Services and Software for On-Farm Autonomy, with Iftach Birger of FieldIn

There are many different views about the future of autonomous farming. One is that, out of the emerging autonomous equipment providers and established blue chip suppliers, there will be clear winners and losers in the battle for on-farm dominance. Another is that farming in the future will involve all kinds of autonomous solutions. This second possibility presents tons of opportunities to add value for farmers.

Our guest on this week’s episode is Iftach Birger, Co-Founder and COO at FieldIn, a farm data and autonomous equipment startup founded in Israel. Rather than wade into the fray playing out between new autonomous equipment players and established corporations, FieldIn is attempting to create a platform that allows a mixed fleet of equipment to interact seamlessly.

For some, the concept of hands-free farming is terrifying; for others, the prospect is game-changing and exciting. But, is fully autonomous farming really possible?

In this episode, we chat with Kit Franklin, senior lecturer in agricultural engineering at Harper Adams University in the UK, who in 2016 set out to prove an entire crop cycle could be done autonomously. The project was called Hands Free Hectare, which later expanded into Hands Free Farm after garnering worldwide attention for producing what is believed to be the first crop to be planted, cultivated, and harvested - completely autonomously.

While Kit started this farming experiment simply to prove robotic farming was possible, how transferable is his autonomous trial crop to the real world?