Engineer the Future with Constable

From how we produce our food to how we travel around, our futures will be shaped by today’s engineers and engineering. 

If Constable was alive in 2050, what stories of change might spark his creativity? What feats of engineering might help us to live more sustainable lives? What, through Constable’s eyes, could a net zero world look like in 2050?

Whereas farmers were historically relied on manual labour, this re-imagined painting shows how agricultural engineering could transform the way we work to produce food and fuel in 2050. 

Kit Franklin, Senior Lecturer in Agricultural Engineering at Harper Adams University, says: “The artistic reinterpretation of Constable has removed the hard physical labour and repetitive tasks of agricultural farmhands as autonomous robots take on the work humans would have traditionally done.”

Using robots in farming will help reduce food waste by ensuring that fruit, vegetables, and grains, are picked at ideal times. 

To the far left of the painting, several bison can be seen, providing an insight into the part rewilding may play in reaching net zero. By re-introducing native species into our environments, it may be possible to reduce the biodiversity loss we’re currently seeing, while also providing several environmental benefits.

Bison can help reduce wildfires as they break through dense undergrowth, and they have large appetites – eating plant material that would be vulnerable to burning. Many European countries are at risk of wildfires doubling if there is a 3°C increase in  global warming. 

Bison hooves also help to churn the soil, reducing the amount of surface runoff and reducing the risk of flooding. 

Today, there are more trees than there were 35 years ago but there’s a lack of species diversity.  Grown for paper and fuel today, in 2050 increased woodland means increased variety of trees to support biodiversity. 

More hedgerow highways could also be used to support insect and bird life and more varied forests could enrich our ecosystems.

Strip farming may become more common. As opposed to whole fields being planted with a single crop, different crops can be grown and harvested alongside one another. Between harvests farmers can grow cover crops to naturally capture large amounts of CO2, restoring soil organic matter and reducing flooding.

This can help soil health as part of a crop rotation system as the soil won’t be overworked. It can also be used when a slope is too steep to farm and can help prevent soil erosion. The use of drones and autonomous lighter farm machinery allows strip farming to be more efficient and better uses our land.

In the future we might look out on an intricately patterned landscape of different shapes and colours, strips of land that curve round contours, with stripes of multi-coloured crops, bordered by wildflowers and rapeseed.  Our future landscapes might be works of art!

Kit Franklin says " If Constable were to walk in the British countryside in 2050, he’d see smaller fields with strips of different coloured crops, and less productive fields rewilded with trees, wildflowers and shrubs to boost biodiversity and pollination.”