AI, robot fruit pickers and the future of arable farming

They can use AI to detect the perfect moment to harvest a crop, destroy weeds with lasers and run on green energy. But what does the rise of agri-robotics mean for human farmers, asks Steven Cutts

In recent years, there has been increasing interest in the idea of destroying individual weeds using specialist robots (EPA)

There are some things that robots can do very well. Let’s face it, your average car assembly line doesn’t involve a lot of people these days but a car assembly line is a carefully controlled environment. Modern manufacturing is an almost exclusively indoor activity, it requires a predictable internal climate and entirely predictable components. Even the unpainted door panels are fed into the system in a safe and reproducible way.

How then can we possibly address the challenges of the farming industry using robotic equipment? An environment that our ancestors exposed themselves to every day has become a no go zone to millions of modern people and the average farmer in the US is now well into his fifties.

The answer to this problem may lie in robotics. Britain has a long-standing tradition of recruiting seasonal fruit pickers from eastern Europe but with all the fallout from Brexit this may not be possible for much longer.