The 1st dramatic shift in their relationship with the environment is the ability of modern human beings to engineer the environment to generate enough food to sustain massive population growth.
Farm automation, usually associated with "smart farming," makes farms more efficient and automates the crop or animal production cycle. Improving the count of organizations is working on robotics innovation to create drones, autonomous tractors, robotic harvesters, automatic watering, and robots. Although these technologies are comparatively new, an increasing count of traditional farming organizations has been adopting farm automation into their processes. As a result, there are several mind-boggling devices to awe and excite the agricultural revolution.
Here are some of the advantages of intelligent farming:
Farm automation technology addresses critical population growth, farm labor shortages, and shifting consumer preferences. The benefits of automating traditional agricultural processes can not be measured.
Consumer Advantage
Consumer preferences shift away from conventionally produced goods and organic and long-lasting produced goods. The automation technique allows producers to reach consumers faster, fresher, and sustainably. In addition, improved productivity due to automation increases output and rate of production, lowering customers costs.
Labour Productivity
Labor costs are more than half of farming, and 54% of farmers report being impacted by labor shortages. As a result, 30% of farmers are shifting to more minor labor-intensive crops. Harvest robots, on the other hand, have large potential. Routine tasks can be automated with robotics technology, decreasing labor costs and reducing the staffing need in an agriculture industry facing a labor deficiency. For example, one strawberry robot harvester can pick a 25-acre field in 2 days and displace 30 farmworkers.
Ecological Footprint Reduction
Farm automation practices can increase agricultural profitability while simultaneously decreasing agriculture's environmental footprint. For example, software tailored to a particular site can help reduce pesticide and fertilizer use while reducing greenhouse gas.
Nonetheless, there are farming automation challenges to overcome. The enormous cost of robotic technology adoption makes a significant barrier to entry for farmers, especially in developing countries. Robotic planters must transport reasonable amounts of water or pesticides; as a result, the hardware must be built in a different way, which results in costs increment to accommodate the larger size. Technical issues and equipment and parts breakdowns also result in high repair costs for such specialized equipment. Finally, farmers must have knowledge and experience with these new technologies to utilize farm automation fully.
