With agriculture facing various challenges including population increase, urbanisation and both mitigating and managing climate change, agricultural automation and robotics have long been seen as potential solutions beyond precision farming. The Hands Free Hectare (HFH) and Hands Free Farm (HFF) collaborative projects based at Harper Adams University (HAU) have been developing autonomous farming systems since 2016 and have conducted multiple autonomous field crop production cycles since a world first in 2017. Noted as a milestone in the advancement of precision agriculture there are many lessons to be shared from the HFH field work which has shown the technical possibility of conducting crop production with small-scale autonomous agricultural machines. These small-scale lighter machines have been hypothesized to improve soil health by reducing compaction therefore, improving yields and reducing farm energy requirement by reducing need for compaction mitigation tillage, as well as enabling increased resolution precision farming. The Hands Free Hectare Linear Programming (HFH-LP) model has been developed based upon the HFH experience to calculate the economics of small-scale autonomous crop production which has shown favorable cost of production in the order of £30/T of wheat using the HFH system over the conventional systems due in part to reduced labor requirement and capital costs.
Further consideration of the HFH/HFF system performance and scale has highlighted a potential for autonomous machines within agro-ecology regenerative cropping systems. Agronomic and sustainability benefits are widely hypothesized regarding agro-ecology in any one of its forms, companion/strip/pixel cropping, whereby synergy between multiple crop species grown in conjunction could reduce the requirement for crop protection products and additional nutrition. Conventional mechanisation of multiple cropping agro-ecology systems is prohibitively expensive due to the scales and logistics involved. Pixel type cropping ‘Agbots’ have been proposed, but implementation faces engineering challenges due to the differing agronomic needs of the crops involved. The HFH/HFF small-scale autonomous machines lend themselves to strip cropping at 2m row widths immediately. The HFH/HFF system is capable of establishing and then repeatedly return to individual crop rows, including at harvest, within a multiple cash crop field by having routing plans for each crop to call upon. Individual nozzle control on the HFF crop sprayer can already apply to 2m strips from a standardised set of tramlines. Autonomous crop robot technology in the form of the HFH/HFF system could enable a move to agro-ecology strip cropping improving in-field biodiversity and agronomic performance as the farming sector moves to improve sustainability.
