Future of Agriculture Full of Robots: Nightmare or Utopia?
Imagine huge autonomous robots running on gas, bulldozing across acres of uniform farmland under a darkened sky that even smells of pollution. All the trees have been cut down, and no animals are anywhere to be seen. Pesticides are sprayed in excess because people no longer tend the fields. The machines do their job, producing enormous amounts of food to feed a growing population, but not without environmental costs.
Or imagine another future: small robots cultivate mosaic plots of many separate crops, working around trees, streams and wildlife in a natural landscape. They run on renewable energy such as sun, wind and, possibly, water. Agrochemicals are a thing of the past, and the robots help the ecosystem stay in harmony, so pests and weeds are kept in fear. Visually, it resembles a futuristic paradise garden with blue skies, green pastures and clean air.
Which world would you like your food to come from? These two visions of the future were presented by Thomas Daum, an agricultural economist at Hohenheim University who works on food security and sustainable farming in countries such as Uganda and Bangladesh. In July 2021 he published a paper outlining a dual vision of ecological utopia or dystopia, to raise the question of how the technological revolution in agriculture may shape our future.
Daum is concerned that the destructive impact of agricultural technology on the environment is not getting due attention. The climate change mitigation strategies outlined in the Paris Agreement cannot be implemented without changing how we grow food.
“Modern agriculture must change. Even if you change all other sectors but do not change agriculture, we still will not achieve these goals”
Even in a world without giant robots, large-scale farming methods already alter the environment. We remove wild animals, degrade soil and clear land to grow food better, and spray chemicals to protect against pests and disease. When we add existing farm technologies to this mix, the situation becomes even worse.
Machines such as tractors, combines and drones for monitoring crops typically require a controlled environment to operate efficiently, so industrial agriculture must eliminate unpredictable factors as much as possible. This can mean growing monocultures year after year on perfectly flat fields with minimal variation in growth, ripening at the same time, and often applying herbicides, pesticides and fungicides to ensure fertility.
“Standardization is the result of our need to mechanize agriculture. It is farming, the agroecosystem and the entire growing process, adapted to the needs of the machine”
The environmental conformity required by industrial agriculture has largely contributed to the loss of biodiversity (the diversity of animal and plant life) needed to maintain ecosystem balance. Biodiversity protects water quality, lowers global temperatures by capturing carbon in soil, provides insects that pollinate crops, and natural predators that reduce pest presence. Machines sharply reduce the diversity of insects, microbes, flora and fauna, because their optimal operation requires destroying a great deal.
Why do we need machines to produce food? It is a question of economics. To keep up with constantly growing population needs, agriculture requires more and more labor. Food is far cheaper than it was in the past, which forces farmers to produce higher yields at lower profit. As a result, if field workers earn less money and leave the industry for better-paid options, farmers may increasingly turn to mechanization to fill the gap.
Balancing both environmental protection and growing demand for food is a difficult task. Nevertheless, with the development of artificial intelligence and autonomous devices, Daum sees high potential for agricultural innovations that will help us adapt to a changing climate and restore biodiversity rather than threaten it.
“Could we reverse some of these trends that have negatively affected agriculture? Instead of adapting the environment to meet the needs of technology, we could program technology to meet the needs of the environment”
Smart robots driven by machine learning may work better in natural, biodiverse systems, because they can imitate the flexible thinking people use to assess their surroundings and make decisions.
Robots are already gaining momentum in the food sector: they pick strawberries, harvest lettuce, pollinate flowers and even milk cows. Because they work more efficiently, robots can perform environmentally friendly tasks.
Daum believes they could also help with the labor-intensive maintenance of hedgerows, which are natural barriers of wild shrubs or trees planted along the perimeter of farmland. They support biodiversity by serving as alternative habitat for local plants, insects and wild animals.
Smart robots may be better suited to intercropping or growing several crops in the same field, a sustainable farming practice that supports soil health and reduces pests, but is costly and inefficient compared with existing technologies.
