The Economic Reality of Agricultural Robotics and the Return of Widjets, Part 1 of 4

If by progress in agricultural robotics one means that concepts being explored in the engineering lab are maturing into viable commercial products that farmers are willing to make capital investment in, then there really hasn’t been any progress over the last decade or more. When I look at a trade publication today showcasing the latest ag-robot commercial venture, what I see looks exactly the same as what people were doing 10 years ago.

The easy, and least charitable, explanation is that researchers in agricultural robotics are more concerned with making clever robots than they are in addressing the economic realities that farmers are constrained to work within. I personally think the real answer goes much deeper than this. But I would like to start by addressing this first speculation.

Regarding the economic reality farmers face; not once have I seen any article or research group address the fact that in the farming industry, productivity and profit do not necessarily correlate. In fact, often they are found in inverse correlation. If one farmer has a productive crop yield, chances are other farmers in that region have done as well. At harvest time, this gluts the market causing the price per commodity to go down; at which point the farmer actually ends up losing money. It is not unheard for a farmer to let a field go fallow midseason when it becomes apparent that a crop has become a money loser for the year.

And regarding the question of crop rotation, at least in my area (Pajaro Valley), except for the apple orchards and berry fields, I never see the same crop in the same field for more than one growing cycle. For example, for vegetable crops, it’s a given that there will be several different crops in the same field over the course of any growing season. This means that any ag-robot technology that requires permanent field-installed components will also become a nonstarter for the farmer.

For these reasons, farmers are extremely reluctant to make any kind of capital investment in equipment or infrastructure beyond what is minimally necessary. In other words, telling a farmer, as a sales pitch, that using a certain ag-robot technology can raise his/her productivity is not going to be, by itself, a useful marketing strategy.

For a farmer, a robot will be just another piece of equipment like a tractor or harvester; and, whether purchased or leased, machine payments come every month whether the equipment is working in the field or not. Contrast this with the economic reality of hiring a field worker; when the work stops, the field worker can be let go and the farmer’s financial commitment ends. This is a point universally overlooked. Yes, machinery and robotics, on paper, will appear to be far more productive then human labor. But the financial commitment that comes over the lifetime of ownership of a single-crop ag-robot negates any short-term/seasonal financial advantage it has over human labor.

The large corporate farms, whose operations encompass thousands of acres, can make the risky financial choice of purchasing a large sophisticated single-crop harvester or planter.

But for family farms, whose operations are measured in hundreds of acres rather than thousands, investing in such large sophisticated machinery is an out-of-reach financial decision; which is why smaller farming operations are more dependent upon hand labor.

One needs to be careful in reading the last two paragraphs. One has to make the distinction between mechanization and robotics. There are crops like wheat, corn, potatoes, peanuts, sugar beets, and etc., that lend themselves to a high degree of mechanization. From soil preparation to planting through to harvesting, each phase of the farming operation can be taken care of in one pass and at one point in time, with the handling of these particular crops all done mechanically. Contrast this with crops like berries, green beans or zucchini squash, where the harvesting goes on continually over the course of a plant's growing cycle, and which also require careful handling to avoid damage to both the food item and the plant itself.

When looking at those crops that lend themselves to mechanization, one finds that the farming industry has already reduced the need for human labor down to a handful of equipment operators running large integrated computerized machines. At this current state of affairs, robotics and AI offer little-to-no marginal return on investment. The best the robotics community can offer is to replace the remaining equipment operators with AI-based control systems. But the truth is, having a reliable, conscientious and responsible human operator on payroll represents a far greater return on investment to the farmer than spending money on a complicated computer-based AI control system that leaves them at the mercy of some outside, distant, and often unresponsive tech support.

To appreciate how serious this last situation is for farmers, one only needs to look to the recent controversy over the “right to repair” that has affected John Deere tractor owners across this nation.

• Wired Magazine, "John Deere Just Swindled Farmers out of Their Right to Repair".
• YouTube, "Right to Repair”.
• YouTube, "Tractor Hacking: The Farmers Breaking Big Tech’s Repair Monopoly”.

Where robotics can offer a true return on investment to the farmer is with crops that require special handling: picking fruit and berries and harvesting a variety of the vegetable crops. These are the crops for which the cost of labor is the largest single expense the farmer has to face. And with coming minimum-wage laws and other rules respecting work week hours, these are the kinds of expenses that will break a farmer financially. So, the incentive to replace the human fieldworker with an equivalent AI-driven machine could not be more immediate. For example: YouTube, “Harvesting Squash & Eggplant in Fresno County”.

In other words, agricultural robotics will only/finally arrive commercially on the farm when it can offer the farmer a human fieldworker equivalent.

But, here’s the catch, until there is an electro-mechanical equivalent to biological muscle, such a human equivalent robot is an unattainable dream.

Developers develop the ideas they can based on the current technologies available to them. Electromagnetic, hydraulic, and pneumatic are the only robust actuator technologies available to design with. So whatever ag-robot might be designed, its functionality, by necessity, will always be constrained to what these actuator technologies are capable of implementing.

This last observation brings this post back to the speculation as to why the field of agricultural robotics is not progressing. The answer is that, given the existing technologies available, it simply can’t.