In the United Kingdom, the ground-breaking Hands Free Hectare, run by Harper Adams University and Precision Decisions, has come to an end after a successful barley harvest.
Martin Abell, mechatronics researcher for the industry lead, Precision Decisions, said, “This project aimed to prove that there’s no technological reason why a field can’t be farmed without humans working the land directly now and we’ve done that. We set-out to identify the opportunities for farming and to prove that it’s possible to autonomously farm the land, and that’s been the great success of the project.”
Jonathan Gill, researcher at Harper Adams University, said, “If combines in the future were similar to the size of the combine we used in this project, which was a little Sampo combine with a header unit of only two meters, it would allow more precise yield maps to be created. They would also be much lighter machines.”