Hello and welcome to this first edition of Turf Pro Weekly Briefing.

Hopefully this will be become a regular part of your Monday (I know it’s Tuesday today, but the day following a Bank Holiday is always somewhat confusing!). As a publishing team we’ve established a very successful and popular, similar service for our sister title, Service Dealer, aimed at the trade side of the outdoor powered equipment industry - which we hope to replicate for the professional turfcare industry. Delivering a round-up of the weekly news, with links and videos providing further information, straight to your inbox.

With my Service Dealer hat on, last week I attended the Agricultural Engineers Association AGM in London, where a lot of the talk was of increased automation and the further use of robots out in the fields. Precision Farming is the hot topic in agriculture.

And whilst of course technological and mechanical developments are obviously to be welcomed and applauded if they make life easier and more productive, I suppose the principal reason for their pursuance is profitability. More crops harvested, by less workers, equals bigger profits for those in charge.

Which is all fine and correct and how capitalism works, but I suppose I do fear for the worker. It’s like that tinge of guilt I get now whenever I go into Smiths to buy a newspaper, or a sandwich from Marks and Spencer, or check in at an airport. You are just faced with banks of machines, where there were once humans, with a solitary person whose job it is to flit between the machines to explain how they work to customers, and maybe place an Out of Order sign upon them when they go wrong.

And I guess my fear is will this trend spill across into the Groundscare industry? Will skilled groundsmen and greenkeepers, begin to lose their jobs to robots? Will we see multiple fairways and parks and football grounds, populated by autonomous machines, all controlled by a single person in an office somewhere with a spreadsheet and a smartphone?

Obviously technological change is taking place, but surely skilled individuals must still be at the heart of the developers thinking for this industry? One manufacturer I spoke to last week, talked of lead vehicles in farming, driven by a person, which had one or two robots following behind it - could this perhaps be a middle ground where things end up? At least there’s still a person included there!

But let’s not get too maudlin at this stage. Take a look through the news stories in this first Turf Pro Weekly Briefing, and what’s the common thread? It’s highly skilled people, using technology to their advantage, to create superb playing and living environments for other people to enjoy and prosper in.

And long may this continue!

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