“The apple trees were blooming, but there were no bees scurrying among the flowers,” Rachel Carson wrote 60 years ago in the opening chapter of Silent Spring. He envisioned a future city with no birds, no insects, no flowers, only disease and death. The reason? All around life has been poisoned by pesticides. But what if, instead of bees, there were hundreds of drones using artificial intelligence to do the job of pollinating apple trees?
The celebrated American conservationist and author’s premonition of a pesticide-fueled climate breakdown where pollinators no longer roam is edging ever closer. Can technology offer a solution to our growing biodiversity crisis?
Every now and then a headline will shout about the arrival of robo bees, with visions of a dystopian future where drones, not insects, “buzz” from flower to flower. In 2018 West Virginia University in the United States developed the BrambleBee, which pollinates plants using a robotic arm. Israeli tech company Arugga claims to be the first company to commercialize a robot capable of replicating buzz pollination in tomato greenhouses. ‘Polly’, which looks nothing like bees, has been put to work in Finland, where the long, dark days of winter make it difficult for bees to pollinate crops, so they need pollen supplements. manual linization. The robot will now do the hard work and also collect plant health data, allowing farmers to make informed treatment decisions.
A more recent example can be found in a joint venture between the University of Stirling in Scotland and the University of Massachusetts. They have received funding to build tiny robots that can reproduce the hum of pollinating bees. Dr Mario Vallejo-Marin, Associate Professor of Biological and Environmental Sciences at the University of Stirling, told Investigate Europe that the aim of the project is not to replace natural pollinators. “We’re not looking for a mechanical way to replace what thousands of bee species do around the world.” Rather, he says, the goal is “to understand why it’s important to conserve different types of bees.”
Credit: AruggaPrototype of Arugga’s ‘Poly’ pollination robot.
Bee conservation is a growing concern. Almost three-quarters of the world’s most essential food crops are pollinated by bees, according to the UN, but numbers are declining as industrial agriculture expands and rampant pesticide use persists. European beekeepers have warned that colony numbers have declined over the past 15 years, while experts have estimated that almost one in 10 wild bee species are dying out in Europe.
Dave Goulson, professor of biology at the University of Sussex, agrees with Vallejo-Martian that robo bees can never replace the real thing. “Honeybees are very good at pollinating and have been for 120 million years,” he says. “So why do we think we can do better by building little robots? It’s nuts. But people are taking it seriously as an option.”
All non-crop plants would not be robo-pollinated, he adds, whereas the most important thing insects do is actually not pollination, but recycling. They recycle any kind of dead material, which Goulson says a robo bee wouldn’t do.
It would take trillions of robo-bees to replace all natural pollinators, according to Alan Dorin of Monash University in Australia, a process he describes as unrealistic and economically impossible for most farmers. Robo bees are environmentally damaging to create and remove, Dorin says, and can pose serious risks to wildlife.
Assistance not replacement
Robotic bees may not be swarming our fields anytime soon, but with the global agricultural robotics market expected to be worth $20 billion by 2025, tech-assisted agriculture that helps the environment is set to take off.
UK-based Small Robot Company (SRC) hopes farmers will use AI and robotics to work with the environment and make food production more sustainable. They hope to replace heavy tractors with lighter, more environmentally friendly robots and help farmers reduce costs and inputs such as herbicides and fertilizers.
They currently have three models of robots – Tom, Dick and Harry – that control, treat and plant crops autonomously. Tom, for example, scans the field to create a map of where the plants are and what each one needs. This data is fed into an AI advisory model that creates a treatment map that advises farmers on what action to take.
Credit: SRC Small Robot Company’s “Tom” robot.
SRC says herbicide applications can be reduced by almost 80 per cent with the technology and the products are due to be rolled out to 50 UK farms by the end of this year. A 2019 crowdfunding campaign raised £1m, much of which the company says came from farmers, and support for the technology appears to be growing. Tom Jewers was attracted by the prospect of reducing chemicals on his Suffolk farm. “The ability to treat only the plants that really need it is changing the game,” he told Farmers Weekly.
Amid rising global prices, the motivations for farmers in the UK and across Europe to reduce their use of chemicals are both economic and environmental. “With the cost of inputs rising, farmers and producers are willing to reduce their reliance on a variety of products, including pesticides,” Dr. Dawn Teverson of the group affiliated with the industry, Linking Environment And Farming (LEAF).
Experiments in agricultural techniques are a centuries-old tradition. It was in 1843 at Rothamsted Research, one of the oldest agricultural research institutes in the world, that the first wheat seeds were planted in the field of Broadbalk in Hertfordshire, England. These seeds would become Rothamsted’s classic long-term experiments, laying the foundations of modern scientific agriculture and establishing the principles of crop nutrition.
Broadbalk has been under continuous scientific study ever since, helping scientists understand how fertilizers can improve crop performance. This is just one way science is being used to improve food production. Rothamsted plant pathologist Kevin King is working to develop early warning systems to farmers for fungal pathogens and help prevent ‘fungicide overspray’.
Credit: Juliet Ferguson The first wheat seeds were planted in Broadbalk Field in 1843,
Fungal pathogens can wreak havoc on crops. King and his colleagues are developing an air monitoring device to measure the amount of spores in the air. This will help them understand how the pathogen behaves and therefore how best to manage and control it. They relay that information to farmers with “the idea being that if a farmer or grower can know exactly what’s going on in their field at any given time,” King says. “They can then take preventative measures to try to manage the disease.”
Credit: Juliet FergusonAn insect trap at Rothamsted Research, one of the world’s oldest agricultural research institutes.
The Rothamsted estate is dotted with various insect traps, which form part of the Insect Survey overseen by Dr James Bell. The work his team is doing now has its origins in a survey started in 1964. They use two types of traps, one at 12.2 meters to take a view of the landscape of insects flying at that height and traps higher short ones that give a more granular view of behavior. . As with fungal spore research, these traps are used to predict insect pest threats and produce newsletters for farmers. Even from their origins in the 1960s with spray, they were created to reduce the use of insecticides.
“In 1964 we believed that if we communicated with farmers, we could change their behavior, and that’s what we do today with forecasts and data,” says Bell.
But changing behavior won’t be easy. The latest research from Research Europe laid bare the problem of pesticides in Europe and the resistance among farmers, industry and some politicians to support laws on pesticide reduction and data collection. Meanwhile, the charity Food Watch recently described a self-reinforcing cycle of pesticide use that is creating fragile agricultural production systems where farmers are increasingly reliant on chemicals.
Not only the diversity of plants, insects and birds is threatened by the current agricultural system. So are the farmers themselves, critics argue.
“Every time we see fewer farmers. They are getting less and less profit,” Green MEP Bas Eickhout said recently. “We see that our rural areas are under threat. In addition, we see the impact of climate change affecting our farmers. We see the loss of biodiversity.”
Technology likely has a role to play in helping farmers escape this cycle, but it is a small part of a larger need for system change and not a replacement for what nature is doing and has been doing for millions of years. Free.