A unique research project at Harper Adams University has seen a cover crop sown by a driverless tractor.

The Hands Free Farm (HFF) is a follow on the widely recognised Hands Free Hectare project carried out at the UK agricultural college which set out to plant, tend and harvest a crop without any human contact with the field.

The project has now been scaled up to 35ha as part of a three-year trial between Harper Adams University, Precision Decisions, Farmscan AG and Agri-EPI Centre. The team hopes to design a fleet of autonomous small vehicles that can be operated from a farm office, for commercialisation.

Delays

Progress has been hampered by a combination of bad weather and the COVID-19 pandemic. The original plan for year one had been to drill two winter crops and a spring crop across the project’s five fields. However, two fields have now been drilled with a cover crop as an alternative.

Kit Franklin, senior agricultural engineering lecturer at Harper Adams, said: “Although drilling a cover crop wasn’t the original plan, nor even plan B or C, it will be good for the soils. It should also help the fields be flatter and more forgiving next year.

“This drilling has still provided a useful learning process; we’ve seen that the system is better than ever before and that we’ll be able to analyse the drilling performance when the crop emerges. This will enable us to improve the mapping ahead of working on combinable crops next year.”

Footage

Mechatronics and UAS researcher Jonathan Gill captured footage of the drilling by drone.

Jonathan said: “The drone footage has more uses than just social media. It’s able to capture the full picture of our progress, and allows future analysis of our path planning, steering settings and timings for the tooling going in and out in the field.

“We’ll be able to look back on these and compare and improve if required.”