Business of Agriculture March April 2019 Edition | Page 17

Smart Farm Machinery: Smart farm machinery
allows farmers to produce more with less. The
backbone of such machinery is technology like
machine vision and GPS. Smart farm machinery
includes driverless tractors that can till the land
without a human driver. This technology will not only
will save labour, but it will also give time to farmers to
pursue more essential activities. Smart tractors will
even be able to use big data to judge the best time to
work on a field without human intervention. Another
advantage is that with this machinery they can work
at any time of day, meaning a farm can be productive
even when its owners are asleep.
Other equipment like seeding machinery makes
farms smarter. While older seeding equipment can
seed a large area faster than humans, they tend to
waste seeds. Newer precision seeding machines are
more effective because they’re able to plant seeds
at an optimal depth and distance from other seeds.
Gradually precision seeding machines and tractors will
be able to farm an entire field autonomously. A farmer
overseeing the field will be fed real-time data which
they can use to optimise the process when needed.
The work being done on the farms is changing and will
change drastically in the near future when automated
farm machinery will become more affordable.
Granular Information on Each Orchid Tree:
Farmers cherish their relationship with their land.
The most skilled farmers have a bond with their
crops and trees. There are start-ups today designing
orchid management software that gives farmers
detailed information about the size of a single tree
and the diameter of its trunk. Farmers who have
orchids spread over hundreds of acres get granular
information about each tree. This allows farmers to
monitor the health of trees and develop better farming
techniques. Such software also strengthens the bond
that farmers have with trees.
Farmers
cherish their
relationship
with their
land. The
most skilled
farmers have
a bond with
their crops
and trees
most farmers were dependent on animals or human
labours to plough and harvest. Today innovations in
agriculture are also the reason why more people die
of obesity than malnutrition. A single farmer today
produces enough food to feed hundreds of people
while before innovations in agriculture, most farmers
practised subsistence farming. Techniques like smart
crop rotation and no-till farming allow resources to
be used as efficiently as possible. There are 7.7 billion
people on Earth today, by 2050 there will be 9.8 billion
and the amount of arable will remain nearly the same.
This isn’t a reason to panic because innovations in
agriculture will mean that in 2050, obesity will still
be a greater health risk than malnutrition. A few
innovations will ensure that there will be ample
food for billions of people; some examples of such
innovations are elaborated below:
Crops to Grow between Rotations: Smart crop
rotation is important to ensure soil fertility and to
retain the balance of resources in the soil. A start-up
has created a cash crop that can be planted between
Business of Agriculture
| March-April 2019 • Vol. V • Issue 2
17