AgTech IoT | Binge watching Clarkson’s Farm

I’ve been heavily immersed in Clarkson’s Farm (Season 5) this week. Jeremy decided to hit LAMMA in Birmingham, Britain’s biggest agtech show, and came back with two high ticket items. The first one; the impressively futuristic AgXeed robot tractor and the second a mobile ping pong table/seeder/weeder from Denmark called the FarmDroid.

While the objective here is not to spoil the show, there was a strong sense that what we were looking at onscreen was a foreshadowing of one potential future. But, there are plenty of incongruent things to dig into once we get into the weeds, backstage. John Deere already tried to build a walled garden and came up a little short.

Amazon’s Cheque Book

Waving Amazon’s cheque book at tricked out tech is something most farmers can’t finagle. The units being reviewed are dirt drizzled “dream cars” for digital dingleberries, effectively a rebadged rural “top gear.” A £30-40k autonomous seeder that depends on manufacturer-controlled RTK correction, proprietary firmware, and a Danish support line is a pricey bet on that vendor’s continued existence, for any “small” farmer.

We can argue back and forth about “farm modernization” till eternity. In many ways the “game” of farming is incentives, grants, taxes, forced culls, social engineering and government schemes, rather than the primacy of planting, tilling and harvesting food. Swapping time saving for tech subscriptions is just as reasonable a carrot within the context as any other economic motive. Robot tractors? …

Pricey Robot Tractors

AgXeed’s own pricing (base unit around 300,000 euros, smaller ones round about 150,000) shows (…and the market has already conceded) that full-robot replacement is a niche play, for now. The retrofit-bridge is the initial scalable product. The cost of a subscription is not cheap either. AgXeed’s own documentation confirms the subscription requirement to keep RTK/data/platform alive – €2,776 for year one of RTK correction, data, and TraXwise access, dropping to €1,300/year after that.

What you’re buying is not exactly a tractor and it’s not precisely autonomous. We’ve looked at the same argument for food delivery robots before. You’re moving the driver out of the bucket seat, for sure. But, there are plenty of other “eyes on” running systems in the background. When shit hits the fan, you’re a rich man playing with rich man’s toys, with zero clue how the get things operational.

Set and forget robots

There is nothing wrong with a set and forget robot doing some weeding, harrowing or ploughing. GPS is a well proven technology and elements like LiDAR, proximity sensors and electronic backbones have already been deployed in the automotive sector for years. Map the field – set the boundaries – mark the obstacles – and let ‘er rip…no real need for all that retail priced “subscription” stuff, you would think? But they’re selling more than that – it’s the whole package, the final solution; all you can eat data.

The picture looks very good from the vantage of Trimble (scale) or a large commercial contracting, businesses (where time is money). They can cover the tech support investment and gamble on work coming from massive landholdings with tight harvesting windows. This is the Formula 1 of agri-tech; money no object, just faster lap times. These poster boys are the literal definition of “too big to fail.”

At the more sleepy bucolic level of an Italian vineyard or a part-time Bulgarian sheep herder, we’re a long way from the this kind of tech nirvana. We looked at exactly this phenomenon the last time we wandered in to a big agricultural show (Agritechnica). All that massive bulk and glitter is not gold. A small diesel tactor is a force multiplier. A big diesel tractor is often a supersized glitterball, in the same way as a modern puffy jacket Dodge Ram. Things that survive well in farming conditions rarely retain that polished aluminum toolbox sheen for long.