Agriculture is one of the world’s least digitized major industries. This is, however, changing. Indeed, data acquisition and analytics companies are already a hot topic, and as such are subject to growing capital investments. This trend is captured in the chart below.
Agricultural robots can also be seen as a part of this picture: they are data acquisition tools at their core. Today, many agricultural robotic companies are graduating into the market and in the process are transforming the value chain of agriculture. This trend is analyzed in IDTechEx’s report “Agricultural Robots and Drones 2017-2027: Technologies, Markets, Players.”
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The data in this chart show the investment in nearly 40 select farm data management and analytics companies. Evidently, interest in the past three years has risen. Note that some companies have yet to raise funds. Note also that IDTechEx excluded FarmEdge, which raised $120 million in 2016, since it was involved in significantly more than data analytics. Further note that many drone and all agriculture robotics are excluded. Acquisitions are also not included. For more details, contact IDTechEx or refer to the aforementioned report.
Contrary to common perceptions, agriculture is in many areas at the forefront of technology adoption. Take autonomous driving as an example: GPS-enabled autonomous tractors have been in use for years in farming. Indeed, the IDTechEx report predicts that the number of GPS-enabled assets in farming will rise to nearly 1 million by 2024. To set this in context, this figure was only 107,000 in 2006 and was nearly 430,000 in 2016 (this includes autosteer, tractor guidance and VRT equipment).
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In fact, when we take the long view, we can see that agricultural machinery has dramatically evolved over the past century. Interestingly, as in other industries, the time is now ripe for further automation as cost of sensing and data processing has fallen in recent decades. IDTechEx forecasts that agricultural robots will become a $12 billion industry by 2027.
Despite the strong progress on the machinery side, data and analytics still play a minimal role in traditional agriculture. Of course, data has been extensively used in research and development, particularly when it comes to advanced seed and agrochemical production. Nevertheless, it is yet to propagate at scale into farming itself.
This is, however, on the cusp of change. Agricultural robots and drones will help drive this transformation. In the near future, sensor-equipped agricultural robots will likely autonomously navigate through farms, continuously building up a detailed spatial map of data about specific plants.
To enable this, however, agricultural machinery may have to undergo a fundamental transfiguration: large, fast and heavy manned machine may have to be replaced with small, slow and light autonomous robots.
We are at the beginning of the beginning of this change. Indeed, there are numerous early-stage companies, projects and research groups that are developing such robots. Surprisingly, many are already in commercial mode, having sold hundreds of such agricultural robots. Again, more information can be found in the IDTechEx report.
In parallel to agricultural robotics, wireless sensing networks are also finding a receptive market in agriculture. The two technologies are complementary. In general, agricultural robotics can help increase the resolution of collected data, elevating the precision levels from a specific farm patch toward specific plants. Furthermore, robots intrinsically extend beyond being just data acquisition tools in that they can also carry out precision agriculture through site- or plant-specific actions such as precision seed planting, spraying, weeding, nutrient feeding and so on.