A three-member team of engineers in Britain, working as the Hands-Free Hectare initiative, are “the first people in the world to grow, tend and harvest a crop without direct human intervention,” says The New Yorker. The engineers say their underfunded experiment with a plot of barley shows the potential of autonomous agriculture, in which machines work the field without farmers at the steering wheel.
The project connected drone software, which can direct an aircraft over a field, “to a series of motors, which, with a little tinkering, made it capable of turning the tractor’s steering wheel, switching the spray nozzles on and off, raising and lowering the drill, and choreographing the complex mechanized ballet of the combine,” the magazine reports. The project had about $250,000 in grant money and relied on small and older-model farm equipment.
“Hands Free Hectare’s final yield was a couple of metric tons lower than the average from conventionally farmed land — and the costs in both time and money were, unsurprisingly for a pilot project, stratospherically higher,” said The New Yorker. The engineers are enthusiastic in describing a future in which small autonomous motorized units apply the precise amount of fertilizer and weedkiller needed for each discrete part of a field — the detail work in the tapestry of agriculture that now uses the broad brush of mammoth equipment.