Agritech report and webinar usher in a new ecosystem
- Innovation
David Kemps
Sector Banker Industrie
In response to the many positive reactions to ABN AMRO’s report ‘Battle for agribots commences’ published in August, ABN AMRO and the Brabant Development Agency (BOM) organised a webinar for a select group of Dutch agritech and industrial businesses. The webinar aimed to outline developments in agricultural robotisation in the Netherlands and worldwide, and to address challenges and opportunities for factories, dealers and industrial suppliers in the robotics sector. Around 65 participants joined the discussion on 3 November 2020.
The findings in brief
Various social and technological developments are set to drive demand for agribots in the coming decade and accelerate their adoption. The main reasons for this are a shortage of labour (migrants), the need to produce food more sustainably using fewer or no crop protection products, and the scarcity of good agricultural land due to soil compaction and exhaustion. Light robots can be part of the solution to these challenges and contribute to sustainable food production using fewer or no chemicals, do the heavy work done by migrantlabourers and at the same time ease the pressure on land, both literally and figuratively.
These are some of the factors underpinning ABN AMRO’s expectation that the global marketfor agribots will grow from 6.2 billion euros in 2020 to 12 billion euros in 2030, with the Dutch share in this potentially growing from 715 million to 2.5 billion in the same period. It will be crucial to eliminate a number of obstacles in order to realise this potential – bottlenecks like rules and regulations, fragmented knowledge, access to subsidies and venture capital, and the business models of manufacturers and farming businesses. ABN AMRO and BOM believe that more focused training, better collaboration in the supply chain (farmer – machine manufacturer – supplier) and Product-as-a-Service propositions could contribute to solutions.
Dutch agri-robotics ecosystem
In its quest to help create a sustainable food system through technology, BOM has beenexploring and conducting interviews around the agritech ecosystem in the Dutch province of Noord-Brabant. Together with a number of partners, BOM set up the AgROBOts in Motion (AiM) innovation platform to put in place the best possible conditions for the Netherlands to play a key global role in agri-robotics.
Although there were a lot of questions about intellectual property, the discussion confirmed that the industry parties are interested in a platform of this type and that there are ways for companies to retain their intellectual property rights or to tackle some fundamental issues in the pre-competitive arena. The potential synergy between agritech, farmers and automotive/high-tech suppliers seems to be a good basis for addressing the specific challenges facing each individual sector. Up to now, manufacturers of agricultural machinery have found it very difficult to combine knowledge around technology and agriculture inrobotics. At the same time, industrial suppliers struggle with the changeable and challenging conditions inherent in agriculture, such as the weather (wind, shade, precipitation, frost), dust, sand and night work, as well as the limited connectivity in countries like Australia and the US. Significantly, robot manufacturers that partnered at an early stage with industrial suppliers saw their time-to-market shorten and the costs of serial production drop. This suggests that a platform bringing all the relevant disciplines together could add a lot of value for all parties.