What will farm machinery look like in 2045?

Fol­low­ing a research project involv­ing inter­views with sev­er­al pro­files in the agri­cul­tur­al sec­tor, I can assert that it will be more than ever a ques­tion of ener­gy tran­si­tion and machine auton­o­my. In the research we pre­sent­ed, com­plete auton­o­my is not a pri­or­i­ty request­ed by users, but a pos­si­ble future: farm­ers want machines that remain con­trol­lable. They pre­fer agile, mod­u­lar tools, rather than large trac­tors that are com­plex to oper­ate and main­tain. The future of agri­cul­ture is focused more on pre­ci­sion farm­ing and agron­o­my, as well as cost man­age­ment and access to skills. Attract­ing skilled work­ers is becom­ing increas­ing­ly dif­fi­cult in this sec­tor. Con­se­quent­ly, we must not for­get the notions of safe­ty and com­fort in the work­place. Automa­tion will nev­er com­plete­ly replace the human work­force, because of the costs involved and the flex­i­bil­i­ty it offers when demand peaks. More­over, niche sys­tems such as ver­ti­cal farms and hydro­pon­ics are emerging.

Has artificial intelligence entered the agricultural sector?

Dig­i­ti­za­tion will be increas­ing­ly present tomor­row. Big data and arti­fi­cial intel­li­gence are already part of pre­ci­sion agri­cul­ture. This intro­duces new meth­ods of agri­cul­tur­al pro­duc­tion and improves deci­sion-mak­ing thanks to all the infor­ma­tion gath­ered from data. In the inter­views con­duct­ed for our work, it emerged that AI has great poten­tial in this sec­tor for some but rep­re­sents a poten­tial threat at the same time for oth­er farm­ers who won­der whether they’ll have to be con­tent with fol­low­ing AI rec­om­men­da­tions with­out know­ing what’s behind them, not to men­tion the pos­si­ble prej­u­dices that all this implies. Some also high­light­ed the poten­tial of blockchain process­es for trace­abil­i­ty, also enabling more process­es to be inte­grat­ed to avoid com­modi­ti­za­tion. Anoth­er top­ic repeat­ed­ly raised was the pool­ing of tal­ent and machin­ery, to gain in effi­cien­cy and encour­age invest­ment: some pre­dict a pref­er­ence for more spe­cial­ized machin­ery, rather than mul­ti-pur­pose tractors.

Precisely what does the future hold for the tractor and agricultural machinery in general?

Unfor­tu­nate­ly, the pub­lic still sees agri­cul­ture as a pol­lut­ing sec­tor, yet new tech­niques in agron­o­my, prod­ucts and cer­ti­fi­ca­tion are very often per­ceived as intrin­si­cal­ly good. Cur­rent­ly there is, unfor­tu­nate­ly, a poor pub­lic per­cep­tion of this sec­tor and our aim must be to change it. For most of the per­sons inter­viewed, this meant tak­ing respon­si­bil­i­ty for sus­tain­abil­i­ty, with farm machin­ery that is also sus­tain­able, mod­u­lar and easy to use and that needs to be upgrad­ed. The farm machin­ery of the future will have to be inte­grat­ed into a more glob­al sys­tem than that of the farm and take into account new devel­op­ments in agronomy !

KD