Last week a US court held Monsanto’s glyphosate responsible
for causing cancer in a ground keeper, awarding $289M of damages. This is a
critical verdict in that it demonstrates that glyphosate - as one of the most
popular non-selective herbicides worldwide- is on shaky ground. Indeed, for
some time now, this agrochemical has managed only to just about retain its
legal permits in the face of mounting concern over its toxicity. This verdict,
even if subject to appeal, will have surely sounded the alarm bells in the
board rooms of agrochemical companies worldwide.
You might wonder what the link between this verdict and
agricultural robotics is? The answer is everything. In a previous article
authored two years ago, I had argued that agricultural robots are the long-term
future of the agrochemical business. This verdict only serves to reinforce this
argument, demonstrating that agrochemical businesses need to urgently start
reinventing themselves as being in the business of controlling weeds, and not
just agrochemical supplies. Inevitably, robots, AI, and smart agricultural
tools will come to form a major part of a weed control (not chemical) focused
business.
To learn more see the IDTechEx Research report Agricultural
Robots and Drones 2018-2038: Technologies, Markets and Players. This report
analyses how robotic market and technology developments will change the
business of agriculture, enabling ultra-precision and/or autonomous farming and
helping address key global challenges. It also develops a detailed roadmap of
how robotic technology will become the future of agrochemicals business and how
it will modify the way we design agricultural machinery.
Precision agriculture has been around for decades. From its
early days, this approach has sought to utilize imaging techniques to enable
precision identification and thus precision action taking. However, at the
time, the cost of data acquisition (via sensors and cameras) and processing was
prohibitively high, both in time and money terms, to warrant any commercial
implementation.
That has now all changed thanks to developments in other
industries such as consumer electronics. Indeed, for several years now,
companies have demonstrated robotics equipped with deep learning based advance
vison technologies that can rapidly distinguish between crops and weeds and to
rapidly take site specific action to eliminate the weed. One such example was
Blue River Technologies which was acquired by John Deere in 2017 for $305M.
Interestingly, Blue River Technologies counted amongst its investors some of
the world’s largest agrochemical makers including Monsanto!
This approach is radically different from the
glyphosate-based approach in which the non-selective herbicide kills everything
apart from the genetically engineered seeds. This action is site- or even
potentially plant- specific, requiring the use of customized weed control
action which could be a precision sprayed selective speciality chemical. This
technology also lays the foundation for doing more than just weed control, e.g.,
it can evolve to site specific fertilizer and nutrient deposition technique.
This technique is only set to improve. The algorithms will
certainly get better with practise or more real data. The cost of data
acquisition, management, and analysis will only further fall. And the fleets of
unmanned small robots will increasingly become sufficiently productive to
compete with large manned agricultural vehicles. All these technologies have
significant upside potential whereas the existing technologies has long
matured, making only small incremental gains.
So what will all of this mean for the agrochemical business?
We believe that agrochemicals companies have no choice but to become
intricately involved with robotics and AI. These two technologies will shape
the future of their business. The advent of precision see-and-spray
technologies will drastically impact on the volume and type of the chemicals
employed, potentially transforming the business from one in which they sell
bulk non-selective chemicals towards one in which they sell many specialized
selective chemicals tailored to various plants. Furthermore, the value chain
will become more digitized with data and intelligence capturing a more
significant part of the overall value. This will inevitably enable new
data-based farm management techniques in which agrochemicals are used
differently than today.
This self-reinvention by agrochemical companies needs to
start soon. It will not be as easy or an overnight transition. It requires that
agrochemical companies build up new skillsets and establish new technologies
and business models. It will also somewhat blur the boundaries between tool
making and chemical suppliers as the two become intractably intertwined.
It might that incumbent companies become tempted to not act
since today their current practise remains more productive and lower cost than
emerging alternative technologies including robotic based solutions. But such
companies forget the direction of technological travel at their own peril.
Agricultural robotics will shape the long-term future of agrochemical business.
This long-term future however may be upon us sooner if similar court cases put
legal restrains on the current technology, raising its risk and costs, and if
herbicide-resistant weeds continue their rapid march across areas in which such
chemicals are heavily used.
To learn more read the IDTechEx Research report Agricultural
Robots and Drones 2018-2038: Technologies, Markets and Players. It offers a
detailed analysis of the short-, medium- and long-term future of agricultural
robots and drones. This report includes IDTechEx’s most plausible forecasts
based on their technology roadmaps, suggesting that the market will plausibly
grow to $35Bn by 2038. It provides coverage of the key global trends, main
players, and critical enabling technologies that will shape the future of this
technology
*Contributed by the Marketing & Research Co-ordinator, IDTechEx,
Charlotte Martin.
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