Beyond robo-bees: can technology really help stop the biodiversity crisis?
“The apple trees are starting to bloom, but no bees are buzzing among the flowers,” wrote Rachel Carson, 60 years ago, in the opening chapter Silent spring. He imagined a future city without birds, without insects, without flowers, only disease and death. The reason? Whole life has been poisoned by pesticides. But what if, instead of babbling bees, there were hundreds of babbling drones in place – using artificial intelligence to do the job of pollinating apple trees?
Renowned US conservationist and author’s hunch on pesticide-induced climate damage where pollinators no longer roam is getting closer and closer. Can technology offer a solution to our growing biodiversity crisis?
Oftentimes headlines will scream about the arrival of robo-bees, with visions of a dystopian future where drones, not insects, ‘buzz’ from flower to flower. In 2018 the University of West Virginia in the US developed the BrambleBee, which pollinates plants using a robotic arm. Israeli technology company Arugga claims to be the first company to commercialize a robot capable of replicating buzz pollination in tomato greenhouses. ‘Polly’, who is not at all like a bee in appearance, has been set to work in Finland, where long, dark winter days make it difficult for bees to pollinate crops so they need to supplement with manual pollination. Robots will now do the legwork and also collect plant health data, allowing farmers to make informed decisions about treatment.
A more recent example can be found in the joint venture between the University of Stirling in Scotland, and the University of Massachusetts. They have received funding to build small robots that can reproduce the buzz of pollinating bees. Mario Vallejo-Marin, Associate Professor of Biological and Environmental Sciences at the University of Stirling, told Investigate Europe that the aim of the project is not to replace natural pollinators. “We’re not looking for a mechanical way to replace what thousands of bee species around the world are doing.” Instead, he says, the goal is “to understand why it’s important to conserve different types of bees.”
Credit: AruggaBee conservation is a growing concern. Nearly three-quarters of the world’s most important food crops are pollinated by bees, according to the United Nations, but numbers are declining as industrial agriculture develops and rampant pesticide use continues. European beekeepers have warned that colony numbers have declined over the past 15 years, while experts estimate that nearly one in 10 wild bee species is facing extinction in Europe.
Dave Goulson, Professor of Biology at the University of Sussex, agrees with Vallejo-Martian that robo-bees can never be a replacement for the real thing. “Native bees are very good at pollinating, and they have been doing it for 120 million years,” he said. “So why do we think we can do better by building small robots? These are nuts. But people take it seriously as an option.”
All non-plant plants would not be pollinated with robots, he added, while the biggest thing insects do is actually not pollination, but recycling. They recycle all kinds of inanimate material, something that, says Goulson, robo-bees won’t do.
Trillions of robo-bees will be needed to replace all natural pollinators, according to Alan Dorin of Monash University in Australia, a process he describes as unrealistic and economically impossible for most farmers. Robo-bees destroy the environment to create and dispose of, Dorin said, and they can pose a serious risk to wildlife.
Help not replace
Robo-bees may not be buzzing around our fields anytime soon, but with the global agricultural robotics market estimated to be worth $20 billion by 2025, technology-assisted agriculture that helps the environment will start to thrive.
The UK-based Small Robot Company (SRC) hopes that farmers will use AI and robotics to work with the environment and make food production more sustainable. They hope to replace heavy tractors with lightweight robots that are more environmentally friendly and help farmers reduce costs and inputs such as herbicides and fertilizers.
They currently have three robot models – Tom, Dick, and Harry – that monitor, care for and grow crops independently. Tom, for example, scans the field to create a map of the location of the plants and what each plant needs. This data is fed to an AI suggestion model that creates a care map that tells farmers what action to take.
Credit: SRCThe SRC said herbicide applications could be reduced by nearly 80 per cent with the technology and would roll out the product to 50 UK farms later this year. The 2019 crowdfunding campaign raised £1 million, most of which, the company says, came from farmers, and support for the technology appears to be growing. Tom Jewers is intrigued by the prospect of reducing chemicals on his farm in Suffolk. “The ability to care for only the plants that really need them has changed the game,” he told Farmers Weekly.
Amid rising global prices, the motivation for farmers in the UK – and across Europe – to reduce chemical use is both economical and environmentally friendly. “With input costs rising, farmers and growers want to reduce their dependence on a variety of products, including pesticides,” Dr Dawn Teverson of industry affiliate group Linking Environment And Farming (LEAF) told IE by email.
Experimentation into agricultural techniques is a centuries-old tradition. In 1843 at Rothamsted Research, one of the world’s oldest agricultural research institutes, the first wheat seeds were planted in the Broadbalk field in Hertfordshire, England. These seeds will become classic Rothamsted long-term experiments, laying the foundations of modern scientific agriculture and establishing the principles of plant nutrition.
Broadbalk has been under continuous scientific study ever since and is helping scientists understand how fertilizers can increase crop yields. This is just one of the ways science is being used to increase food production. Rothamsted Plant Pathologist Dr Kevin King is working to develop an early warning system for farmers for fungal pathogens and help prevent “wasteful spraying with fungicides”.
Credit: Juliet FergusonFungal pathogens can wreak havoc on plants. King and his colleagues are developing an aerial monitor to measure the number of spores in the air. This will help them understand how the pathogen behaves, and how best to manage and control it. They pass this information on to farmers with “the idea being that if a farmer or farmers can find out what’s really going on in their field at any given time,” King said. “Then they can take precautions to try and manage the disease.”
Credit: Juliet FergusonThe Rothamsted Plantation is dotted with various insect traps, part of the Insect Survey supervised by Dr James Bell. The work his team is doing now stems from a survey that began in 1964. They used two types of traps, one at 12.2 meters to take a landscape view of insects flying at that altitude and a shorter trap that provided a more detailed view of behavior. . . As with fungal spore research, these traps are used to predict threats from insect pests and produce newsletters for farmers. Even from their origins in the 1960s, they were formed to reduce the use of insecticides.
“We believed in 1964 that if we communicated with farmers, we could actually change their behavior, and that’s what we do today with forecasts and data,” Bell said.
But changing behavior will not be easy. Investigation Recent investigations in Europe uncovered European pesticide problems and resistance among farmers, industry and some politicians to support legislation on pesticide reduction and data collection. Meanwhile, the charity Food Watch recently described a self-reinforcing cycle of pesticide use that creates fragile agricultural production systems in which farmers are increasingly dependent on chemicals.
It is not only the diversity of plants, insects and birds that are threatened by current agricultural systems. So are the farmers themselves, critics say.
“We are seeing fewer and fewer farmers. Their profits are dwindling,” said Green MEP Bas Eickhout recently. “We see that our rural areas are under threat. In addition, we see the impact of climate change affecting our farmers. We are seeing a loss of biodiversity.”
It seems that technology does have a role to play in helping farmers out of this cycle, but it is a small part of a larger need for system change and is not a substitute for what nature is and has been doing for millions of years. Free.
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