Brian Carroll lifts his hands, sweeping his palms across a field several green tractors have just begun tilling up, and paints a picture. “Wouldn’t it be great to look like the Epcot Center in Florida, where you have the experimental prototype community of tomorrow?” he asks. “Except here you have the farm.”
Carroll is spearheading an effort to build an agricultural Tomorrowland on 40 acres of black dirt just outside of Horace, North Dakota. The director of operations at Emerging Prairie, a non-profit dedicated to fostering entrepreneurship in North Dakota, he’s overseeing Grand Farm, an initiative launched at the end of April that is in the running—competing with indoor operations like Iron Ox—to create the world’s first fully autonomous farm by 2025.
Farm may be a misnomer, however, because while Grand Farm will include some fields growing crops like corn, soy, and wheat, even those will most likely be for field testing more than actual production. Described as a “a laboratory for entrepreneurs and ag tech companies,” the effort will include a business accelerator, robotics lab, makerspace, and code school called Emerging Digital Academy.
Autonomous farming—marked by equipment fueled by artificial intelligence, using machine learning to gather and compute data to determine and optimize when, where, and how much to plant, fertilize, and the like—has been evolving for years. It has already yielded advancements in precision agriculture and smart equipment such as driverless tractors. Now, projects like Grand Farm promise to take it further.
Grand Farm hopes to advance autonomous ag tech as an approach to addressing several issues facing North American farmers and rural communities today: a skills gap, a lack of venture capital across rural America, and a farm labor shortage pervasive across the U.S. and Canada.
Grand Farm’s primary goal is to provide technology that will take human labor out of the equation, but it’s not an all-or-nothing proposition for Carroll. “I look at it this way: if we get to a fully autonomous farm, that would be great. But to me, the challenges are addressing those pain points… those are more important measurements to see if we’re successful or not,” he says.
The project will develop and test ag-focused innovations, ultimately marrying them with investment opportunities to shepherd them into the wider market. For now, production will center on row crops, but Carroll says the initiative has already gotten interest from mushroom growers and vertical farmers. Grand Farm, which received an investment of 1.5 million from Microsoft earlier this month, also has a bigger goal: to ensure that when the future of agriculture arrives, North Dakota—and the Corn Belt more generally—will have a place at the table.
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Like other, similar efforts, Grand Farm also raises important questions about the role of ag tech, and artificial intelligence in particular, at a time when farming has become dominated by large producers and even larger agribusiness interests. Artificial intelligence-based (AI) ag tech also brings with it sociocultural issues that have profound implications for farmers in rural America and the communities they sustain.
Fertile Ground for Innovation
For an experiment that pairs one of America’s oldest industries with one of its newest, North Dakota is fertile ground. Ninety percent of North Dakota’s land is devoted to agriculture; the state is a top producer of row crops including sunflowers, lentils, and soybeans, and 40 percent of North Dakota’s farms weigh in at 1,000 acres or more in size.
Grand Farm isn’t the state’s first foray into farm-tech innovation. The now-international, multi-billion-dollar farm equipment company Bobcat was founded in North Dakota in 1947. More recently, Fargo-based Myriad Mobile launched the app Bushel that digitally handles everything from scale tickets to cash bids for modern grain farmers.
Although Grand Farm’s founders face an uphill battle when it comes to finding investors (more than three-quarters of venture capital went to companies in San Francisco, Los Angeles, New York, and Boston in 2015) the founders hope that an infusion of capital and high-tech jobs could revitalize an area that has been struggling to keep young people from moving away.
AI farming promises a myriad of benefits, such as using precision ag to reduce farming’s carbon footprint through a highly efficient use of resources—everything from fertilizer and pesticides to water and seeds. Autonomous tractors and other machines that use sensors, algorithms, and image-recognition software all have the potential to make farming more efficient by killing weeds, harvesting crops, and spotting crop diseases before they spread.
“I think one of the big benefits from a global perspective is that we’re going to be able to use these technologies to produce more food with less inputs on smaller amounts of land,” says Evan Frasier, director of the Arrell Food Institute and research chair in Global Food Security at Canada’s University of Guelph.
“There is a great interest and desire in technology and where it may go,” says Mark Watne, president of the North Dakota Farmers Union.