UK Edition
How Britain is using technology to lead a new farming revolution
On an overcast morning over Meon Springs, a 1200-acre family farm nestled in the South Downs, 15 miles east of Winchester, a new agricultural revolution can be heard. It doesn’t thunder like a diesel tractor or bleat like a lamb. It bleeps like a gadget.
Will Butler, a 55-year-old, third-generation farmer who is just getting used to such sounds on his land, jokes: “When my son is running the farm it will probably just be him and a couple of robots.”
Already, Meon Springs is increasingly deserted. In recent years, when Mr Butler drove through the winding lanes around his wheat fields, he could spot as many as three dozen labourers scattered amid the lush green landscape. Now those workers have been replaced by laptop-wielding technicians testing small, spidery orange robots that crawl over his patch of picturesque countryside.
The machines, from a Portsmouth-based start-up called The Small Robot Company, take thousands of pictures of Mr Butler’s crops which are then fired through an artificial intelligence algorithm. That informs him what is happening in every single centimetre of his fields. The analysis distinguishes between weeds and crops, and between healthy and diseased leaves, allowing Mr Butler to pinpoint fertilizer and pesticides rather than douse a whole acre with chemicals.
Known as Tom, Dick and Harry, the customisable robots weigh a quarter of a ton - rather than the 25 tons or more of a tractor - and are the frontline of a “agri-tech” revolution that is sweeping the world.
From leaf-level sensors to Fitbit style “wearables” for cows; from farm management software platforms to gene-editing and robots like Tom, Dick and Harry, new technologies are helping drive vastly improved precision and productivity in a sector that, estimates suggest, must feed a global population of more than 9 billion by 2050.
Such inevitable growth has seen investors pouring billions into a hitherto traditional sector often seen as slow to adapt. But in Britain something particularly dramatic is happening.
Research for The Telegraph has found private funding in British agritech has almost quadrupled in the last 11 months compared to the whole of 2017 even as, globally, investment has flatlined.
At $30m the total remains small and is dwarfed by megadeals worth hundreds of millions in North America. But it points to a new attitude towards UK agritech. Ben Scott-Robinson, co-founder of the Small Robot Company, counts off a handful of reasons driving the profound change. They include growth potential and the need to be more environmentally responsible. But at the top of the list is Brexit.
As Prime Minister Theresa May continues to sell her Brexit deal to MPs, businesses and the public, one of the things she repeatedly touts is Britain’s exit from the EU’s Common Agricultural and Fisheries Policies. It is, she insists, a critical part of “taking back control”.
There are two immediate consequences for British farms: cash and manpower. “85 per cent of British farms are not viable without EU subsidies,” says Scott-Robinson. Meanwhile, as Mr Butler is finding out at Meon Springs, the tap of cheap immigrant labour is being turned off. “We have Eastern European labour here to help with the dairy farm, but I don't know whether people are going to come over anymore to work here after Brexit,” he says.
The implications are clear: “British farmers urgently need to find new efficiencies,” says Scott-Robinson.
The government insists it wants to help. At Defra, Michael Gove says that subsidies will be replaced (over seven years, to 2028) with a model that rewards “public good”, such as environmental stewardship, rather than simple bulk production. Meanwhile, at the Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy, Greg Clark has announced £90m for a Transforming Food Production Challenge to further stimulate a sector it estimates contributes £14.3 billion to the economy and employs 500,000 people.
“Most farmers are aware that we are on the brink of a very exciting technological revolution,” says Guy Smith, Deputy President of the National Farmers’ Union. “But let’s be clear. This tech is not cheap.” He says there is a role for government in providing, say, soft loans, grants, or tax breaks, to invest in new equipment. But the agritech appetite is there. “Farmers are turned on by tech,” he says. “We’ve always loved our new toys - and these are new toys.” He describes standing on the sorting line of a cherry farm in Herefordshire which only a couple of years ago was manned by significant numbers of workers from Eastern Europe. Now, he says, each individual cherry is scanned and graded by size automatically. “It’s so exciting, to think every single cherry is scanned. Robotics are transforming the way we farm in this country. Brexit really is providing new opportunities to think differently.”
Just how differently is a key point.
“We could become a cutting edge, international agtech hub, if we make the most of the opportunities,” says Smith. “But on regulations, say, if we simply cut cut and paste the common rule book, that will stop us. For example, gene editing is really exciting. But the ECJ has just decided that it must be regulated in the same stifling way that GM-foods are. We need a benign regulatory backdrop. If we’re overcautious we will lose the opportunity.”
The risk is clear. The biggest agritech deal of 2018 in Britain saw $10m invested in Tropic Biosciences, based in Norwich. The company develops high-performing varieties of tropical crops using what it calls “cutting edge genetic editing technologies”.
“We are in the top few countries for agritech,” says David Rose, who researches the impact of new technology on agricultural society at the University of East Anglia, just down the road from Tropic Biosciences. “You can’t say we’re not going to have a fourth agricultural revolution. The rationale is that if we have a labour shortage after Brexit, the robots can pick up the slack.”
And he says it’s not just in fruit picking where change will come. “Drilling seeds, self-driving tractors, applying fertilisers, there are lots of things that can be done more efficiently with robots.”
Above all, it is ubiquitous sensors and the data they produce that will be game-changing.
“A farmer who has worked a farm for 50 years knows where crops grow best,” says Freddie Reed, Projects and Technical Manager at Agri-Epi, one of four new agricultural research centres co-funded by government and industry. “Data takes the experience of that farmer and put it in a computer program so the next farmer can learn in one year, not 50. It’s getting to that point.”
Ian Wheal, founder of a livestock app called Breedr, describes “a huge push towards data” in arable farming, and is trying to replicate that for cattle. “With better data you have better traceability, and you understand quality earlier on, which is crucial.” He says almost half of meat cattle are delivered to processors “out of specification” which means the animals fetch lower prices. With ear tags and mobile app - what Breedr calls the “Internet of Cows” - he hopes to end that. “Our data will predict for farmers when it is best to sell their animals for the most money.” It is a potentially revolutionary scheme that, he says, “is absolutely focused on the UK, because with Brexit there is a great opportunity for us to be more productive, while maintaining welfare and still be competitive on the global stage.”
With its impact on subsidies and labour, Brexit is catapulting British agriculture - willingly or not - headlong into a new era, says the NFU’s regulatory affairs adviser, Helen Ferrier. “Brexit is accelerating trends. Things that would have happened in the industry anyway are being forced upon it.” That could end up giving Britain a global advantage. But it could also bring turbulence. “It’s exciting - as well as being a bit scary,” says Ferrier. “But then the two often go together.”
Back at Meon Springs, Will Butler, who has been working the same fields since he was 18, and been up since 4:30 that morning to prepare his dairy, shows more excitement than fear. “I am very optimistic about the future. Farming is the core of the British isles, and the economy. As a country we care about our farming and our food - and that will never change.”