Preface Rather like the acronym UAVs is used to describe Unmanned Aerial Vehicles, or LEVS to describe Light Electric Vehicles, or PDDs to describe Personal Delivery Devices, I should like to propose a new acronym, EAMs to describe Electrical Agricultural Machines and so EAMS will be used to describe all kinds of electrical machinery used in farming from early tractors to the drone. EAMs, which can be for static use or for transportation, can be traced back over two hundred and seventy years ago to the year 1746. Alessandro Volta was an Italian physicist, chemist, and a pioneer of electricity and power, who is credited as the inventor of the electric battery. At the very young age of 7, Alessandro started to show a great interest in natural phenomena, to the extent that, anxious to find some bright blades of straw, which according to the local farmers were supposed to be made of gold, he almost drowned in the Monteverde spring, near Camnago. He did not find it, fifty-three years later, he would invent the fundamental building block for electrical power: the Voltaic pile. Despite a century of horrific wars, and Industrial Revolution and some significant international plagues, human populations managed to grow 400 percent during the 20th century. Today’s world population is 7.6 billion, and the United Nations projects that another billion will be added by 2030, still another by 2050, and that by 2100, the world population will be 11.2 billion. The food they will eat will need to be farmed as efficiently and as sustainably as possible. It is therefore vital that this book looks at EAMs and their tremendous potential to deal with this.

The domestication of oxen in Mesopotamia and the Indus Valley Civilization, perhaps as early as the 6th millennium B.C. provided mankind with the draft power necessary to develop the early plough into the larger, animal-drawn true ard (or scratch plough). Some of the earliest evidence of ploughing from around 2800 B.C.was found at the Indus Valley site of Kalibangan. Subsequent archaeological finds in Prague, Czech Republic, push the oldest known ploughed field even further back to 3500-3800 B.C. All food produce was planted and harvested by hand: seeds were scattered by hand and planted grains were brought from the field to be threshed on the dooryard. Milking a small herd of cows or goats was also done by hand. This continued for centuries. Then man discovered electricity. In 1746, just a few years before Benjamin Franklin of Philadelphia sent a kite to catch lightning in a storm, a Doctor von Maimbray gave talk to the Royal Society of London where he described his experiment of electrifying the myrtle bush (Morella cerifera) which then put forth new branches in October, something which had never happened before. This news inspired others in Europe to carry out similar experiments. In 1749, Abbot Jean Antoine Nollet of the Royal Academy of Sciences in Paris France, inventor of the electroscope, published a pamphlet on “The Harmful Effects or Advantageous of Electrical Phenomena on Plants.”1Isolated experiments continued until in 1783 Father Pierre Bertholon de Saint-Lazare of Montpellier published “About the Electricity of Plants”, a work in which he dealt with the effect of atmospheric electricity on plants, taking in their medicinal and nutritive-electrical virtues and but in particular the practical means of applying it usefully to agriculture.2He even built an electro-vegetometer, a device for collecting atmospheric electricity to distribute it in the soil and then to the plants, but he met with little success. Bertholon also conceived of subjecting plants to “electric rain” by connecting a large syringe to an electric source. A gardener, standing on a slab of insulating material in a wagon, carried a sprinkling can electrified by means of a wire leading to a static machine. “By means of this process, strange for the times, the good Abbé Bertholon, who was considered something of a sorcerer, obtained lettuces of an extraordinary size.”3

In 1920, although electric vehicles were not used on the American farms about 5,000 electric industrial trucks were produced by 12 American manufacturers, while estimates of the total fleet ranged from 6,000 to 15,000, most of them built during the war. Most used an exchange charging system. Among the manufacturers seen in and around cities and towns were the Commercial Truck Company, the Lansden Company, the Walker Vehicle Company (now owned by Commonwealth Edison), the Ward Motor Vehicle Company, the Steinmetz Electric Motor Corporation, Walter Motor Truck Company, and the Baker R L Corporation.One step away from agriculture, Charles A. Ward of New York City, was head of his family’s baking company, made up of the Mackey Company, the Ward Corby Company, the Ward Bread Companyand the Ohio Baking Company of Cleveland. In 1911, Ward had decided to replace his horse-drawn delivery vehicles with electric trucks, thus doing away with the unsanitary stable hitherto part of or adjacent to bakery.1 Alongside this, the challenge of using stationary electric agricultural machines continued to be met. Two innovations which entered into dairy farming were the milk cream electric centrifugal separator and the surge milker. The Babson brothers (Henry, Fred and Gus) of Chicago were friends of and dealers for electrical battery inventor and entrepreneur Thomas Edison, and importers of Belgian-made Méllote separators. In 1916, the Babsonsproduced their own Pine Tree milking machine. While the overall design was similar to others, the electrically powered Pine Tree Pulsator outperformed any other pulsator made. These machines were powered by a 32-volt Delco system with 12 batteries near the barn. Pine Tree Pulsators were simple enough that the farmer could maintain them himself. The Pine Tree Pulsator was patented in 1921. The problem with this unit was that it was difficult to keep clean.

The 21st century dawned with interest in the potential of electric agricultural machines. Beginning in 2000, a concept study, MELA Mobile Elektrische Leistungsund Antriebstechnik Mobile (electric power train technology)supported by universities and organizations in Germany as well as Fendt Agricutural Company (AGCO) showed a possible solution on tractor electrification with electric driven auxiliaries as well as electric CVTs and implement electrification. In 2003 the University of Hohenheim developed an electric combine harvester called Magda. With the introduction of a 42 VDC power supply system, the range of small rotational drives and servo motors could be covered. They showed that if more power had to be transmitted, threephase alternating current should be used since threephase machines had a large speed range and a large range of constant power. During the first years of the century, longestablished transport manufacturers have been quick to see the environmental advantage of electric propulsion, be it with batteries, hybridelectric or fuel cell. With airliners, Boeing, Airbus and Tupolev quickly saw the advantage. With motorcycles, names such as HarleyDavidson, Curtiss, Ducati, Saroléa and Royal Enfield have positioned battery packs between two wheels. With trucks, Daimler, Toyota, Cummins, Peterbilt, DAF, Volvo, Leyland, Kenworth, and Isuzi, among others have taken the electric route. With buses, Alexander Dennis, Scania, Volvo, New Flyer, Van Hool, DAFVDL, Blue Bird, Heuliez, Rampinican carry their passengers more silently. It therefore seemed only logical that traditional agricultural machinery builders should make the same transition. The first to do this was John Deere, established in Moline, Illinois in 1837.

This chapter traces the history of the electric quadcopter commonly known as the drone, prior to its use in agriculture. As long ago as 1493, the versatile Italian Leonardo de Vinci, painter, sculptor, machine designer often inspired by his observations of Nature, made a sketch in one of his little notebooks of a screw-like machine next to which he wrote in his mirror-handwriting: If this instrument made with a screw be well made – that is to say, made of linen of which the pores are stopped up with starch and be turned swiftly, the said screw will make its spiral in the air and it will rise high.1 Four centuries later, in 1863, the Viscount Gustave du Ponton d’Amécourt, President of The Society for the Encouragement of Aerial Locomotion by Means of Heavier than Air Machines, published a forty-page monograph in Paris, entitled “The Conquest of the air by propeller. Account of a new system of aviation.” In this he took the Greek words helico and pteron, meaning “spiral” and “wing”, and combined them into the word hélicoptère (helicopter). D’Amécourt and his friends were among those very few who were passionately convinced that the future of flying was with heavier-than-air machines. To prove their point, having built a fragile flying machine model driven by clockwork springs, they watched it ascend vertically for a few seconds to a height of less than 3 metres (10 feet), only to crash back to the ground.

EAAMs (Electric Agricultural Aerial Machines) have emerged from drones used for both aerial filming, as toys and even as racing units. A Price water house Coopers’ study revealed that the global market for drone-powered business solutions was valued at $127.3 billion in 2016. For agriculture, prospective drone applications in global projects were valued at $32.4 billion. Stelios Kotakis and colleagues at market research firm IHS Markit projected that there would be around 400,000 shipments of drones to firms in the agriculture and forestry sectors in 2017. The Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) of the United Nations projects that by 2050 humanity’s ranks will likely have grown to nearly 10 billion people. Farmers will need to produce more with less, while preserving our environment for future generations. And society has a duty to help them achieve this. Although agriculture is perceived as a traditional economic sector, precision agriculture technologies have already boosted crop yields significantly in the last decades. The same study forecast that agricultural consumption would increase by 69% from 2010 to 2050.

In 1920, a 30-year-old Czech writer Karel Èapek, wrote a play called “R.U.R.” (Rossumovi Univerzální Roboti or Rossum’s Universal Robots). For this dystopian work about a bad day at a factory populated with sentient androids, Èapek called the androids “roboti”, as suggested byhis brother Josef, a painter and writer. It was premiered in Prague on 25th January, 1921. Èapek was admired for his opinions: My dear Miss Glory, Robots are not people. They are mechanically more perfect than we are, they have an astounding intellectual capacity, but they have no soul. But surprisingly he was keen on gardening!

Appendix A e-weed killers George Washington Carver, an American agricultural scientist and inventor once said “A weed is a flower growing in the wrong place.” Nevertheless they can be a menace to agriculture. In 1895, Albert A. Sharp of Memphis, Tennessee invented a new and improved Vegetation Exterminator: “The object of my invention is to produce a simple apparatus which may be conveniently applied to a car or other vehicle, and which when the car to which it is applied is moved along the track, or a vehicle is moved along the road, will cause a strong current of electricity to be sent through all the adjacent vegetation, thus killing the same” (Patent US546682A). Sharp’s idea was to kill the rank vegetation which grows along railroad banks and highways in tropical countries. Through the years, a handful of inventors would tackle the challenge of the electric weed killer. One of these was William E. Burt of the small town of Yuba, Wisconsin who had invented a dynamometer for measuring horsepower back in 1909. In 1928 he obtained a patent for destroying weeds, whereby an oscillatory current would pass through the root system of a plant such as Canadian thistles which were very hard to destroy by known methods. Burt suggested a powerful current transported from place to place by an electric wagon or truck. On board was a motor, a DC generator or exciter and an AC generator. The farmer would then use a switch to oscillate the current and killed the weeds. In 1947, Russell R. Poynor of Elmhurst, Illinois, assignor to the International Harvester Corporation, applied for a patent for an electric weed killer, “relating to the destruction of weeds and the like which tend to interfere with and retard the growth of selected vegetation. The invention concerns particularly a machine for thecultivation or crop plants and apparatus therefore. A further object of the invention, therefore, is the provision of mechanism mounted upon a power propelled vehicle carrying a member of electrically conductivematerial having sufficient rigidity to brush over weeds growing in a crop row but being flexibly mounted to permit the member to yield upon encountering the greater resistance of the crop plant.”(US 7933.43)