On an overcast morning over Meon Springs, a 1200-acre family farm nestled in the South Downs, 15 miles east of Winchester, a new agricultural revolution can be heard. It doesn’t thunder like a diesel tractor or bleat like a lamb. It bleeps like a gadget.

Will Butler, a 55-year-old, third-generation farmer who is just getting used to such sounds on his land, jokes: “When my son is running the farm it will probably just be him and a couple of robots.”

Already, Meon Springs is increasingly deserted. In recent years, when Mr Butler drove through the winding lanes around his wheat fields, he could spot as many as three dozen labourers scattered amid the lush green landscape. Now those workers have been replaced by laptop-wielding technicians testing small, spidery orange robots that crawl over his patch of picturesque countryside.

The machines, from a Portsmouth-based start-up called The Small Robot Company, take thousands of pictures of Mr Butler’s crops which are then fired through an artificial intelligence algorithm. That informs him what is happening in every single centimetre of his fields. The analysis distinguishes between weeds and crops, and between healthy and diseased leaves, allowing Mr Butler to pinpoint fertilizer and pesticides rather than douse a whole acre with chemicals.