Future Crop Farming

As crop robots are finding their ways onto farms, they are largely heralded for cost efficiency due to substituting labor-intensive tasks. Despite the advantage of a lower weight than tractors and the option to equip crop robots with precision farming tools, the mere implementation of crop robots in existing plant production systems will not realize their potential. Thus, the established way of farming must also be reconsidered. Ecological issues like the risk of soil erosion and the loss of biodiversity may be addressed in small-scale, highly diversified agricultural systems. Such systems include the cultivation of multiple crops in the same field, e.g., in the form of strip intercropping. In addition to ecological benefits, intercropping approaches may improve the economic resilience of farms against external shocks, which, however, stands in contrast to cost inefficiencies resulting from small-scale structures. The role of crop robots in future farming systems is thus a field to be studied, also from a social perspective: crop robots’ ecological and economic benefits face farmer adoption hesitancy due to uncertain societal reactionsTo understand the potential of crop robots for future-proof agriculture, a systems-oriented evaluation is necessary. The project Future Crop Farming in south-eastern Germany is designed to address this nexus of technology, ecology, and economics under consideration of the underlying social framework by applying the Actor Network Theory. In addition to the agronomic analysis of the crop production system, the field lab will also serve as a platform for communication with different groups of society. This project was funded by the Bavarian State Ministry for Food, Agriculture and Forestry (A/21/17). The field lab is also part of the Horizon Europe project Digitalisation as an Enabler of Agroecological Farming Systems (HORIZON-CL6-2021-FARM2FORK-01-03).