Every time one of the cows on Marten Dijkstra’s dairyfarm in the north of the Netherlands needs to be milked, she makes her own way to the dairy barn and joins a queue to use a robotic milking machine. While the cows milk themselves, Dijkstra can avoid one of the most back-bending demands of being a dairy farmer. “It gives me flexibility in my life as well as my back and shoulders,” he joked. It seems most of his fellow Dutch dairy farmers agree. The milking robot ― first invented by Dutch engineers in the early 1990s ― already outsells traditional milking parlors where cows are taken to be milked in the country. And they are just one of a wave of machines now taking over mundane farming tasks in the Netherlands, including harvesting, and fruit and vegetable picking, with almost $1 billion spent on innovation last year by the sector. This innovation drive, including increasing use of automation on farms like Dijkstra’s, has helped propel a country with a land mass smaller than the state of West Virginia to become the world’s second-biggest food exporter after the U.S., with agri-food exports worth more than $100 billion.

ahavelaar via Getty Images Cows on a farm near Amersfoort in The Netherlands.

And it’s dairy, and fruit and vegetables ― where technologies like milking and harvesting robots are becoming commonplace in the Netherlands ― that account for the biggest share of that export revenue. “Automation has been part of that success story,” said Erik Nicholson of the United Farm Workers of America. The Netherlands “is seen as a world leader because of the innovation going on there and the output it manages despite its comparatively small size.” The Netherlands’ high population density compared with other countries has been a driving force behind the automation of its agricultural sector, said Janneke de Kramer, a food and farming robotics specialist at Wageningen University, the country’s main agricultural research institution. “We have a lot of people in a small area of land, so for a long period now we’ve had to produce more food with less land than other countries,” de Kramer said. “The Dutch agri-sector has been good at working together to develop science and new technology to overcome this.” The other big issue driving automation is labor shortages. Farmers are aging in the Netherlands and manual farm labor is getting harder to find as migrants from other countries return home ― many put off by poor farm working conditions. Researchers at Wageningen have said roughly one-quarter of Polish workers have left farm jobs in the Netherlands in recent years. The local population just “don’t want to work on farms anymore,” said Dijkstra. “We have a greying population here and we’re also having fewer children, too. It’s something we can’t prevent from happening, but one of the solutions for us in farming is automation.” A Nonstop Pepper Picker De Kramer’s team of researchers at Wageningen are developing a range of new machines to take over almost all the hard labor being done on Dutch farms today. De Kramer said robots can make up the labor shortfalls and squeeze the most from the country’s agricultural land. But it is not just about taking away mundane farm jobs that people don’t want to do, said de Kramer. The new wave of technology being rolled out on Dutch farms can also help improve the sustainability of food production, she said, by cutting the use of chemicals and reducing food waste. Chemical-based pesticides have been identified as a major risk to wildlife, including wild bee and honeybee populations, as well as a health risk to farm workers. Robots being developed by de Kramer’s team can recognize where disease might break out on crops through the use of cameras. They can then dramatically cut back the amount of pesticide applied by a targeted spraying of that area, rather than a blanket approach. The next big challenge is automating the harvesting of specialty crops ― a breakthrough that could further reduce the need for manual labor on farms. Researchers at Wageningen have been developing Sweeper, a sweet pepper harvester. Its robotic arm can move up and down a greenhouse, using cameras and sensors to spot and pick ripened peppers. Not only can it distinguish color, it can also recognize ripe peppers hidden behind leaves. The robot was able to harvest a pepper in 15 seconds in tests last year and is expected to be on sale for Dutch farmers within the next three to four years. While humans can pick peppers quicker, the robots can work nonstop and overnight.

Wageningen University Sweeper, the pepper harvesting robot, in action.