How Self-Driving Tractors, Drones and Virtual Reality will Transform Agriculture in Nigeria

Technology has enabled tremendous advances in every area of human life in every part of the world; but the rate of that advancement has been different and much slower in the emerging economies—Nigeria and most other African countries especially. That the technology community has been abuzz for the past one week because of Mark Zuckerberg’s first visit to Africa—Nigeria first and then Kenya—is something that a lot of young Nigerians have come to see as the beginning of a never-before-seen technology revolution that will sweep across the country and continent. Many young talented Nigerians are using technology to solve local problems, ranging from education through transportation to healthcare, and some of these were showcased to Zuckerberg during his visit at the Co-Creation Hub in Yaba, Lagos.

While these tech solutions to local problems were commended by Zuckerberg, he also stressed, during a Question & Answer session for entrepreneurs and developers, that Nigeria and Africa have the talent to solve relevant global challenges. There are so many global problems today craving ground-breaking solutions; but one of such problems whose solutions can come from Africa is food security through agriculture not only because of how technology can be applied to scale agricultural production but also due to the fact that more than half of the earth’s arable lands, that can be exploited for agriculture without harming the green ecosystem, is in Africa. This means that applying the right technology in agriculture could turn Africa into the food hub of the world, and there’s need to start work now not just for the sake of the world but also for the food safety of our country and the entire continent: Nigeria’s population is estimated to surpass that of the US by 2050, making the country the 3rd most populous in the world, and a strong food security will certainly prevent a lot of problems.

Mechanised farming has witnessed technological progress over the years, enabling large-scale farming within short periods of time. But Nigeria and Africa have not kept pace with this progress. The continent is stuck on only tractor farming; there’s no wide-scale system of monitoring soil fertility status, real-time crop health status and proactive surveillance of pest-induced diseases in crops. The result has been limited land use for agriculture, poor crop yield due to over-used soil and occasional mass loss of crops to disease outbreaks in plants like the recent case of tomato scarcity in the country from a pest infestation (which skyrocketed the price of tomato).

Self-driving Tractor model

However, we can leapfrog the traditional mechanised farming technology to the current emerging advanced technologies that are beginning to find their way into agriculture. Companies like Tesla, Google, Uber, nuTonomy and so on are working on self-driving car technologies which would usher in autonomous cars to the streets in less than a decade from now. The self-driving technology is also getting to trucks as the world’s largest ride-sharing platform Uber just acquired an autonomous truck startup called Otto for over $600 million. And other players like CNH Industrial and Autonomous Tractor Corporation are working to bring affordable fully autonomous tractors to farmers in the US to replace the existing semi-autonomous ones. The advantages of a fully autonomous tractor on the farm are enormous: tractors that can weed, till and plant seeds on as many hectares of land as possible and do the harvesting without getting tired (because they don’t need on-site physical human drivers) in a short period of time compared to human-driven tractors. Nigeria, through the Ministry of Science and Technology, can leverage this by collaborating with these companies to train young Nigerian engineers in these emerging technologies as applied in agriculture for the long-term, while contracting the companies’ services to deploy these autonomous tractors to large-scale farmers in the country and training these farmers extensively on how to use them. Furthermore, autonomous driving technology can be incorporated into the mechanical engineering curricula of tertiary institutions across the country to equip their engineering students and also to stimulate further research on how to adapt it to suit and maximise the potential of this environment which can lead to the design and development of solar-powered autonomous tractors to harness the abundant solar energy here in Nigeria. An affordable solar-powered fully autonomous tractor made in Nigeria and whose use has been mastered by farmers all over the country will lead to an unquantifiable rise in farming and food production.

Agriculture Drone

Mass-scale farming capability alone will not be enough to achieve food security; there’s an equally important need to have access to data on real-time soil fertility and crop health status to enable farmers make informed decisions and take proactive steps to prevent crop loss and poor harvest. This is where real-time surveillance of soil and crops come in. Traditionally, farmers in developed parts of the world have relied on satellite imagery and manned aircraft surveillance for information on their soil and crops; these methods are very expensive and limited as they rarely provide real-time information on soil and crop health, making them unattractive to most farmers. However, the advent of unmanned aerial vehicles known as drones is disrupting the selling point of traditional farmland surveillance methods. Many startup companies in the US and Europe are designing drones suited for real-time surveillance of large farmlands. These drones are equipped with precise autonomous navigation systems and high definition cameras that can shoot in the visible and infrared spectra, enabling analysis of crop health parameters such as change in chlorophyll colour which is visible in the infrared spectrum on a computer screen; in addition, they can be used to spray pesticides over large areas of farmland. The prices of these drones are falling every day due to competition among the different producing companies, meaning farmers can relatively afford them. There are a few African startup companies who are already building and deploying drones for various services. Public and private sector funding can help interested Nigerian entrepreneurs establish companies that will design and build drones suited to the Nigerian terrain. Also, technology and engineering faculties in our tertiary institutions can be motivated, via funding and sponsored training of students and faculty members in unmanned aerial vehicle research labs in the US, to dedicate units to emerging technologies in agriculture whose work will be to adopt these technologies and modify them to maximise the agricultural potential of this environment; such units should also work to birth innovations such as solar-powered drones that will ensure longer flight duration of these drones as against existing battery-powered ones. Moreover, soil scientists, plant biologists, physicists, radiologists and other experts in the country can collaborate to work out the parameters that reflect healthy and diseased crop status and soil fertility in different parts of Nigeria, and how these parameters appear under visible and infrared light used by agricultural drone cameras, in order to give farmers access to all the necessary data they need to ensure sustained mass-scale agriculture and food production. 

Drone Surveillance Analysis of a Farmland

Virtual Reality in Agriculture

Virtual and augmented reality technology is yet to find its way into agriculture probably because it is still in the formative stage of its industrial applications. This is where Nigeria not only can set the pace in its agricultural applications but can become a global centre of excellence in agricultural virtual and augmented reality technology. While we, the young people, play around (games, movies and so on) with virtual reality headsets such as the Samsung Gear VR and Facebook’s Oculus VR headset, it is time to begin imagining and working out frameworks on their applications in important areas like agriculture. Nigerian software engineers should start developing virtual reality applications that integrate and analyse real-time agricultural drone surveillance and autonomous tractor activity on the farm; this will enable farmers to monitor in virtual and augmented reality progress of work done by their autonomous tractors (and correct any problem they may encounter remotely), the fertility integrity of the soil and health status of their crops. Imagine the reward to a farmer having a hawk-eye view of his vast farmland in virtual reality or overlaid in his room (through an augmented reality headset). A group of young Nigerians, Imisi 3D, at the Co-Creation Hub in Lagos, has kick-started discussions around virtual reality platform applications in Nigeria. Companies like Zuckerberg’s Facebook’s Oculus Rift and augmented reality startup companies like Magic Leap will definitely show in interest in such applications for global deployment and adoption through their hardware platforms. Such virtual and augmented reality apps will not only transform our agriculture sector but also will turn the Nigerian tech startup companies behind them into multi-million dollar businesses as they license their products for use in other African countries and countries beyond the continent.

Future of Virtual and Augmented Reality

US government funding and support of military and space technology gave birth to so many innovations and inventions beyond military and space programs such as the Magnetic Resonance Imaging machine (MRI) used for several investigations in medicine and unmanned aerial vehicles, drones, that are finding commercial applications in geographical mapping, agriculture, and film-making in Hollywood and so on. Public and private sector funding and investment in Nigeria into efforts by scientists and entrepreneurs working on and deploying emerging technologies in agriculture can equally birth technological innovations that will not only make Nigeria and the rest of Africa the food basket of the world's ever-growing population (because we will begin exporting rice, other cash crops and also processed products from these crops), but also find applications beyond agriculture both within Nigeria and other parts of the world.

And in Mark Zuckerberg's words, there's this energy in Nigerian entrepreneurs; and though it may take several years, probably decades, they have the talent to and will leverage these emerging technologies to turn around different sectors of Nigeria's economy, including agriculture. If you are passionate about technology and how its applications can transform Nigeria and Africa, check out Radar by Techcabal: it is an online forum where young Nigerians (technology enthusiasts, developers and entrepreneurs who are building the coolest tech companies in Nigeria and Africa) congregate to discuss technology and how it will shape the future of Nigeria and Africa