Green Pill vs. Orange Pill: The Decision That Will Define the Future of Farming

“We can't solve problems by using the same kind of thinking we used when we created them.” - Albert Einstein.

Most farmers believe that they can farm with any equipment they want - as long as it is green. Most growers believe that they can choose to manage their equipment any way they'd like, as long as it is through a dealer network. Most people in farming know that they can take any path they want to autonomy, as long as it's the sanctioned one.

The problem with most of the thinking in agricultural equipment today is that it follows one path and is oriented toward the past - it assumes that the way we farm today will be the way we will farm forever. Autonomy? Sure, you won't need to ride in the cab anymore, but only if it's on our schedule. You want to have control over your tools? That's fine; work through our dealer. You want new equipment? Great, take your pick from our showroom floor.

For the incumbents, this status quo has existed for so long that they can hardly remember what genuine customer choice looks like. They don't know what it's like when farmers stand up and ask questions like, "why is the global farm equipment business totally controlled by a handful of major companies?"

• "Because we're the best solution on the market," they answer.
• "Because we can cut you the best deal and build the biggest, fastest machines."
• "Because this is what you've always done."

But does the fact that we've spent the last 80 years viewing agricultural equipment through the lens of a few major companies with nearly identical products and development roadmaps mean that this is how we should always buy, use and service our equipment?

• The average combine harvester is now over 30 tons, causing soil compaction, which threatens to rob global yields of as much as 20 percent.
• In 2018, 10% of the Australian cotton crop was reported as impacted by preventable spray drift - resulting in an estimated $18 million in production loss.
• It is estimated that less than 0.1% of applied pesticides actually reach their target pests.
• Most farmers today are stuck working in their businesses rather than working on and running them.

This is not a clear picture of success; something has to give. Farmers need us to introduce more optionality into farm equipment manufacturing. Farmers need the ability to customise their equipment. Farmers need a way to opt out of the current ag equipment scene and play a game that is designed for them to win.

Simple Autonomy vs. Integrated Autonomy

"If you want to make small changes, change the way you do things. If you want to make big changes, change the way you see things." - Don Campbell

Today, there is an enormous amount of conversation in ag equipment devoted to discussing autonomy on-farm. All of the major agri-corporates are landing on eerily similar perspectives. They want to pluck farmers from the cab, they want to make your machinery more efficient, and they want to make sure that all of this "disruption" takes place without anything changing in a fundamental way.

Click to hear what the big 3 have to say.

Realising the full value of new technologies requires that we develop and implement new paradigms for farming. Most companies are building their autonomous solutions through an old lens we call "simple autonomy." At SwarmFarm, our team has built an entirely new approach we call "integrated autonomy."

1. Simple autonomy just removes the farmer from the tractor. Integrated autonomy provides the farmer with the tools to farm smarter.
2. Simple autonomy approaches doing more with increasingly large machines. Integrated autonomy helps producers to do more with less.
3. Simple autonomy takes old tools and attempts to set them to new purposes. Integrated autonomy steps into the future and designs the best possible solutions for tomorrow.?
4. Simple autonomy forces you to pick from a branded set of solutions. Integrated autonomy provides you access to a network of innovative application developers.

Forging Our Way to Integrated Autonomy

"Two roads diverged in a wood and I - I took the one less traveled by, and that has made all the difference." - Robert Frost

Our company was born on the farm, and our solution was developed in response to a real set of problems that we faced in our operation. Starting on the farm in Queensland has always been a guiding light for us because it reminds us of where we came from and the enormous opportunities for change we see right before us.

We don't have to wonder what it means to stake your livelihood and your financial future on a grain crop. We've done it for decades. Our team doesn't have to think twice about what it looks like when a field is massively damaged from the weight of large equipment, they know how our farm was before we started this journey. We don't have to imagine what it might be like to acquire more acres and expand our equipment footprint only to find that our yields declined; we've had hard financial conversations at our kitchen table. We can remember the dissatisfaction of spraying our fields with more and more chemical and the creeping feeling in the back of our minds that "it can't continue on like this."

We remember because we lived it. For us, starting SwarmFarm Robotics was not just some academic exercise or the theoretical pursuit of a removed consultant. This company was born from the realisation that there was something missing in the current agricultural equipment market.

The fact is that a handful of companies run and control all of the equipment manufactured to support the world's largest and most important industry. This has allowed for tremendous scale and some interesting technology, but it has left something to be desired for farmers who need to customise or design their solutions to optimise their operations. In many ways, it has brought us to a place where the industry is stuck in an "always done it this way" mindset. This is the type of environment that leads to farmers paying six times more for parts and repairs than they do for the actual sale of equipment.

We wanted to create farm equipment that enabled a system where growers could control their own destinies. One where we could challenge the status quo and provide an alternative to how things had always been done.

Were dealerships really the best way to serve farmers, or could another model work? Did our equipment have to continue to grow to support larger farms, or was there another way to scale?

Taking the Leap

"All the forces in the world are not so powerful as an idea whose time has come." - Victor Hugo

Our "lightbulb moment" arrived when we realised that our current equipment was very good at covering broad acreage in a limited amount of time, but it wasn't very good at helping us to farm our land to the best of our ability. We were chasing size and scale, and the top equipment in the industry led us down a path to highly compacted soils and blindly sprayed fields, searching for an eternal "answer in a can." For every problem, we were looking for a chemical solution to spray.

What we didn't know then is that there was another option - an alternative that had the potential to change everything. We found a way to use robotics and autonomous? technology to make farming smarter, more efficient, and more profitable. We created farm equipment that was designed from the ground up for precision agriculture and would help us reach our goals of increasing yields, decreasing inputs, and improving sustainability.

We formed SwarmFarm Robotics with the goal of developing an entirely new type of farm equipment - one that could be customised for each individual operation, one that could be used in coordination with other pieces of automated machinery, one that could work just as efficiently in small paddocks as it could in big fields, one that can traverse rough terrain without compacting it or damaging the soil structure beneath it.

Our ambition was bold but simple: we wanted to change how farmers could farm. We wanted to enable them to take control of their own destiny by providing them with the right platform and tools to do so - without having to rely on a dealer or service provider who was removed from their operation and goals.

We took a leap, we opted for the orange pill, and now everything has changed. We see things differently. Our team has charted a proven path to better farm health, and we're inviting courageous growers to join us for the journey. To date, we have commercially deployed our robots on more than 1.35 million acres, operated for more than 68,000 hours, and reduced pesticide inputs by an estimated 780 tons and we're just getting started. We're moving forward to create the future of farming. We're ready to live in a world where functional farm operations can be customised so that profits and sustainability are no longer in conflict.

Interested in joining us for the ride? Make sure you're on the right side of innovation today.