Back-breaking hand-weeding is being phased out at a large-scale Suffolk vegetable operation - as it harnesses new technologies to help fill the farm recruitment gap. 

Home Farm Nacton at Ipswich is leading the way with driverless tractors which use Artificial Intelligence (AI), Suffolk Farming Conference was told last month.

Farmer Andrew Williams of Home Farm Nacton showed delegates how two solar-powered Farmdroids and a Robotti machine are starting to change how they farm at the 1,170ha operation on the Orwell Park Estate. The estate took on the Robotti in 2021 and its first Farmdroid in 2022.

Ipswich Star:

Although they are still on a steep learning curve, the machines are already making an impact, he explained.

It will take a while to work out how best to integrate automation into the wider farming system, but the farm has already learnt a lot.

Andrew explained that they decided to look at automation as it lost five key workers due to retirement. One of these managed hoeing and weed control for many years.

"With Bob retiring, Brexit happening and finding people to weed our field, the board sanctioned the idea that when commercial robotics became available we should engage with it," he explained.

Among the things they have learnt since adopting the machines is that you have to be 100% committed to the GPS and the implements you say you are going to use, he said.

"It doesn't cut corners - it does what it says on the work plan," he explained. And there were issues such as dust clouds which caused the failsafe to activate.

The Farmdroid was invented by two Danish farmers' sons. "We were blown away by what they had done," he said. Not only did it drill the crop, it could then go back and weed between the plants, he explained.

"It's ideal for us because it just keeps going round and round. That has been very successful. We now grow our organic onions with it." They also used it on the red beet (beetroot) crop, he said.

In its first year alone, the machine clocked up 2,000 hours. He described Farmdroid as a "big success" and Robotti as a work in progress.

The event - on February 29 - brought together hundreds of industry experts - there to hear from a line-up which included Henry Dimbleby, co -founder of Leon restaurants, who wrote a National Food Strategy for the government, then Ravenous, his own book on the subject, in 2021.

Ipswich Star: Food employs 35% of people on the plant and makes up 12% of the global economy, he told the audience.

Back in 1945 there were 2.8bn people on the planet - more than at any time in history - and the figure was now 8bn. In the past, as the human population grew, so did the amount of land cultivated.

With less land available, newspapers of the 1950s and 1960s were full of premonitions of a Malthusian collapse which never happened - thanks to people like Norman Borlaug, a botanist from Idaho, who went to Mexico and developed a high-yielding dwarf wheat variety. This made it possible to produce more on the same amount of land.

Ipswich Star:

"We now produce twice the number of calories from slightly less land than in 1945 - it's an astonishing success," he said.

But today's food system was now the second biggest cause of climate change after energy. It was also the biggest cause of ill health, he added.

He discussed junk food versus the invisibility of nature - and the difficulty of measuring it. There was much untapped potential in nature, he said. "It's now very clear to me there's something in the human soul that reacts to nature," he said.

He discussed solutions to the current food issues. There were those that believed in "land sparing" - pursuing intensive farming with nature at the margins - and others in "land sharing" such as organic farmers, he said.

But he believed the answer was an approach combining the different elements - and a 30% drop in the amount of meat we consume.

"The question then is can you produce enough food. The good news is in the UK you can," he said. "But it will involve changing land use."

He praised the English government in getting payments wrong - but working with farmers and admitting they were getting it wrong and trying to find a solution.

He ended on a half-optimistic, half-pessimistic note. "While I'm quite pessimistic on health, I am quite optimistic on the environment," he said.

Suffolk Farming Conference took place at Trinity Park, Ipswich, on February 29 and was hosted by Fram Farmers, Suffolk Agricultural Association and Scrutton Bland