Elizabeth Vaughan, TechHub Specialist at the Community Alliance with Family Farmers (CAFF), recently spoke to participants of the Farm Robotics Challenge and the AIFS community about the unique challenges facing small farms and how technological innovations could support small farmers. Through the Farm Robotics Challenge, co-organized by AIFS, teams of students from across the country are working on designing robotic solutions to tackle agricultural challenges. The Challenge has a particular emphasis on small farm applications and positive societal impact, so it is important that teams understand the needs and perspectives of the farming community. 

Farmers and ranchers are passionate about what they do. We saw this passion for providing healthy food during the Covid-19 pandemic when the demand for food from local farms increased tenfold. Keeping up with demand can be challenging, especially when small farms do much of the labor by hand and with few technological tools. When surveyed, 70% of the farmers working with CAFF identified water access issues and production complications due to prolonged drought as their top issue. Additional challenges included access to land, access to capital and infrastructure, and the uncertainty brought by climate change. In order to address these priorities, there is a huge need for investment in on-farm research. 

With the incredible innovation that is possible in AgTech, equipment and solutions can be scaled both up and down. This presents an opportunity for researchers to work with small farms to increase their footprint and survivability in a highly competitive market. CAFF believes that family farmers can benefit from tech solutions that address water access, flood and fire mitigation, soil nutrient management and analysis, livestock health tracking and location monitoring, farmworker safety, pest management, financial tracking, including loan software, and robotics that decrease labor time and increase crop yield. One of AIFS’ projects, led by Prof. Mason Earles, is focused on creating open-source machine learning infrastructure with optimized sensor-driven resilient precision agriculture. Data contributions from small farms and ranches are essential to ensure the results of these studies will help these same family businesses into the future.

The potential that CAFF and AIFS envision from AgTech cannot be achieved without improving tech literacy amongst farmers and farmworkers. Community and university partners can help make technology accessible for all by being a part of the education process. As part of this, Elizabeth highlighted CAFF’s Small Farm Innovation Challenge, which seeks solutions that strengthen local food systems and small farm resilience. This year, Farm-ng’s Amiga robot won in the hardware innovators category, and is also the platform being used for the Farm Robotics Challenge! The nascent ecosystem of collaboration between farmers, farmworkers, students, professors, and NGOs around an open-source robotic tractor, with the common goal of improving agriculture and farm work, is an exciting step into the future of food production.