The ground-breaking Hands Free Hectare (HFHa), run by Harper Adams University and Precision Decisions, which aimed to be the first in the world to plant, tend and harvest a crop with only autonomous vehicles and drones, has come to an end after a successful harvest.

The Iseki tractor which was used earlier in the project for the spraying, drilling and rolling, was smaller and lighter than most tractors used nowadays.

The team’s mentality that smaller is better was carried through to harvest which was completed with a combine harvester designed to harvest trial plots.

The team believes that the use of smaller agricultural machines could improve soil and plant health.

Jonathan Gill, researcher at Harper Adams University, said: “There’s been a focus in recent years on making farming more precise, but the larger machines that we’re using are not compatible with this method of working. They’re also so heavy that their damaging farmers’ soils.

“If combines in the future were similar to the size of the combine we used in this project, which was a little Sampo combine with a header unit of only two meters, it would allow more precise yield maps to be created. They would also be much lighter machines.

“The weather can be an issue when farming, and provide only small windows for work to be completed; we’ve experienced it ourselves with this project.

"Just like anywhere in the UK, we’ve had to adjust our spraying times and harvest times due to the rain. This is part of the reason machines have been getting so much bigger over the years; we need to be able to complete work quickly."

We believe the best solution is that in the future, farmers will manage fleets of smaller, autonomous vehicles.

"These will be able to go out and work in the fields, allowing the farmer to use their time more effectively and economically instead of having to drive up and down the fields.

“But it’s going to take new talent entering the industry to develop the technology. We hope that this project has helped to inspire some people and shown them the range of interesting and innovative jobs that are available now in agriculture.”

Farming without humans

Martin Abell, mechatronics researcher for the industry lead, Precision Decisions, said: “This project aimed to prove that there’s no technological reason why a field can’t be farmed without humans working the land directly now and we’ve done that.

"We set out to identify the opportunities for farming and to prove that it’s possible to autonomously farm the land, and that’s been the great success of the project.

“We achieved this on an impressively low budget compared to other projects looking at creating autonomous farming vehicles. The whole project cost less than £200k, funded by Precision Decisions and Innovate UK.

"We used machinery that was readily available for farmers to buy; open source technology; and an autopilot from a drone for the navigation system.”

Jonathan added: “Despite our combine being 25 years old, it performed absolutely wonderfully.

"It’s phenomenal to know that I was part of this world-first project. To know that we’ve actually done it and you can now look out at the field and see it’s all gone. We grew it, nursed it and now we’ve harvested it, completely autonomously. What an achievement.”

“It feels amazing to have finished,” said Martin. “We’ve worked all year for this. At some points it didn’t feel like it was ever going to happen, but we’ve done it."

Challenges

“Our major challenge leading up to harvest was getting the combine ready. We spent a lot of time practising; getting our headland turns right and on the day they appeared to be perfect, which was amazing to see.

“The combine drove a lot better than the tractor. We made a bit of a breakthrough with that. Unfortunately, we didn’t have the time to make the same adaptations to our tractor, so even though we’d practised a rolling team, as a precaution during the actual trial, we didn't allow the tractor to get too close to the combine to avoid any accidents.

“Throughout the year we’ve been predicting a yield of 5t. Looking in the trailer, it looks like we’re not quite there. Our agronomist predicted 4.5t and it looks like he’s on the money.”

The team now plan to make a Hands Free Hectare beer with the spring barley that has been harvested.

They also hope to bring the project back by repeating the experiment, but with a winter crop.

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Watch: the hands-free hectare – inside the fully robotic farm