Opinion: AI will focus on farm management, not tasks
© Ocean/Nikonos/Adobe Stock What role will AI play in the farm of the future?
It took me a moment to twig that the question was about artificial intelligence, not bull sperm or bird flu.
Given the media noise around the disruptive effects of artificial intelligence (AI), could farming be in for a shock?
According to AI-powered search engine Bing, AI is “the ability of a digital computer or computer-controlled robot to perform tasks commonly associated with intelligent beings”.
See also: Opinion – Artificial intelligence will only go so far in farming
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Bing also told me that “AI has the ability to transform 21st-century agriculture” and that it has “saved the agriculture sector from different factors such as climate change, population growth, employment issues and food safety.”
AI backs itself to farm better than farmers can.
Farmers are famously slow to adopt technology, and the commercial reality is that robot deployment on farms is going to be limited.
No one is going to design a robot that throws straw over a gate.
However, it’s not hard to imagine that our existing machines could be designed to communicate better with us: it wouldn’t take the processing capacity of Deep Thought for a tractor to simply tell you what that warning light means.
The transformation that AI really enables is about management, not tasks.
As data become ubiquitous across our farms, AI-powered technology will be used to make more sense of it than we can.
And as AI starts to organise our farm management for us, we will have more incentive to deploy more tools to enable it to do so.
Imagine having a fleet of in-field sensors so that you don’t have to crop walk or moisture test 10 different fields in a morning.
Or language sensors in your livestock sheds that interpret sounds of disease, distress or contentment.
Smart image and sound analysis is already ramping up biodiversity monitoring.
Even amateurs like me can use apps such as Warblr, which listens to and identifies birdsong, and PlantNet, which employs image analysis to identify plants.
Sensors deployed round the farm will create real-time environmental sustainability information for supply chains and offsetters, improving traceability and enabling inset payment models.
Of course, this means we might need fewer ecologists.
The government announced additional funding at the end of July for local authorities to recruit more ecologists to support the rollout of biodiversity net gain, but these jobs might not even exist by the time the recruitment period closes.
Other customer service roles are also at risk. Our purchasing co-operatives and banks will realise that a friendly voice on the end of the phone can’t be guaranteed to be as effective or as available as an AI chatbot.
Farm traders, brokers and agents that rely on the “human touch” in optimising land use or crop marketing strategies soon might find AI creates better outcomes at lower cost.
There is, of course, more than one silver lining here for farmers.
No one will miss the Rural Payment Agency’s never-ending numerical menu options, and automation will reduce profiteering.
I can see people increasingly valuing the countryside as a place to escape technology and connect with their senses and nature, something they can know is real.
Farmers will benefit from AI-driven innovation in managing the farm of the future, and in getting better customer service.
It’s clear this new technology is not going away, so we – and those who provide services to us – better be prepared.