Farmers are facing more pressure; CNH says robotics can help

The R4 robot is designed to help vineyard, orchard and specialty crop growers overcome sector challenges. | Global trade wars mean farmers’ supplies are growing more expensive, while many crop prices have dropped.

At the same time, changing weather conditions mean getting a good harvest is increasingly tricky. These pressures result in a need for a change in how we farm, and robotics could be the answer. Luca Ferrari, a senior manager of robotics a breakthrough technologies at CNH Industrial, said labor availability, costs, productivity, and efficiency are common concerns from the company‘s customers. “Our users need to get more done with fewer resources. They want something, and we see it with robotics but not just robotics, that is solving a real problem, that is easy to use, and that can create value,” he told The Robot Report. “Labor availability is one of the main challenges that our farmer and our growers are experiencing, especially during some critical operations like planting, spraying, and also harvesting.” “They don’t adopt technology just because it’s fancy. They adopt technology because it’s really solving an issue and demonstration that it can improve the value of operations year by year,” Ferrari continued. Recent advances in AI means robots are ready to step up Already, most farms are using some form of advanced technology including autonomy. Now, Ferrari said, they’re becoming increasingly connecting and intelligent. “We are seeing a shift to agentic systems. ‘Agentic,’ for me, is not an AI agent, but agentic means that we are moving from a paradigm where robotics and automation are not just assisting the operator with individual tasks in an operation,” Ferrari said. To him, a truly agentic system is one that is capable of sensing the environment, making decisions, and executing entire operations. Recent advances in sensing, machine vision, and AI have enabled this shift. “We can really transform this data that we perceive from the environment in real operation,” Ferrari said. At CNH, one example of this is FieldOps, which is offered through its subsidiary New Holland.