a working farm with
research facilities. Its scientists run projects designed to make a difference across the food chain, with machine vision playing a vital role. ‘We have a quite significant group working on agricultural robotics and the vision system associated with those technologies,’ explained Pearson. ‘We’ve
16 IMAGING AND MACHINE VISION EUROPE APRIL/MAY 2021
got an Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council centre for doctoral training, which is for 50 PhDs joint with Cambridge and the University of East Anglia (UEA). And that’s engineering at Cambridge and UEA in the machine vision lab, so you get a view that vision is very important.’ Pearson went on to explain that 18 of
these PhDs have been recruited so far, with the rest to be assigned over the next eight years. ‘We’re recruiting and we’re getting a lot of really positive connections with
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