Living in the Field 2.0: Solinftec Releases New Autonomous Robot Concepts

Index:

1. Overview

2. Stand Alone Sensing to “Living in the Field”

3. Solving the Digital Farming Puzzle

4. New Solinftec Systems

5. Phenotyping

6. Manufacturer or Integrator or Something Else?

7. Challenges

8. Final Thoughts

Overview

In August of 2022, Solinftec announced a new product offering, the Solix.

The Solix is a solar-powered autonomous platform that was not only equipped with cameras to acquire data about the field but also equipped with the capability to spray— specifically weeds that it identified within the crop.

In April of 2023, Solinftec announced the Hunter for the Solix platform, equipping the platform with the capabilities to lure, detect and eradicate insects autonomously using a specific light frequency.

Now, Solinftec is progressing the concept of Living in the Field even further.

The Beginning: Stand Alone Sensing to “Living in the Field”

The promises of digital agriculture have been immense. From traceable food to fully autonomous equipment, de-commoditized grains and reduced fertilizer costs, there is no shortage of potential with digital technologies powering agriculture.

Yet, despite all of this digital technology, yields have gone up at about the same 1.3% annually as they have for decades and the profitability of the farmer sways based on the commodity cycle and interest rates.

Much like the famous Peter Thiel line describing a slowdown of innovation and societal progress, “We wanted flying cars and all we got was 140 characters”, the digital agriculture equivalent could be “We wanted autonomous farms and traceable food, but all we got was was a lot of siloed data, hoards of colorful NDVI images and press releases about carbon farming.”

There is some satire in that line, but also some truth.

There has been a gap between what farmers and the industry have wanted and what has been delivered through digital agriculture.

The current expectation to reality gap stems from many reasons, including:

• farm internet connectivity

• lack of technology interoperability

• localized nature of farming

• poor incentive structures

But two other operational considerations:

• cost-effectiveness of insights/actions and timeliness of actions.

Given the commoditized nature of large-scale farming along with the already significant expenses of farms and the high influence of fast-changing weather and quick-moving insects and disease, cost-effective and timely actions are critical.

Digital agriculture began with sensing. This started as basic as weather information, to soil sampling, then progressing to things like NDVI satellite imagery and drones or tractors with cameras on them.

Then we moved to diagnoses. This is synthesizing or interpreting data from the sensors to recognize an issue— a disease on the crop, an insect outbreak, or hail damage, for example.

Sensing and diagnosing has been where 99% of agtech has stopped. There has been a plethora of companies and technologies that sense and diagnose. Still, they are disconnected from the ability to take action, needing to connect to a piece of equipment with a time lag to execute.

Next, we get to action. Action is the ability to act on the diagnosis to mitigate or eliminate any issues. John Deere was one of the first to bring this capability to light with their aptly named “Sense and Act” technology which includes their “See and Spray” capability, or the ability to sense weeds, diagnose that they are different from the crop and then in real-time Act to eradicate the weed with a precise spray response.

Sense and Act has shortcomings, though— the field is a complex, dynamic system, and there is constantly a new challenge arising, whether it be weeds, disease, planter misses, insects, nutrient deficiency, or other abiotic stresses. Things change daily and at varying areas within a field.

There is a need to be constantly sensing, diagnosing, and acting to optimize outcomes in the field. There is a need to always be in the area.

But most pieces of equipment, such as the sprayer, aren’t entirely autonomous (meaning they demand labor), and they cost farmers hundreds of thousands of dollars, which means every hour they operate comes with a hefty depreciation bill— this makes the efforts of sensing, diagnosing and acting a high-cost endeavor.

Because of this, agronomy management applications are focused around one herbicide application, one fungicide application, a fertilizer application, and sometimes an insecticide application sprinkled in with a half dozen manual field scouting visits from the farmer or agronomist because of these cost realities.

We have optimized the current agronomic system around three things:

1. labor constraints

2. cost structures

3. tools we have available

But optimizing around labor, current tools, and cost structures might not be the way to optimize outcomes in the field and, ultimately, profitability for farms.

There is an opportunity to rethink how we optimize outcomes.

Solinftec has referenced the need to live in the field. That gap has been one of the deficits in realizing many of the benefits of digital and precision agriculture.

For a piece of equipment to be capable of acting continuously, it needs to “live in the field.”

For that to become a reality, the fundamentals of equipment need to be re-thought so that it’s capable to always be in the field and be across the field constantly enough, in a time-efficient manner, to always be able to act on the new occurrences, be it weeds, insects, or otherwise.

There is a need to expand beyond just sensing, diagnosing, and acting:

This is where the Solix Robot Family comes in — the platform can live in the field, or on the farm, and run 24 hours a day, seven days a week, to ensure a closed loop on sensing to action with minimal gaps in that sequence for a low cost.

Solinftec took the concepts of solar power, autonomy, and sensor technology and merged them to reimagine how to optimize the field.

If we consider across the agtech landscape, there are currently not many companies capable of doing this today across the five critical components laid out.

Whether it is equipment companies, sensing companies, drone companies, or retrofit companies, there is at least one gap in every company’s arsenal.

To illustrate where many of these companies lie, I created a an image comparing the capabilities as it stands today across some major companies and segments in the agtech sector:

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