Microfarms and computational agriculture: a future of farming?

<p><strong>The following video introduces the Robots for Microfarms (ROMI) project and describes the concept of Micro Farms and Computational Agriculture. Funded by EU Grant 773875.</strong></p> <p><em>Videos are available in:</em></p> <ul> <li>Hi-res (1080p Apple ProRes)</li> <li>Mid-res&nbsp;(1080p&nbsp;H265)</li> </ul> <p><strong>Video script:</strong></p> <p>(MINCHIN) Micro-Farms are farms which are smaller than five hectares and that is a European commission designation of that type of farm which are very common and proliferate all across Europe and are growing in number.<br> <br> (HANAPPE) Micro-farms the way I see it now would be a small farm 1000 square meters maybe a bit more using poly-cropping to really optimise the space and situated next to the city, with the direct link to the city.<br> <br> (MINCHIN) But the Farms themselves are very interesting because being a small scale they cannot compete with a conventional agriculture and for that reason often turn to more diverse crops, polyculture systems and diversity as a solution for their markets. difference information<br> <br> (SERRA CANT&iacute;) An organic farm is a space where the coal is to cultivate the entire ecosystem, and to do so we focus on different crops that help and complement between them, and are not monocultures. Rotating crop beds, adding organic matter, structuring the soil and taking care of the life in the soil such as microorganisms, bacteria, fungi. All of this ultimately ensure that the plant is healthy and does not have so many pests and diseases. A conventional field can have many hectares with the same crop, they are monocultures. That means that if one disease comes, or one insect it can reproduce exponentially. But instead if you have different crops, this stops because the food that it has is limited.<br> <br> (MINCHIN) When we work with Organic agriculture we&#39;re really looking to a tradition of companion planting and polyculture which is much more complex than the conventional agriculture of today. So what we&#39;re seeing here is planting of tomatoes together with lettuce and together with a basil and the Basils give a natural defence against predators for the tomatoes but we can also use an intercrop lettuces in the gaps. But dealing with that polyculture becomes rather complex.<br> <br> (HANAPPE) And managing its complexity is difficult of course that&#39;s one of the reasons why we went to monoculture in the first place. But now with the digital tools that we have we can reintroduce some of this complexity and handle AI and Robotics to assist us in managing this complexity.<br> <br> (MINCHIN) Farmers working on a small scale with a large diversity of crop finds that the work is often very very labor intensive.<br> <br> (HANAPPE) For two months I&#39;ve experienced myself at the Chatelain farm and in it it&#39;s quite taxing on the knees and the back. Ninety Five percent of the disorders in agriculture are muscular skeletal problems.<br> <br> (MINCHIN) The statistics show that after four years of starting a new Farm, many of these young Farmers actually end up with back problems and really struggle to manage the intensity of that biodiversity, of that diversity of crop. So for ROMI our challenge really is to try and support those young Farmers to deal with the complexity and to manage some of the menial tasks that they face day to day.<br> <br> (BAORI) If we can help a small organic micro-farm stay in business, because we&#39;re helping to replace a little bit of the manual labor and the the kind of hardship of that keep their costs down it means that we&#39;re encouraging smaller Farms to not use chemicals they can use a Rover for weeding, and it&#39;s better for for the land it&#39;s better for the farmers it&#39;s better for us all really in the end so it&#39;s a very worthwhile project.<br> <br> (CAMPRODON) Agricultural itself is technology right it&#39;s not lets say we don&#39;t wake up one day and suddenly the world looked like it is, no, we built it for thousands of years. And so for me I don&#39;t know if there&#39;s such a big disconnection or we should think as a big disconnection between traditional farming and this new farming. Things change but I like to see it more as a natural evolution of the way that humans use technology. Basically they develop this cultural practice, that helps them to modify their environment and they apply that to farming.<br> <br> (HANAPPE) What can we do with new technology to help these farms? And then it was at some point you know just sort of well, let&#39;s do something very provocative, let&#39;s do robotics for these farms. Which was a bit of a clash because many of these farmers actually started farming because they sort of wanted to go back to to Nature. And then saying to them look well we can introduce robotics for you, is a bit of a sort of edgy topic.<br> <br> (MINCHIN) And that really means that we might be able to take the best of the past and combine it with the tools of the future to forge a &lsquo;computational agriculture&rsquo; which feeds the land, feeds the ecology and also feeds ourselves. The ROMI tools are really set up to be able to help farmers with the support of biologists and with the support of computation, but it&#39;s not there yet. That&#39;s why we have open sourced these tools to allow a future development towards those objectives.</p>