How modern technologies are changing the approach to agriculture
Updated: Nov 29, 2022
Author: Cristina Cristea
Date of publication: 16/06/2022
Despite the rather archaic stereotypes, agriculture today occupies almost a leading position in terms of introduction of advanced technologies. Let's discuss how modern farmers have thrown away shovels and rakes, picking up smartphones and tablets.
Drones
The most obvious scenario for the utilization of drones within the agro-industrial complex is monitoring the state of the fields. Specifically, we are currently talking about tracking the placement of employees and working equipment, protecting against harmful animals. Creating regularly updated accurate pasture maps and predicting the quantity of crops during a particular area is also a facility brought up by drones. Within the US, drones are even used for planting forests - the aircraft hovers over the bed in a very strictly specified place and “shoots” the seeds into the soil with enough force to penetrate to the specified depth. All this is possible due to existing technologies. Therefore, the following step is the development of the ability and range of UAV (unmanned aerial vehicle) flights. Likewise as a rise within the capacity of their batteries, it'll be possible to put in additional equipment on the drone body. Also, more advanced cameras will automatically conduct aerial photography with an analysis of nitrogen content, moisture, flooding and waterlogging of soils. However, the previous years this required the utilization of third-party companies that provide satellite pictures or small private aircraft. The new batteries will take the payload capacity of even relatively small drones to a brand new level. As a result, farmers save up from having to shop for additional equipment and hire an outsized number of employees. Moreover, experts have calculated that the utilization of drones reduces the price of landing by 85%. Also, saving time is important. For example in an hour, a compact and fast device can sow 10 square meters. km of fields, it'll take someone an entire day to try and do this. Additionally, a bigger battery capacity also means the chance of an extended flight to very remote pastures to manage grazing animals and look for individuals that have strayed from the herd.
Genetic Engineering
Disputes about the advisability of interfering with the genetic code of agricultural plants and animals are occurring for several years. However, today there's simply no other way to grow plants that are immune to viruses. Changing the genotype helps to resolve the matter not only of viruses, but also of more dangerous pests - insects. Thus, scientists from Belgium and also the USA successfully introduced the genome of an earthen bacterium into a potato cell. Due to these vegetables they were able to synthesize insecticides of bacterial origin, which made this crop immune to the attacks of the Colorado potato beetle. So, the identical trick was done with cotton, saving it from the threat of destruction by the bollworm.
Robots
Also, the use of human labor in agricultural enterprises has ceased to be profitable. For instance, classes, categories and subcategories of robotic machines have already been formed in this industry. In addition, robots used the agro-industrial complex belong to the category of “field robots”, which, in turn, is included within the category of service robots. This category is split into narrow-profile subcategories like milking systems, agrobots, farming robots, etc. Within the category of robots for agriculture, milking robots and autonomous tractors are the most common.
5G
But neither drones, nor smart sensors, nor autonomous tractors can work without fast mobile communications. Thus, the most advantage of fifth generation networks is minimal delays. Therefore, if ordinary users are expecting the mass introduction of 5G thanks to high data transfer rates, then business customers have an interest in this technology. This primarily happens by implementing IoT (internet of things), unmanned vehicles and comfy remote control of remote equipment. All these concepts fit perfectly into modern agriculture, especially the notorious Internet of Things. Nowadays, thousands of sorts of sensors are utilized in agricultural enterprises that track the age of animals, soil composition, the presence of diseases in plants. Also, they take care of the situation of every animal on the farm, the state of products within the warehouse, the degree of readiness of the crop to collection, the approach of precipitation, etc.
Artificial Intelligence (AI)
In modern agriculture, AI is not any less common than in smartphones and computers. First of all, it's accustomed to analyzing the appearance of plants. In particular, with the assistance of thousands of uploaded photos, AI learns to spot problems with the long run crop during a timely manner. Thus,this is applicable to both micro-photography for more accurate diagnosis, and large-scale surveys from satellites and UAVs to see the extent of the spread of the disease. Others use cases for AI in agriculture that aren't as widespread yet. For example, such cases are managing transport, scheduling automatic soil watering and spraying fertilizers, and monitoring animal health.