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Croptimal choices

The long haul toward food security begins at the source, and precision farming is capitalizing on the latest technologies to feed the world while ensuring we still have a habitable Earth.

Agriculture has a long list of impacts on the planet from water use to pesticides. And the more we farm, the more impact we make. Fortunately, a revolution in farming technologies is helping farmers maintain yields and honor the land that provides them.

“Good farmers, who take seriously their duties as stewards of creation and of their land’s inheritors, contribute to the welfare of society in more ways than society usually acknowledges, or even knows.

These farmers produce valuable goods, of course; but they also conserve soil, they conserve water, they conserve wildlife, they conserve open space, they conserve scenery,” wrote Wendell Berry, American writer and environmental activist, in his book “Bringing It to the Table: On Farming and Food.”

Randy Price, precision farming specialist at Louisiana State University Agricultural Center, says precision farming has ample benefits for farmers, consumers and the environment and presents solutions of how farmers can live up to this standard.

Pesticides protect the crop and the global population’s food supply, but they have a significant impact on the environment.

According to a 2023 study out of Chang Mai University in Thailand, “The transport of pesticides from crop-growing regions has resulted in widespread contamination, not only of soils, water bodies, and/or crops but also of the atmosphere via various pathways.” Precision farming technology, however, might be a part of the solution.

Send in the drones

Drone technology can help, Louisiana State’s Price says. “Drones are allowing farmers and consultants to obtain overhead images of farm fields and land areas at greatly reduced prices over satellite and other methods.”

Drones can be fitted with sensors and imaging technology, and this data plays an integral role in active farming. Among other uses, the data can help farmers identify fungal contaminations, pest infestations or areas of growth congestion.

Identifying these issues early and targeting specific locations eliminates the need to spray entire crops with pesticides — which means less toxicants in the air, soil and food supply: better for the land, better for the consumer, less costly for the farmer and safer for farm workers.

IMAGE: AI Generated, KUST Review
In the greenhouse

While other innovators are focused on open farmland, the researchers at Khalifa University are looking at ways to automate greenhouses. Read more›››

“We have a significant community of scholars working in the area,” says Lakmal Seneviratne, director of the university’s Center for Autonomous Robotic Systems.

Research focuses on using robots, whether drones or mounted on rails, to collect information about plant health and readiness for harvest. Machine-learning resources help predict disease and fruit yields and analyze soils, he adds.

“Tactile devices (could also) predict fruit ripeness,” Seneviratne says. KU is partnering with UAE agtech giant Silal on a 2,000-square-meter greenhouse in Al Ain, but commercial greenhouses could easily be hectares in size, he says.

For now, the project is focused on strawberries, blueberries and tomatoes.

KU is also partnered with ASPIRE’s International Virtual Research Institute for Food Security in the Drylands. “A lot of investment is happening in the UAE,” Seneviratne says.‹‹‹ Read less

Once the problem is identified, a drone is programmed to spray the affected area with the appropriate pesticide avoiding overuse. Price says the more common precision tools are yield monitors.

This technology allows farmers to determine their crop yield within a specific unit area of their land and perform on-farm analysis, allowing for informed planning and decision-making. Understanding which areas are underperforming or overperforming is crucial to this process. Monitors and analysis assist irrigation allotment, fertilizer volumes and crop rotation.

Research also includes testing. “They will try different application rates (fertilizer, irrigation, additives, etc.) on small areas of a field, such as twelve rows plot down the whole field, etc., and then use the yield monitor at the end of the year to quickly (and easily) see the differences in that plot,” Price says.

Mapping the land

All of this information helps farmers create a prescription map of their land — something Price says is challenging and labor intensive. He says he believes for areas over 3,000 acres, mapping needs to be easier. The knowledge bases are inadequate at this stage and still required are “systems that will convert remote sensing data into actual disease and pest damage assessments.”

He and his team are working to make this happen with automatic flying drones.

“They take off, fly a field, land and recharge automatically,” he says, adding that low-level flights that record data at 10 meters from the crop surface allow high-resolution images of plant leaves to be recorded (with location) for automatic analysis with AI and other techniques.

Price’s team has been collaborating with several companies to create automated flight platforms for remote-sensing drones and additional yield monitors for sugarcane.

Price says AI will be the major contributor going forward to analyze crop damage and assess pests and disease. This would allow for fully automated treatment by sprayer drones. The drones then would collect the next remote-sensing data for analysis. Assess, treat and repeat.

In addition to crop health, AI offers data-driven decision-making opportunities for soil conditions and weather patterns.

“Over time, precision farming should allow farmers to more precisely treat various areas of land, without over-treating other areas and create a more sustainable agriculture,” Price tells KUST Review.

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AQUA BOTS

In a world hungry for nutritious food, aquaculture is clearly a winning idea.

It isn’t a new one, either. Humans have been farming seafood for millennia. In more recent years, aquaculture has expanded to land-based tanks, where farmers raise fish and other seafood. Those tanks, however, take up increasingly valuable space on land and worsen competition for scarce water and other supplies.

Hear the writer read this story

This has more farmers looking back to the sea, where space is abundant and water and nutrients are free. Mariculture, the subset of aquaculture in the open seas, however, presents additional challenges.

A UAE tradition

Robotics could be on tap to move traditional Emirati fishing techniques into the future. Read more›››

The robots Lakmal Seneviratne and his team are working on at Khalifa University could eventually be employed to clean and repair hadra – fence traps placed perpendicular to shore – and gargour – fishing traps woven from palm leaves into a semicircular form, he says. ‹‹‹ Read less

Traditional mariculture relies on intensive manual labor to clean and repair equipment, monitor conditions, inspect nets and care for the plants and animals raised for human markets. That kind of manual labor is expensive, requiring trained commercial divers who are increasingly spread thin as aquaculture operations expand. It can also be dangerous work for those divers, particularly as farms move out into deeper and more perilous waters.

Mariculture can also pose threats for the environment, spreading disease, antibiotics and parasites or allowing farmed fish to escape and negatively affect native species.

Eleni Kelasidi, a senior researcher at SINTEF, one of Europe’s largest independent research organizations, thinks those issues could have a common solution: robots.

Putting a robot into the open water can be a bigger challenge, however, than putting a robot on the land.

For one thing, Kelasidi says, it’s important that autonomous systems do not harm farmed fish and/or damage the flexible structures.

This is both an ethical and economic consideration, she says. The ethical consideration: “We cannot harm any living thing and/or let them to escape from the fish farms.” The economic: “The fish are the profit of the industry.”

Happy fish

Kelasidi and her team have access to industrial scale fish farms and operate full scale research facility to investigate how robots stress or otherwise affect fish using equipment originally designed for the oil and gas industry. They test systems to see how well they function but also to observe how fish react to, say, different colors, sounds or lights. The goal is to learn what stresses fish and ensure healthier fish stocks and better profits.

Humans on the surface currently perform many aquaculture jobs using remotely operated machines, she notes.

“Our job is to cut the dependence from the humans to get the robotic systems to operate themselves. They need to understand their environment and make sure they don’t collide with structures,” Kelasidi says.

Another challenge for researchers, she says: making remote-operating vehicles “more clever.”

‘An exciting frontier’

Self-operating aquatic systems is an issue Lakmal Seneviratne, director of the Center for Robotics and Autonomous Systems at Khalifa University, is working on as well, and he’s optimistic.

CAPTION: Aquabots from Khalifa University

“It’s a very exciting frontier in underwater robotics,” he says, noting that 70 percent of the Earth is water but humans have explored only 5 percent of that.

Seneviratne and his team are also working on land-based agricultural robots such as “dogs” that can step lightly between rows of crops; “hands” that can gently pick fragile fruits; and robots on rails that can move up and down a field to monitor individual plants for signs of disease or readiness for harvest.

But ocean farms present a different set of challenges for autonomous systems.

“The problem isn’t that aquaculture is very deep, but (maintaining) navigation and control,” Seneviratne says, echoing Kelasidi’s concerns.

GPS doesn’t work beneath the water’s surface and robots have to be able to navigate currents and waves without damaging each other or farm structures.

Cameras, to capture images, and artificial intelligence, to sharpen and analyze those images, are important to managing these conditions, he says.

Looking to nature

But being able to see in the murky depths is only part of the issue for mariculture robotics. The machines also need control. So researchers are looking at life forms already adapted to aquatic environments for inspiration. Although not specifically designed for aquaculture, the biomimicry could prove useful in ocean farms. Among the ideas:

Aquaculture’s promise and challenges

As the world’s population grows and climate change puts more pressure on traditional terrestrial farming, sustainable aquaculture could play a key role, says Naveed Nabi, an assistant professor at Chandigarh University. Read more›››

“In the present times, when food security is a matter of serious concern, aquaculture has played a key role to mitigate this crisis, supplying about 178 million tons of food in which 20.2 kg per capita is destined for human consumption,” he says. “Aquaculture not only adds resilience to the global food system through improving resource-use efficiencies, but also by diversifying the farmed species.”

But he warns that farmed fish present challenges to the environment including fish escapees that harm native species and the spread of disease and parasites.

There’s also the issues of eutrophication, in which water becomes overloaded with nutrients, leading to deadly algae blooms; antibiotics in the environment through unconsumed food or fish waste; and threats associated with pesticides. ‹‹‹ Read less

A team from Harvard and the University of South Carolina in 2021 presented the Finbot, which uses four independently controllable fins.

In 2023, a team from Zhejiang University, China, in 2023 published results of their Copebot, designed to mimic the copepod, a small crustacean known to escape from predators with explosive jumps. Their bot, they report, was able to leap out of the water, land on a small pad, transmit data and jump back into the water.

Back at Khalifa University, meanwhile, researchers have other ideas.

“Looking at aquatic environments, many animals evolved flexible or completely soft bodies to improve their swimming capability and adaptability to the intricate underwater world,” says Federico Renda, who heads the team. “For instance, octopuses can squeeze into small apertures to hide or catch prey, and jellyfish developed the most efficient locomotion strategy of all. In my team, we take inspiration from soft creatures to build new underwater robots capable of replicating these functionalities while understanding the physical principles involved.”

One of KU’s designs mimics flagella, the whiplike structures that propel bacteria through liquid to solve another issue with underwater robots: Many are tethered. While the tethers allow the machines to be operated from the surface, they can also become tangled together.

“Recently, we have developed an untethered underwater robot inspired by flagellate microorganisms capable of efficient and safe locomotion in close proximity to sensible underwater habitats,” Renda says. “Furthermore, each flagellum can be used as a coiling gripper in addition to propulsion, achieving redundancy and multifunctionality, which can significantly simplify underwater operations.”

To test robots’ ability to navigate choppy waters, Khalifa University built a wave pool that simulates currents. Stanford University’s Oussama Khatib recently used it to run Ocean One, a humanoid robot designed to perform such tasks as monitor coral reefs and offshore oil rigs, through its paces.

SINTEF’s Kelasidi would like to see robots replace human divers or assist them on highly risky operations. Seneviratne likewise expects robots to allow human divers to inspect more often and longer.

“We see robots as helping divers instead of replacing them,” he says.