Farming has been around for thousands of years, and the benefits that it has provided for society cannot be overstated. While the objective of farming (namely, to grow food and other resources to sustain a population) hasn’t changed much, the tools used for farming have changed drastically over time, as a result of technological innovations. One of the newest innovations in the agriculture industry is the automation of farming. In the following, I will be discussing some of the contemporary innovations in the agriculture industry.
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Robots Used for Planting
One innovation of modern agriculture is the invention of robots that perform planting. Traditionally, planting is executed by people and is a very labor-intensive task that takes a lot of time and energy.
Nowadays, there are robots and drones which are programmed to plant seeds. One obvious benefit of having this process be automated is that it frees up time for other workers, allowing them to spend more energy on other significant tasks.
But this is not the only benefit. Some of the newer technologies are able to target the specific regions of land which are most suitable for planting, and then plant seeds in those regions. So not only can planting be done much quicker with the help of automation, but the likelihood of a successful planting is increased due to the ability of the technology to locate optimal areas for planting.
Robots Used for Harvesting
After planting, eventually, comes harvesting. Like planting, harvesting is a labor-intensive process that, when performed manually, takes up a lot of time and energy.
Just like there are robots for planting seeds, there are robots for harvesting crops. Some of the technologies used for harvesting crops are robots which can determine whether a crop is ripe or not and then harvest it if it is ripe. This can lead not only to harvesting being done quicker but also a more successful harvest, considering that a well-designed robot can potentially determine the ripeness of produce more accurately than a person, especially considering that people have to determine ripeness for each individual plant, which adds to the amount of labor required to harvest.
Monitoring Crops
Traditionally, farmers spend large amounts of time analyzing and monitoring their crops. Although this is certainly a skill that farmers have, the unpredictability of nature can often lead to farmers making imperfect judgments about the quality and status of their crops.
This is another situation in which automated agricultural methods can outperform manual labor. Since automated machines can perform analyses on crops that are more scientific than human analyses, there is a great probability that automated monitoring can outperform manual monitoring by a long shot.
Automatic Tractors
Another modern agricultural innovation is automatic tractors. These are tractors that can be controlled remotely. The benefit of this is, like with robots used for planting and harvesting, that time is freed up for workers so that they can spend more time on other projects. Also, with the use of a controller display, the person operating the tractor can keep an eye on things that he would normally be monitoring while in the tractor.
Furthermore, the technology of automatic tractors is becoming more sophisticated, and eventually, it is likely that such tractors will become fully automated. What this means is that automatic tractors will no longer have to be controlled by a single person, but can be totally automated so as to run on their own.
Conclusion
As you can see, automation is transforming the agriculture industry. Robots are not only able to perform tasks at a faster pace than people but are also able to determine quality control in a more systematic way. Because of the great benefits that automation provides, it is certainly likely that automated methods will become increasingly used and developed in agriculture.
