Accelerating agricultural technology via ‘small’ steps

We hear from Ben Scott-Robinson, CEO of Small Robot Company in the U.K., about how its team of robots is poised to create a new model for regenerative and profitable farming; Saskatchewan farmer Terry Aberhart talks about how artificial intelligence is meeting today’s challenges facing farm operations and how it will change future production practices, for the better; and entrepreneur Rob Saik discusses how digital platforms and ag-tech startups are transforming innovation on the farm. Hosted by Laura Rance.

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Laura Rance: [00:00:06] We all know good workers are hard to come by, especially on the farm. But what if you had employees that didn’t watch the clock, didn’t care if it was a weekend or holiday, and were capable of providing individualized care to every single plant in your field. Well, on this week’s Between the Rows, we’ll be learning about Tom, Dick, Harry and Wilma, a team of robots that might be coming to a prairie farm near you in the not too distant future. I’m your host this week, Laura Rance. I’ll be talking to a British company that’s using artificial intelligence to make farming smarter.

Ben Scott Robinson: [00:00:44] Well, the key thing that we’re doing here, I think, is rethinking how a farmer can see their crops.

Laura Rance: [00:01:00] We’ll hear from a Saskatchewan farmer about the potential he sees for this new technology on prairie fields.

Terry Aberhart: [00:01:07] Well, what excites me the most is the potential efficiencies long term, the potential safety benefits to the environment and sustainability. There’s just so many things. There’s so many things.

Laura Rance: [00:01:21] And we’ll hear from a long time AG tech entrepreneur about how the whole innovation game is changing in agriculture.

Speaker4: [00:01:29] I love it. I love the fact that these people are young and passionate and they want to take an idea. Next challenge for them is to commercialize it and then scale it.

Laura Rance: [00:01:39] But first, here’s a word from our sponsor.

Commercial: [00:01:43] We knew we were doing something right when a competition started swearing. Every time they talked about us. Just the other day, I heard someone saying, Have you seen this seed master ultra pro II They got third party Pammy testing that confirms it’s individual row metering delivers uniform seed placement, near zero seed mortality and no impact on germination results. We take it as a huge compliment. Start raising your ROI at seedmaster.ca.

Laura Rance: [00:02:20] Well, as every Tom, Dick and Harry knows, agriculture is facing renewed pressure to use fewer resources to become more efficient and be more sustainable. The small robot company based in Salisbury, England, has come up with an idea that checks off a few of those boxes using artificial intelligence and precision agriculture technologies. It has come up with a system that allows farmers to manage each plant individually, even though there are billions of plants in one field. Here’s my conversation with one of the company’s lead executives, Ben Scott Robinson, who was in Regina recently to participate in an Agtech accelerator program. This collaboration between Conexus credit unions, cultivator initiative, economic development. Regina and Amertek is designed to position the prairies as a global hub for Agtech, investment, commercialization and job creation. I started by asking him why he was in Regina in the first place. Hi, Ben. Thanks for joining us on Between the Rows.

Ben Scott Robinson: [00:03:31] Hi, Laura. Thank you very much for asking me along.

Laura Rance: [00:03:34] So what brings you to the Canadian prairies this week?

Ben Scott Robinson: [00:03:39] So I’ve been lucky enough to be invited, along with four other agtech startups from the U.K. to join the Saskatchewan Agtech Accelerator, which is just a fantastic program to support the growth of Agtech innovation in Saskatchewan and in Regina.

Laura Rance: [00:04:00] Now you have come to Canada with a new way of thinking about getting the work done on farms. And from what I understand, this is something that can help farmers make not only get the job done, but make them more efficient at the same time. And it’s a team of workers. Tell me about Tom, Dick, Harry and Wilma.

Ben Scott Robinson [00:04:24] Yes. So we are building a suite of robots called Tom, Dick, Harry, and supported by the brains of the operation Wilma, which is an AI driven operating system. And their job is to ultimately deliver arable crops, a cereal crops, from before planting all the way up to the point of harvest.

Laura Rance: [00:04:47] Now. How do they do that? What kinds of roles do they play in this?

Ben Scott Robinson: [00:04:52] Well, the key thing that we’re doing here, I think, is rethinking how a farmer can see their crops. So with the increasing level of capability of sensing equipment on farms, farmers have been able to move from a sort of field scale view, maybe looking at a 100 acres or 200 acres in these big plains farms down to sectional views. But what we’re doing is approaching it from the other perspective, and we’re providing a per plant farming. So the capacity of being able to have a near real time view of every single crop plant in the field, and then the capability to go back and apply timely and efficient treatments to those plants to achieve their best potential.

Laura Rance: [00:05:42] This takes the concept of precision farming to a whole new level.

Ben Scott Robinson: [00:05:48] It certainly does. And so to put it in context, in your average acre of land, you will have round about 1 million to 1.2 million wheat plants. So to be able to do that across a farm of 10,000 acres requires a huge amount of processing capabilities and very clever artificial intelligence and a way of being able to disseminate that information in a way which is usable by the farmers and by either existing technology or our treatment technology as well.

Laura Rance: [00:06:27] Can you walk me through the process? Tell me how this might work in a practical field application?

Ben Scott Robinson: [00:06:34] Absolutely. So our Tom Robot is a ground based robot and he lives on the farm. He is completely autonomous, which means at the moment he works an eight hour day and a five day week. But ultimately he will be able to run pretty much continuously while except when the batteries are charging. And he can just go up and down all day, every day looking at or collecting data, imagery and different types of data on the field. And then that information is then passed to Wilma, the operating system, who then processes that information to find the location of each plant, essentially name and number that plant, and then look at how it’s growing through the season. So Tom goes back out into the field, will be covering those plants every couple of weeks, so we’ll be able to see the growth of that plant over that time. And then as we understand how that plant is growing, whether it needs a bit of support with more nutrients or maybe it’s suffering from from a disease, early stage disease, or maybe there’s a start of a pest outbreak there, then Wilma will be able to tell our robot to then go out in field and either feed it the nutrients it needs or treat it. So that first bit with Tom and Wilma, we call per plant intelligence and that is live now in the UK, admittedly in smaller farms and smaller fields, but we’re working at a commercial pace and rate there. And to start with, we can provide that information as a treatment regime for existing spot sprayers, which really reduces the amount of chemicals that are being used. So it has a big impact on the herbicide that’s needed to be applied in field, but also a big impact on the nutrients that can be applied. And obviously with the cost of both glyphosate and nitrogen being at all time highs, this is something that farmers are very interested in at the moment.

Laura Rance: [00:08:40] So as I understand it right now, Tom goes out and collects the data, Wilma process it, and informs the farmer to go out using maybe conventional means to support that crop, either through pest management or extra nutrition.

Ben Scott Robinson [00:08:59] That’s exactly right. Yes.

Laura Rance: [00:09:00] So but from what I’m hearing is that the Dick component of this process, you are actually able to go out and do things in a in a in a different way to control weeds, for example. Just just describe how that might work for me.

Ben Scott Robinson: [00:09:20] Yes. So the Dick has a multitude of jobs, but the the main one is around precision spraying at a at a whole new level. So moving down to a per plant spraying capability. But with weeds particularly, what we are keen to do is to use non-chemical means to control those weeds. And right now we are trialling at field scale and electric non chemical weeding system. So literally going up to the individual plants in the field and running an electric current through them to systemically kill that plant. Now because we have this per plant view, we can also understand which of those we like to call them. Non crop plants are a threat to the crop will reduce the yield and and have an impact on on the farmer’s bottom line but also which of those plants are actually not a threat and actually might help. So things like clovers can lock nitrogen into the soil and and sort of prairie flowers can encourage the return of more biodiversity. So we are looking to be some quite sort of subtle, I suppose, in the way that we’re doing it.

Laura Rance: [00:10:44] And where does Harry fit into the picture?

Ben Scott Robinson: [00:10:48] So Harry is a precision planting system. And with the idea that we are planting each seed at the right depth and spacing so that that plant can achieve its full potential in those soil conditions, in those humidity and rainfall conditions, so that we can get the maximum yield out of that plant.

Laura Rance: [00:11:15] When you look at farming in the U.K. versus farming on the Canadian prairies, there’s obviously some differences in the size of fields, and I think there’s differences in the productivity. How do the economics work out?

Ben Scott Robinson: [00:11:30] So as it stands at the moment, the way that prairie farming works is, is is more efficient and more cost effective, certainly per acre, than what is achievable in the U.K. But also there is a very different level of yield. So the reason why I’m here is to really understand the prairie system better, to be able to work with farmers here. And I’ve been very privileged to meet some outstanding prairie farmers from Saskatchewan who have been very open to talk about the way they work and how they would like to make their farms better so that we can understand how we can deliver to 100 acre, 200 acre fields rather than ten or 20 acre fields like we have in the U.K. But hopefully how we can also help both make their system more efficient, but also hopefully increase yields as well.

Laura Rance: [00:12:29] Do you see this as being scalable across all types of farms and all sizes?

Ben Scott Robinson: [00:12:36] I think that the system of per plant farming is infinitely scalable. The all the challenges around the data and the amount of information, those challenges have been solved in other industries already. And if you think about the complexity of how, I don’t know, Amazon works, for example, you realize that understanding the location of billions or hundreds of billions of single data points which are in one place is actually not a particularly big problem to solve. Whether the machinery, whether the Tom, Dick and Harry look the same in Canada or on the plains as they do in the UK. I doubt it. I suspect that the Tom, Dick and Harry will have a very different appearance here, but ultimately they will be able to achieve the same result.

Laura Rance: [00:13:32] What type of farmers most likely to adopt this first to their system?

Ben Scott Robinson: [00:13:38] So I think there are there are two sort of types of farmers that will be most interested in looking at this sort of system now. One is, I guess you call the sort of trans generational farmer, the farmer who are looking at their land, who are looking at the legacy of their farm, whether it is because they are about to pass it on to the next generation or they have just inherited it, and they will be thinking about, how can I make this farm work for the next generation? How can I make it make sure that we maintain soils in an effective way? How can we apply with the new set of consumer and government demands around reducing chemical inputs in fields while still maintaining or hopefully increasing yields? And then on the other side, I think that there is a just a straight commercial benefit. You know, the use of per plant farming radically reduces the amount of inputs that need to go on to a field. And that allows for farmers who just take a very commercial view in how their farm is run to realise that to to in a way to remove the reliance on things that are outside their control like input costs as we’re seeing at the moment, and bring the control of the cost of their crop closer to them so that they can produce even more efficiently.

Laura Rance: [00:15:09] When you say there could be a radical reduction in the amount of inputs used, do you have any numbers to quantify that for me?

Ben Scott Robinson: [00:15:18] Certainly. So the first data pass that we have been doing in the UK looking at we distribution shows that we can bring down the use of herbicides using existing machinery by somewhere between 60 and 80%. Wow. And that is and because we know where those plants are in field, we can be very precise with the amount of chemical that the sprayers or our dick robot takes out into the field. So there’s no wastage. So that is obviously a huge benefit. Then in terms of nutrient application, we are currently seeing incredible saving savings opportunities in understanding the variation of plant sizes and distribution and emergence rates in fields which are, you know, pretty much invisible to the naked eye or even to a drone, which look like we can bring in substantial savings there. We don’t have numbers around that yet. We’re still in the process of crunching those, but it’s looking like a significant saving. And then the final one is being able to understand when disease or pests first breakout in the field, either when that is very first visible on just a few plants, maybe in the middle of the field, which is very hard to see if you’re an agronomist or a farmer or even before it’s visible on the plant at all. And what we want to do, and this is our ultimate goal, is to give farmers the confidence to not spray to not spray fungicide just in case, but to have the confidence to say, I know my field does not have disease, so I know that I can step back from that that particular application without fear of losing yield.

Laura Rance: [00:17:00] How Ben, how long do you think it will be before you really understand enough to perhaps look at implementing something like this in a Canadian context?

Ben Scott Robinson: [00:17:11] So one of the really exciting things about being here in Regina today is that it has given me the chance to talk to all the people in the area, all the the real forward thinkers within this Saskatchewan farming community and also manufacturing and distribution community to be able to to start that process of being here. It will take at least a year for us to be able to initially gather the data, to have meaningful understanding of what’s here. But we are keen to get here as soon as possible with our Tom robots to be able to gather that data. And once that data is gathered and we also understand all the requirements for the Tom, Dick and Harry robots here, and we can train the algorithms within Wilma to work in Canada, then we will be looking to help farmers as fast as possible.

Laura Rance: [00:18:08] Well, I’m looking forward to seeing how this turns out. Thanks very much for joining me today, Ben.

Ben Scott Robinson: [00:18:14] An absolute pleasure. Thank you for asking me again.

Laura Rance [00:18:26] I was speaking with Ben Scott Robinson of the small robot company in the United Kingdom. This technology is starting to pay its way on British farms, but cereal crops, there are seven or eight times better yielding than what we might see here under prairie conditions. I asked Saskatchewan grain farmer Terry Aberhart about the potential he sees in this technology.

Terry Aberhart:: [00:18:51] Well, I think there is there’s huge potential in per plant evaluation. It seems an incredible stretch from where we are today, especially in large area farming areas like in western Canada or different parts of the world, because we’ve kind of gone from even to this kind of mass scale of efficiencies and things like that, very large equipment to cover ground. But really the reason we moved in those directions was because of human resource limitations and trying to cover more acres and the larger equipment gets and that maybe creates efficiencies as far as what you get done in the field. But it creates also a lot of other inefficiencies with how accurate, where applying inputs and where they are needed. And let’s face it, we’re going through an evolution in the world today where that probably just isn’t good enough. And when we look at how like even spraying technology and looking at green on green spray sensing and things like that, well, you know, going across a field with 100 foot wide or 130 foot wide, boom, just mass broadcasting chemical, when you think about it in that sense, is it’s really a bit of an archaic method of going about that procedure when we think about the technology that’s available to us today. So simply, I think that it is probably a big stretch to think about how we can take smaller machines and or smaller robots and scale it. But on the same hand, those machines, you know, they don’t need holidays, they don’t need to sleep, they don’t need to eat those kind of things. And so I do believe we’ll get there. It’s just a matter of time and it’ll look different. But but I do believe we can get there.

Laura Rance: [00:20:44] We’re sort of on the cusp of a convergence between this intergenerational transfer. Like we’re seeing a lot of older farmers that have been doing broadacre farming that are at the end of their careers. And we’re going to see a new generation taking the helm that’s maybe more digitally oriented. Do you see that being a spot where this might accelerate uptake of this kind of approach?

Terry Aberhart:: [00:21:09] I think it will somewhat accelerate the adoption and what we’re doing, but I think it’s mainly just going to be driven by the market, right? Like as inputs get more valuable, as inputs get harder to get supply chain as the value of the crop goes up, it just it creates more margin and opportunity. So I’ve always said this with precision agriculture and new science and technology, usually what happens is the cost of implementing something either remains the same or actually reduces over time because of, you know, it’s a lot easier for us to develop or deliver a variable rate program today than it was ten years ago. Right. Everything gets better and more efficient. And then the value of what we’re getting from that activity is increasing over time because inputs are going up and the value of the crop is going up. And that ebbs and flows based on the market. But over time, long term, those things only go up. So the cost of implementing it either stays the same or reduces over time as the value increases over time. So we’re going to get to a point where others in the market are using technology that’s more efficient and can produce at a lower cost or create savings. And eventually that like anything, it’ll spill out to where if you don’t keep up with the Joneses, so to speak, you’ll be you’ll be struggling with profitability. Or, you know, we always talk about in life, in business, it’s a lot like a plant. You’re either growing or a die. You’re dying. There’s no static state. So in my mind, if there’s a farm or business that’s saying, well, we’re just going to we’re just going to sit still for the next ten years. Like you’re not actually sitting still. You’re going backwards as the rest of the movie industry is moving ahead. So we need to always be keeping up with that.

Laura Rance [00:23:08] What excites you the most about the kind of technology that companies like Ben bringing brings to the table?

Terry Aberhart:: [00:23:14] Well, what excites me the most is the potential efficiencies long term, the potential safety, the the. Benefits to the environment and sustainability. There’s just so many things. There’s so many things, right. And I think it’s a a shift of thinking, but there’s just so many opportunities. And unfortunately in agriculture, we get beat up a lot, like we’re not doing things very well, but I think we’re probably doing things better than a lot of industries. And I’ve always believed there’s no there’s no other industry that worries more about the next generation than in farming. So most farms are are always actively looking at protecting the land and and the soil for the future to make it better versus just grinding out the profits and, you know, dine and dash kind of thing.

Laura Rance: [00:24:19] So in your dreams, when you look ten years up the road and you’ve got Tom, Dick, Harry and Wilma or whoever, whatever name that has when it comes to your farm, what kind of decision do you see that helping you make.

Terry Aberhart:: [00:24:35] Almost all of them? I mean, that one of the biggest challenges in agriculture today is the amount of information that’s coming at us, the amount of information and decisions that we have to make on a daily basis. So the reality is working with it’s not only going to be autonomous machines, but it’s A.I.. So I cannot there’s no possible way anyone could fathom looking at every plant, even in a couple acre plot, right? Like it’s not even fathomable as a human being, but with the machine that is possible and it’s been done and will be done. And so when you can aggregate this huge amount of data we heard for years about the value of big data, and I think it’s a bunch of BS in my mind because data is worth nothing if you don’t can’t make a decision from it or there’s not some kind of intelligent output. But what I’m excited about is what I like to call intelligent data, and that’s when we take all this big data and we put it into something that we can make a decision with very easily with with data. Lots of times in the farm, especially in the past, we there’s a lot of decisions that were based off kind of emotion or your gut or.

Laura Rance: [00:25:55] Think by golly and a little bit more for insurance.

Terry Aberhart:: [00:25:58] That’s that’s right. And but we’re moving to an area where that’s not good enough anymore and there’s too much to risk there. So when you can when you can make decisions from the data, it’s way easier. It’s a lot less stress. And and you’re probably making a much better decision on average. So that’s where the opportunity is here, I think.

Laura Rance: [00:26:24] That was Terry Aberhart a Saskatchewan farmer who sees a bright future for robotics on his grain farm. The small robot company was among 16 companies participating in the Agtech accelerator program. Their ideas run the gamut for solving some of agriculture’s biggest problems everything from labor shortages to livestock, wastewater recycling. While many of the faces at this event were new, I found one long time ag tech business starter who was back to launch his newest big idea. Rob Saik has launched a fistful of companies over the course of his career. His most recent effort is Advisor Pro, which he describes as a hybrid between telemedicine and eHarmony, a service that links farmers who have a specific question to an expert who can help find the answer. Rob and I talked about how Agtech startups are changing the innovation game. And these options, these technological options are becoming far more prevalent and far more available, far more accessible financially. Where are we with uptake?

Rob Saik: [00:27:33] Well, uptake, you know, trying to reach farmers and the broader agriculture community is very difficult because it’s a very disparate geographically spread out and psychographic. You’ve got everything from 30 year olds who think like 70 year olds and you’ve got 70 year olds who think like 30 year olds. So, you know, for Advisor Pro, it’s a digital platform. So we’re trying to reach them, learn on the digital highway. So people that are on their phones and you know, farmers are on their phones for up to 3 to 5 hours a day. You wouldn’t think that. But they are. And and so we want to reach them where they’re living and they’re living on their phones and the digital highway. So that’s the challenge right now and that’s how we have to reach them.

Laura Rance: [00:28:17] And how do programs like this fit into that scenario?

Rob Saik: [00:28:22] Well, you know, we were talking about this. And so if you think back to when you and I started our careers, the innovations when we were younger, the innovations came out with from the companies like Elanco or Hoechst, Ciena. And we waited for the big companies to have the innovations. John Deere and Case would come up with an innovation today. The innovations are coming from all the startups and there are startups are being acquired by the big companies. But the technology that we have right now, the phone that you’re holding in your hand, the the computers that we’re using, allow startups like here at the Cultivator Accelerator. We have 16 companies from Canada and the UK that are all having ideas and bringing those ideas to life that could impact and make a difference to farmers like Terry Aberhart, who’s talking right now. So this is an exciting time. So the innovation is coming from new places and often, Laura, the innovation is coming from non farm kids, it’s coming from people not connected to agriculture. So they have an idea. Like I was talking to a physicist the other day out of California who’s got an idea on how to do multiple testing of products on on a field. He has nothing to do with agriculture, but they’re looking for a way to make a difference. And I love it. I love the fact that these people are young and passionate and they want to take an idea. Next challenge for them is to commercialize it and then scale it.

Laura Rance: [00:29:51] Perfecting the idea is one thing. Attracting the investment to commercialize it is another, Saik says. For every good idea that makes it, there will be a few that don’t.

Rob Saik: [00:30:02] Back in the day when I started Agri Trend, we started agri trend and I would soil test, make recommendations, charge a farmer, get some money, make some profit, make it, grow it. But a technology company requires literally, literally millions and millions of dollars. Every day I wake up right now and I crumple a bunch of cash and throw it on a fire. And I and I give it to all the people. We have about 30 people working right now, and who knows whether we’ll make it or not. These companies here, some will make a real difference, as some might not make it. But it’s those that do that change agriculture.

Laura Rance: [00:30:36] That was Rob Saik, an Alberta entrepreneur who was participating in the recent Agtech accelerator program held in Regina. That’s all we have for you on this week’s Between the Rows, but we’ll be back again next week. Thanks for joining us. I’m Laura Rance.

Speaker5: [00:30:53] Commercial: [00:30.53 We knew we were doing something right when a competition started swearing. Every time they talked about us. Just the other day, I heard someone saying, Have you seen this seed master ultra pro II They got third party Pammy testing that confirms it’s individual row metering delivers uniform seed placement, near zero seed mortality and no impact on germination results. We take it as a huge compliment. Start raising your ROI at seedmaster.ca.

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