The future of farm robots

Robots are already used across agriculture’s supply chain, and they are bound to become more autonomous and affordable. A question arising now is whether these will be gigantic machines, such as the smart harvesters used in the grain industry, or smaller ones able to work with existing farming equipment.

In ‘Farm robots: ecological utopia or dystopia’, published in Trends in Ecology and Evolution, agricultural economist Thomas Daum suggests that we might end up with fleets of small, intelligent robots, fuelled by sustainable energy, farming in harmony with nature, or a dystopian situation where large robots subdue the landscape with heavy machinery and artificial chemicals, resulting in humans becoming even more dissociated from nature and the origin of their food.

Daum says the future will probably be a mixture of these, but hopes the scenarios outlined will spark conversation and allow for an informed choice to be made.

So far, the development of semi-autonomous