Investor Harus Memperhatikan: Robotika Mengambil Alih Pertanian

Pada zaman pra-modern, sebagian besar aktivitas ekonomi didorong oleh sektor primer: pertanian, peternakan, dan produksi makanan lainnya. Dengan revolusi industri, ekonomi kita semakin didorong oleh industri pertama, kemudian layanan. Hal ini membuat sektor primer, meskipun tetap bertanggung jawab atas tugas penting produksi makanan, menjadi semakin tidak terlihat dalam hal ekonomi.

Faktor kunci adalah mekanisasi pertanian. Di wilayah miskin dan kurang berkembang seperti Afrika, pertanian dapat menjadi mata pencaharian sebagian besar penduduk dan menyumbang hingga 15% PDB. Di negara seperti AS, pertanian kurang dari 1% PDB.

Mechanization and industrial farming led to several trends, almost all of them detrimental to the environment:

• Ekspansi monokultur massal seluas ribuan hektar alih-alih ekosistem beragam dengan pagar hidup, banyak spesies, dll…
• Ketergantungan besar pada pupuk kimia.
• Penggunaan intensif pestisida dan herbisida yang menyebabkan kerusakan ekologi dan pencemaran air.
• Degradasi kesuburan tanah akibat pembajakan dalam, pupuk, fungisida, dan pemadatan di bawah beban traktor yang semakin besar.
• Penurunan keanekaragaman hayati tanaman, dengan hanya beberapa varietas yang sering mewakili 80%-90% total produksi.
• Nilai gizi makanan yang diproduksi menurun.

This is not sustainable. Populasi lebah terancam oleh “Colony Collapse Disorder, kemungkinan dipicu oleh pestisida. Dan hal ini bahkan tidak menguntungkan, menimbulkan tekanan besar pada petani, yang jauh lebih mungkin daripada populasi umum untuk mengakhiri hidup mereka sendiri. FAO PBB (Food and Agriculture Organization) memperingatkan bahwa 90% tanah akan berada dalam bahaya pada tahun 2050. Dan produksi makanan harus meningkat 70% pada tahun 2050, meskipun sebagian besar tanah menjadi terdegradasi dan steril.

This could be a pretty grim picture. But we have the solution already, and it is being implemented right now.

Beranjak ke Langkah Selanjutnya

This is not all negative. Industrial farming has drastically reduced hunger despite the world population exploding. It also freed up human labor for more productive tasks like sciences and education.

But there are a few things that industrial farming does poorly and seemingly cannot get better at:

• Pengendalian gulma dan hama tanpa bahan kimia.
• Pemanenan dan pemetikan, terutama buah-buahan dan beri yang rapuh.
• Perawatan khusus untuk setiap bagian kecil lahan yang dibudidayakan.
• Irigasi optimal yang tidak membuang sumber daya air berharga.

The solutions so far have been to either ignore it (chemical treatment) or solve it by exploiting cheap migrant labor (fruit picking). From both an ecological and ethical standpoint, it is not acceptable to keep the same practices in place.

Untungnya, robotika kini hadir untuk membantu menjadikan pertanian lebih berkelanjutan.

Bayangkan masa depan di mana pemetikan buah dilakukan oleh robot pintar yang tidak akan melukai punggung mereka dan tidak akan kepanasan di bawah terik matahari; di mana traktor diesel raksasa digantikan oleh armada drone otonom kecil beroda yang berjalan dengan tenaga surya; di mana ladang terus dipantau oleh drone terbang untuk memeriksa; dan di mana pestisida serta herbisida digantikan oleh air panas atau lengan robotik.

The good news is that the whole farming industry is doing this. Not only small enthusiastic startups but also industrial giants like Bayer. You even have global agricultural robotic forums like recently in Desember 2021 in France. Progress is made all over the field, but we can categorize them into a few segments.

Pemungutan Buah dengan Robot

Advanced.farm is using 6 robotic arms, machine vision, and a suction cup to harvest apples without the need for human presence gently. It can also do it at night, allowing for a 24/7 harvest schedule. It has also designed a strawberry harvester, which is 5x more efficient than a human harvester. So despite a little spooky look when operating at night (see below), it is really safe and efficient.

Fieldworkrobotics has signed a partnership with German machine maker Bosch to develop its soft fruit-picking robots. It specializes in fragile fruits and veggies like raspberries, cauliflower, and tomatoes, using advanced robotic arms.

Manajemen Gulma & Hama dengan Robot

Ecorobotix has created a robot that combines machine vision with precision spraying to reduce by up to 95% the volume of pesticide and herbicide used. Instead of spraying the whole field, their robots target only the plant that actually needs the chemical. While this does not remove chemicals entirely from farming, this should reduce drastically the total volume and its associated pollution.

Naio Technologies aims instead to remove herbicide from the field fully. A lightweight (1.5 ton, so just like a car) autonomous robot drives the field and shreds or uproots the weed with small blades. It uses LIDAR, GPS guidance, and machine vision to drive by itself and distinguish crops from weeds, requiring no supervision.

Some go even further, such as Blue River Technology, a partner of the giant in farming equipment John Deere. It uses machine learning and machine vision to identify every plant in the field. So the robot can get rid of the weed but also thin out the crop like lettuce, increasing the overall yield without human intervention, “doing the job of 9-10 people”. You can see more in the video below:

(the same use of machine vision to thin and weed around the crop is also done by Vision Robotics, Ekobot, and Aigro). And it is likely many other startups are either still operating in stealth mode or just getting started.

Pengairan dengan Robotika

Osiris Agriculture is a French company that has developed an irrigation robot. By driving itself and identifying the plant needs, it reduces water consumption by 30% and also saves farmers 7 hours of work per hectare in the summer months.

Pemantauan dengan Robotika

Precision Hawk use drone to monitor crops’ health, using multispectral sensors. These drones are reading not only visible light but also infrared, which gives information if an area needs watering. It also signed a partnership with the world’s largest drone manufacturer, DJI, for an app able to transform any drone into a monitoring drone.

Aplikasi Lain untuk Robotika

There are plenty of other possible applications.  For example, managing cattle with Beefreeagro, which locates and counts cattle autonomously. It can also detect early signs of disease and monitor if all the fences and gates are how they should be.

Robots can also be used for reforestation efforts. Biocarbon Engineering has used flying drones to plant hundreds of trees in just a few minutes in a test to regrow mangrove forests in Myanmar. This can be especially efficient for hard-to-reach areas like coastlines and mountains.

Because some cultivation, like flowers, is often done indoors, there are also planting robots for greenhouses like the Roboplant.

Sebutan Khusus

Not all fields are in nice flat rows for miles. Many fields are on slopes or have complex configurations, for example, vineyards or mixed crops. There is a robot for that, too. The Slopehelper moves on tracks like a tank and can do almost anything depending on the equipment attached: spraying, mowing, weeding, mulching, and even assisting manual pickers to reach the fruits in an orchard or vineyard.

It is likely that multi-role robots will become the norm, mixing together in one machine for planting, irrigation, pest control, weeding, picking, etc. Probably through the merging of some of these startups in a few tech leaders or in pre-existing agronomic conglomerates like John Deere and Bayer.

Last but not least, maybe you are not a farmer but a gardening enthusiast who would like to cultivate some of his food at home. But without the time or physical capacity to do the gardening yourself? Or do you want to see farming robots in action by yourself? Then, you can look at the open-source Farm.Bot. It will plant, weed, water, and fertilize autonomously a surface up to 3mx6m for “just” $3,995.

Kesimpulan

Robots are just beginning in farming. And they are also here to stay. Labor is still a major component of the price of food production. Robots can help keep food affordable as well as promote better farming practices. We might, in a few decades, look back at current agriculture practices as destructive and short-sighted compared to much more advanced robo-farming methods that help preserve biodiversity and reduce pollution.

Robots are likely to replace most tractors over time and radically modify the way farming is done. This is both a threat and an opportunity for incumbents in the sector. So, from an investment standpoint, it would be best to invest only in agri-businesses embracing robo-farming and being able to adapt to a change as radical as mechanization was almost a century ago.

Savvy Investors should keep an eye out on the agricultural space, specifically companies that are applying data analytics and capitalizing on robotics.