Editor’s View: Will AI’s impact on farming be meek or mega?
© Adobe Stock “The data revolution will be bigger [for the farming industry] than the invention of the tractor.”
Perhaps the most remarkable claim at AI(Live) – a conference held this week that brought vets and others together to ponder how big the future impact of artificial intelligence (AI) will be on livestock production.
Yet it wasn’t just a gathering of bright-eyed tech optimists who have cluttered the aisles of agricultural events for a decade without achieving a great deal; there were also plenty of critics.
See also: Opinion: Why we need to stay in control of artificial intelligence
This made the event far more compelling, as various speakers probed exactly what motivates a farmer to adopt new tech.
About the author
Unfamiliar technology that seems to change at a bewildering pace, a workforce reluctant to shift from a way of working they are content with, and a sad sensation that genuine interactions are being replaced by a cold, unfeeling machine.
All of these must have weighed heavily on farmers as they contemplated replacing horses with tractors on their farms.
The fact is it took until 1959 for the agricultural horse population to fall to 10% of its 1921 peak, according to Equine Machines: Horses and Tractors on British Farms c1920-1970 – a fascinating paper written on the topic by Dr Felicity McWilliams.
If the hype over AI is to be believed, we perhaps stand on the brink of an equally transformative period now, with some of the most giddy futurists predicting it will crash over us with extraordinary rapidity.
And it is not all in the future, of course, with millions in the wider economy already using ChatGPT and the many other research tools that rival it.
Some of agriculture’s supply chain is already benefiting. Oxbury Bank’s Jeff Bradshaw notes that an AI assistant has slashed the cost and time of analysing a set of financial documents from £60 and 24 hours, to 10p and three minutes.
And Harper Adams University’s Dr Jude Capper highlighted a slew of research, aimed at using AI to improve animal health, that has already taken place.
This included video analysis of dairy cattle that can forecast future lameness and, in broiler chicken production, predict chick mortality with remarkable accuracy.
We’ll cover this in more detail in next week’s Livestock section, but if these early hints of tools to slash office admin and improve animal health can be brought to market, at least some of the hype may be realised in time.
Dr McWilliams’ conclusion on farming’s journey from the horse to horsepower concludes that it was a long transformation rather than a rapid revolution.
Indeed, the slowest period of change was during the 1930s when farming went through a depression in arable prices, reducing the area under cultivation.
Yet many today still persist with the assumption that it is in a time of hardship that you are likely to see the period of most rapid change as businesses battle to survive.
Too often the opposite is the case as people lack the money and mindset to contemplate doing things differently.
So here’s my forecast: if you want to predict where AI may change farming the fastest, look to whichever enterprise is enjoying enough prosperity to inspire confidence.