Imagine scenario one: colossal autonomous gas-powered robots wipe out hectares of homogeneous agricultural land.
The sky is blackened and smells of smog. The trees have all been cut down and there are no animals in sight. Pesticides are oversprayed because humans no longer take care of agriculture. Machines do their job, producing huge quantities of food to feed our growing population, but it's not without ecological costs.
Or, imagine scenario two: smaller robots cultivate “mosaic” plots of many different crops, working around the trees, streams and wildlife of the natural landscape.
They are powered by renewable energy sources, such as the sun, wind or perhaps water. Chemicals are a thing of the past, because robots help the ecosystem stay in harmony, so pests and weeds are kept at bay. In this scenario, agriculture creates a sort of futuristic Garden of Eden, complete with blue skies, green pastures and clean air.
Which world would you like your agricultural food to come from? With this I won the "rhetorical question of the year" award.
Either way, these are the two futures imagined by Thomas Daum, an agricultural economist at the University of Hohenheim, who works on food security and sustainable agriculture in places like Uganda and Bangladesh.
In July, Daum published an article on Trends in Ecology & Evolution which presented these two visions: an ecological utopia or a dystopia. His goal was to create a debate. The theme? How the technological revolution in agriculture (also known as Agriculture 4.0) could shape our future.
“Today's agriculture must change”
Daum is very concerned that the disruptive effects of agricultural technology on the environment are not receiving enough attention. The climate change mitigation strategies outlined in the Paris Agreement cannot be met without transforming the way we grow food.
“Even if you change all the other sectors,” he says, “if you don't change agriculture, we will still miss those goals.”
A horrible situation
Even in a world without huge agricultural robots, large-scale agricultural practices are already changing the environment. “Agriculture is inherently an intentional shaping of the ecology of a particular place,” he says Emily Reisman, human environmental geographer at the University at Buffalo.
And as a modeling now leaves a lot to be desired. We remove wildlife, we degrade the soil, we clear the land to better grow food, we spray chemicals to ward off pests and diseases.
If we add agricultural technologies to all this, the picture worsens, and not a little.
Nature at the service of machines?
Machines such as tractors, harvesters and crop monitoring drones generally require controlled environments to operate efficiently. This is why unpredictable factors must be eliminated as much as possible in industrialized agriculture.
This can mean years of monocultures on perfectly level fields with little variation in growth, ripening fruit at the same time. It may also mean frequent application of herbicides, pesticides and fungicides to ensure uniformity.
“Standardization is the result of our need to mechanize agriculture,” he says Patrick Baur, sustainable food systems scientist at the University of Rhode Island.
Agriculture, agroecosystem and the entire cultivation process are modeled to meet the needs of the machine.
Patrick Baur
Biodiversity is in danger.
The environmental coherence necessary for industrialized agriculture has contributed substantially to the loss of biodiversity, the variety of plant and animal life necessary to keep ecosystems in balance.
Biodiversity protects water quality, moderates global temperatures by trapping CO2 in the soil (rather than in the air), and ensures there are insects to pollinate crops, or natural predators to reduce the presence of pests.
Machines drastically reduce the diversity of insect life, microbial life and flora and fauna. They are variables that must be eliminated in order to function optimally.
But why do we need machines in agriculture to produce food?
It's a question of economics. To keep up with the ever-increasing demands of a growing population, agriculture requires more and more labor. Food is also much cheaper than it used to be, forcing farmers to produce higher yields for less profit. As a result, if field workers earn less and leave the industry for higher-paying options, farmers may increasingly turn to mechanization to fill the gap.
From nightmare to utopia
Supporting both the environment and the growing demand for food is a difficult balance to find. However, with the advent of artificial intelligence and autonomous devices, agricultural innovations can help us adapt to a changing climate and restore biodiversity rather than threaten it.
Rather than adapting the environment to meet the needs of the technology, we could program the technology to meet the needs of the environment.
“Intelligent” robots governed by machine learning could learn to function better in natural, biodiverse systems.
What agriculture 4.0 can do
In the food sector, robots are already taking off. They collect strawberries and lettuce, even milk cows.
Because they work more efficiently, robots can perform green tasks that would be uneconomical if they had to be done by hand. An example? Pull weeds one by one instead of using herbicide.
Technology could also help with the maintenance of hedges, which are natural enclosures of wild shrubs or trees planted around the perimeter of agricultural land.
Smart robots may also be better suited for cultivation of several crops in the same field, a sustainable agricultural practice that encourages soil health and reduces pests, but is costly and inefficient with current technologies.
But implementing robots that can perform these jobs comes with challenges.
To do what we want and at the same time protect the environment, robots would have to be even more intelligent than the current generation. Which means it will cost more money to design them.
Not only that: the construction and maintenance of these machines also requires resources that drain the environment. I'm thinking about mining minerals like copper and lithium, to build them, energy for intelligent systems, and new ways to dispose of robots, as they will likely have a limited lifespan.
More importantly, Daum's vision of an ecological utopia may prove to be a dystopia for human workers.
In the best case, robotic innovation may simply not be necessary, because experts say small-scale farms with abundant human labor can be both highly productive and rich in biodiversity.
At worst, Agriculture 4.0 could exacerbate socioeconomic problems already present today in agriculture and technology-related industries.
The storytelling that helps science
I find Daum's article very interesting indeed (get it?) and somewhat unusual for an academic journal. He uses science fiction storytelling as a tool to explore the limits of what is possible.
Several of his colleagues have appreciated this approach to engage the audience in a conversation about what the future can be like.
Can we reach this future of utopian ecology? For me yes.
Some of the elements of his utopian vision are possible, even for industrialized farms that would require huge robots to sustain high yields. The most important thing is that we pay attention to agricultural technologies and policies now, otherwise we will end up in the other scenario, the bad one.
