Per Plant Farming: How Artificial Intelligence will create a better future for arable farming

Per Plant Farming is the idea that it will be possible for a farmer to take action on each plant in their field individually. They will be able to do something to one plant - apply a chemical, a fertiliser, harvest it or kill it if it is a weed - and they will be able to do something different to the plant next to it.

However, farming will only get to that future if decisions are supported by large scale computing and data management power and guided by Artificial Intelligence (AI). AI in turn will only be able to have a significant impact on farming if it is given a consistent flow of up to date, structured, detailed datasets. A fully digitised view of the field.

The vision is that any farm growing any crop anywhere in the world will routinely use Artificial Intelligence to support their everyday decision making. Under a Per Plant Farming system, arable farming would use far fewer chemicals and fertilisers and it would be far more productive. 

Transformative visions for a better way of operating have been delivered in many other industries in recent years, from smartphones to e-commerce to electric cars. Perhaps the key driving question behind this project has been; why has the change been so much slower in agriculture? 

The study tour sought to find out if there is an opportunity for Per Plant Farming in a diverse range of cropping systems around the world and to see what the UK farming can learn from other systems.

I visited Brazil, Canada, USA and China to explore these questions and saw farms ranging in size from 600,000 hectares to 1 hectare. It was clear that Per Plant Farming is possible on the full range of farm sizes, and the potential benefits are enormous. It is not, however, on the cusp of being adopted worldwide at scale and its full implementation seems likely to be some way in the future.

Recommendations

Startups are essential to driving progress in any industry and large incumbents are not currently driving a vision for Per Plant Farming. Venture Capital is the wrong source of funding for AgTech, which needs longer form, more patient capital investment structures. Government has played a key role in establishing new technologies internationally and is in many ways an ideal funder, but for many reasons this is unlikely to work in the UK. We need new forms of funding to address the challenges of this industry. Regional Ag Tech Studios which are funded with a long term perspective, which support startups for longer and which are guided by farmer entrepreneurs seem to be the right solution. New technologies are inevitable, but if they are not developed by and at least partly owned by primary producers then there is a risk that they serve everyone in the industry except for farmers.