Your starter for 10 – can you name a highly computerised and technically advanced vehicle currently on sale in the UK?
If your answer is a Tesla, BMW or another futuristic electric vehicle packed with in-car infotainment, parking cameras and digital mirrors then you’re probably in the majority.
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But you could just have easily suggested the latest tractor or combine harvester and scored top marks. Modern farming requires the best machinery for the job, and it might surprise you how much has changed inside the average agricultural vehicle in recent years.
There’s a big debate about self-driving cars and at what point they will be allowed on public roads in this country. But how many people know that driverless tractors are being used on British farms?
Steered by GPS, the satellite navigation system used to track mobile phones, they are a game-changer in the way we produce food. Harper Adams University in Shropshire achieved a world first when researchers successfully planted, tended and harvested a crop using only drones and automated vehicles.
A field of spring barley was followed the next year by winter wheat in a project named Hands Free Hectare. An autonomous tractor sowed and sprayed the crops, soil samples were taken by small rovers looking like something from the moon landings, while the growth of the cereals was monitored by camera-drones flying overhead.
Finally, an unmanned combine worked back and forth to harvest the crop. And if you think this is the stuff of science fiction, the idea was conceived exactly 10 years ago.
Of course, that doesn’t necessarily mean that every farm vehicle today is equipped like the space shuttle; the cost of the newest kit will always price some people out. At anything up to £320,000 for an autonomous farm vehicle, affordability is an issue for now.
But what about sustainability? Despite features such as radar, ultrasound and sensors that stop the vehicle if it detects an obstacle, driverless tractors are about half the size of conventional ones as well as lighter and, therefore, kinder to the soil.
The new agricultural revolution is taking place elsewhere on farms too, which are a hotbed of technical innovation and efficiency. Robots that are able to plant, spray and pick are being used or trialled at the moment.
In Herefordshire, a solar-powered sugar beet-seeder and -weeder has been working the fields on Ally Hunter Blair’s tenanted family farm near Ross-on-Wye. The machine has been nicknamed Freddie the FarmDroid.
It not only sowed an entire field this spring but it also GPS-marked every beet in the ground so that the specialist blade could cut all the weeds between each row and around every individual plant.
Do all these marvellous machines have the charm of the old-fashioned sit-up-and-beg tractors? I don’t think the popularity of vintage tractor parades of little grey Fergies and classic Fordsons is under any threat.
So, what’s next? The team behind Hands Free Hectare is already speculating on what emerging technologies might be able to achieve in the future.
Instead of automated tractors and combines, could we soon be sowing and harvesting crops with a swarm of AI-enabled pilotless drones? Our daily bread produced without a wheel on the ground. It’s tantalising to think that one day even a GPS-steered driverless tractor could be classed as ancient farm machinery.
Read more of Adam's columns
- “Succession has always been a thorny issue.” BBC Countryfile’s Adam Henson on how farming is changing – and why it’s good news
- 160 woolly pigs were released on a Scottish farm – and they’re disrupting the landscape in a very significant way
- It's big, docile – and known as the Cotswold Lion
- “It makes them look like a living breathing hat stand.” Meet the bizarre farm animal that looks more deer than sheep and doesn’t need shearing
