14 IN THE NEXT five to 10 years, smaller, automated machinery will take over from huge, soil compacting equipment and farming as a service will be a new business model for agriculture, according to Professor Scott Shearer. Shearer is Chair of the Department of Food, Agricultural and Biological Engineering at Ohio State University. His presentation during Crops Day at GreyBruce Farmers’ Week focused on the future of farmmachinery. He specifically touched on the adoption and limiting factors in automation, changes coming in equipment ownership and business models, what disruptive technologies are on the horizon, and whether farmers will control all aspects of their operations. Using data from the University of Nebraska’s tractor testing lab, he showed how the size of John Deere tractors really took off after the 1960s, mostly due to the increased use of the diesel engine. He pointed out that tractor weights continue to increase at a rate of 870 pounds per year. “Think about what that means in terms of soil compaction,” he said. “The ideal soil is 50 per cent particles by volume, 25 per cent void space for air and 25 per cent void space for water — when those portions become imbalanced, that’s when we see crop productivity suffer.” He also pointed out that soil compaction — especially around the Great Lakes — means more nutrient runoff into waterways. Shearer showed a comparison of equipment in which larger tires (36 inches wide) and equipment (360 inches wide) with a weight of nearly 100,000 pounds compacted the soil to four times the depth compared to smaller tires (16.9 inches), equipment (120 inches), and weight (10,000 pounds). “We’re in this cycle in the U.S. of increasingly using larger equipment, which means farmers have to till deeper into the soil, which creates problems,” he said. He said that the solution to the compaction problem is autonomous equipment. He showed a photo of the small Xaver single-row seeder. The idea is to have a ‘swarm’ of these seeders which are energy efficient, can run 24/7 and are cloud controlled. FARMING AS A SERVICE Shearer also said that an emerging business model is ‘farming as a service’ (FaaS). “If you’re a profitable producer, there are probably 10 to 12 things you can do well — the thing is, as technology progresses, can you continue to be in control of all those actions and activities?” he said. “I think this [farming as a service] is how farmers in the future will access technology,” he said, pointing out that farmers currently assume the risk of technical obsolescence when they buy machinery. “If we take a modern technological tractor, it has a life of about 20,000 hours and it’s Disruptive technologies FUTURE FARM EQUIPMENT Lois Harris JOHN DEERE FULLY AUTONOMOUS TRACTOR. PHOTO COURTESY OF JOHN DEERE used about 500 hours a year, so themechanical life would be 40 years, but what about the technology life?” He says that, by custom hiring, renting and leasing equipment, the liability for technical obsolescence is on someone else. He said that when he visited SwarmFarm in Australia, he asked what sales were like for the 20 autonomous units they had just built. “They said they’re not selling them, they were going to lease them” he said, explaining that the company will send a technician out to the farm to set it up and trouble-shoot any initial technical problems. PRECISION AND COST SAVINGS “There’s a true advantage to automation,” he said, pointing out that Craig Rupp, who owns Sabanto Agriculture, has noted that using his autonomous technology means that machinery costs for planting can be slashed from an average of twenty-five cents per horsepower per hour to seven cents per horsepower per hour. The advantage of robotic irrigation, he said, is that it’s not a capital asset tied to a specific field, as in current centre-pivot irrigation systems, so it can be moved around. The robotic irrigator can also target the base of the plant and navigate through the crop at any stage of growth. He also mused about potentially using the robotic irrigator to spread livestock nutrients during the crop’s growing season, rather than only at the beginning or end of it. “It expands the window for applying nutrients to nine months of the year, as opposed to a couple of months in the spring and a couple of months in the fall,” he said. Infield sensor networks are coming on strong and can be used to determinewhat’s happening Industry News
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