Crop robots can defy economies of size and make small-scale agriculture economic – or can they?

Abstract

By comparing experience from two autonomously operated strip cropping field trials, obstacles to a labour-efficient use of crop robots in small-scale biodiverse farming systems are described. Despite different approaches, the conclusions from the two trials agree that logistics and the natural environment are main causes of time-inefficiencies. The current state of technology thus does not yet result in autonomous equipment reliably saving labour time relative to conventional equipment in small-scale, diversified systems. Consequently, larger fields are more economical for robot operations so that crop robots, like tractors, are subject to economies of field size.