The Small Robot Company reimagines agricultural practices with an innovative Farming-as-a-Service (FaaS) model.

Agriculture is a labour-intensive process. Expanding regenerative agriculture requires significant resources to scale up. Advanced technological solutions, such as artificial intelligence (AI) and data analytics, have the potential to make agriculture more efficient and profitable.

The Small Robot Company carries the ambition to reimagine business-as-usual agriculture practices by offering an innovative solution: farming-as-a-service model (FaaS). The company builds robots that tend to individual plants and feed and spray them in accordance with their specific nutrition needs, without any wastage.

The robot, named Tom, conducts mapping of entire fields autonomously in order to gain insights into individual plant data. Subsequently, the data offers insights on reducing herbicide/fertiliser usage and weed control. In addition, the company is developing solutions for robotic non-chemical weeding, grass weed detection, disease identification & treatment and advanced soil insights. AI advice engine, Wilma, assists the robot with the help of AI data and analytics to provide plant-specific intelligence to the entire farm. This knowledge underpins the plant-specific actions on farms.

From planting to harvesting, the company hopes to automate the entire process. As for farmers, who use this technology, they don’t have to own the machinery, reducing their financial burden. In addition, they pay a per-hectare subscription fee for a robotic hardware service which digitises the farm, and delivers crop care.

After conducting extensive trials to estimate the impact of their robots with the support of research institutes and agri-food organisations, the company found that, on a small scale, per plant farming achieved yields nearly 235% times higher than commercially grown wheat.In addition, the company aims to introduce per plant farming service to nearly 50 farms after a pilot has revealed that this method has the capacity to reduce herbicide applications by 77%, glyphosate by 80% and fertiliser by 15%.The company is also working on ways to increase carbon capturing and sequestration through agrifood related solutions for pest treatment and robotic soil sampling. 

According to the company, the usage of small robots as opposed to big, industrial sized machinery improves farm efficiency, biodiversity and yields. Small farm sizes blunt the practicality of big machinery, thereby reducing cost efficiency. In essence, the company is positioning their farming-as-a-service as a democratic farming model in which farmers don’t need to be concerned about the know-how or worry about the machinery being obsolete or taking the risk of ownership. This model also ensures optimal utilisation of machinery as all the participating farmers share the machines instead of owning them.

Photo by Dan Meyers on Unsplash.