Farms today face challenges to produce enough crops and raise enough livestock to feed a growing world population. At the same time, farmers must manage costs and try to reduce waste and environmental impacts. As the global population increases, so does the demand for agricultural goods, and this rising pressure makes efficiency critical for farmers to succeed. New technologies offer solutions that allow farmers to increase productivity. They also help save money and natural resources.
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Tracking Field Conditions
Source: cropin.com
In the past, farmers relied heavily on intuition, observation, and experience to decide the best times for crucial tasks like planting, fertilizing, and harvesting crops. They used traditional wisdom passed down through generations and trial and error experimentation. This approach depended on individuals’ skill and knowledge. Now modern sensors and monitoring tools give farmers detailed, constant data about their land and hyper-local weather. These precision agriculture technologies remove guesswork and help farmers make better decisions by understanding field variations in more detail.
Moisture sensors placed throughout crop fields using advanced GPS grids reveal which zones have enough moisture for healthy growth and which areas are too dry. Farmers use this precise data to irrigate specific zones in a tailored fashion, avoiding overall water waste. Other sensors check critical factors like nutrient levels in the soil, acidity, and compaction. Farmers can then treat distinct parts of a field that actually need fertilizer, nutrients, or soil amendments rather than broadly spraying everything.
Connectivity advancements enable fully integrated weather stations to monitor conditions like hourly rainfall, wind speed, humidity percentages, and temperature fluctuations. Hyperlocal information gets aggregated from multiple stations spread across acres of farmland to map microclimates and weather patterns spanning entire property maps. When damaging conditions like hailstorms, tornados, or floods threaten crops or livestock, real-time alerts notify farmers via text messages and allow quick protective actions. For example, farmers can open ventilation systems or move animals to sheltered barns. Weather software can also calculate soil moisture loss because of sun, wind, and heat indexes. This helps schedule irrigation more precisely between rain events.
Optimizing the Farm Operation
Source: flyingprecision.com
Technology innovation allows farms to streamline critical tasks that once required significant manual labor like planting and harvesting crops. GPS-guided autonomous tractors, sprayers, and harvesters can plow, seed, apply chemicals like pesticides and fertilizers at variable rates, and efficiently gather mature crops. One tractor pulling a seeder automatically avoids zones already planted by another tractor with a different crop, minimizing double applications.
Monitor and control software keeps diligent track of key aspects of overall farm operations like animal feeding cycles, livestock health patterns, crop irrigation runtimes, and inventory volumes. IoT solutions from a company like Blues use cellular and satellite connectivity to wirelessly link many types of sensors across extensive farm properties to transmit periodic or continual status data. Custom dashboard interfaces gather and clearly display this real-time information to help farmers closely monitor equipment performance, crop growth, and livestock well-being. Operators can spot potential problems early, like a low feed tank needing a refill.
For example, a remote wellness tracking program could receive periodic heartbeat data and rumination levels from wireless sensors contained in ear tags worn by cattle. Certain irregular heart rate patterns or decreased cud chewing may indicate emerging illnesses requiring veterinary treatment before entire herds are affected. Alerts notify farm managers via text messages or emails no matter where they are located. This allows significantly earlier intervention as compared to relying on visible disease symptoms or manual inspections. The cattle tags also include location beacons helping farmers pinpoint and find specific animals needing attention amongst large, grazing lands.
Reducing Environmental Impact
Agriculture relies heavily on natural resources like land, water, and air to raise livestock and produce crops. Technological innovations enable farmers to be good environmental stewards while remaining economically productive. For example, efficient automated sensor systems can detect leaks from pipes, tanks, pumps, or hoses much quicker than manual inspections. This allows faster response times to address water waste issues before substantial losses occur. Other software applications utilize weather data and soil sensor moisture data to estimate optimal watering amounts, timing, and zones for crop fields based on actual conditions. This avoids over-watering certain areas while potentially under-watering others.
Mobile apps streamline tracking detailed data like fuel usage from tractors, trucks, generators, and other equipment. Reviewing this information motivates farmers to reduce unnecessary engine idling, consolidate trips, and ensure machinery is well-maintained. These practices save substantial fuel and lower air emissions each season. High-precision GPS planting tools space crop rows exceptionally evenly, maximizing production across available land. Automated spraying machinery calibrates chemicals per zone and avoids overlapping treated areas, preventing harmful agricultural runoff issues. Targeted, variable rate fertilizer application also considerably decreases nutrient pollution in nearby waterways.
The Future of Agricultural Technology
Source: xcubelabs.com
Exciting new developments in agricultural technology explore futuristic ideas to continue advancing farm production, efficiency, profitability, and sustainability. Researchers work extensively on autonomous mini-robots, or agbots, that could take over tedious or back-breaking tasks like tending, pruning, and picking crops. Lightweight, row-roaming agbots may foster much higher yields and require far less human effort over the long, exhausting traditional harvest process. Sensors and data transmitters are also being made drastically smaller and cheaper. This allows the expansion of wireless monitoring networks across more acres and buildings on farming properties.
Advanced analytics software aggregate many data streams from gateways of crop sensors, weather forecasts and commodity market price fluctuations. Artificial intelligence and machine learning algorithms allow systems to interpret what the integrated data means and recommend ideal next steps to farmers for maximum efficiency. Recommendations may include planting certain acreage with one crop versus another or harvesting sooner based on weather. The systems get “smarter” through computational experience analyzed from many seasons across multiple farms.
Conclusion
While agriculture has progressively evolved for centuries, recent technology opens doors to more dramatic near-term transformations. Continued innovation in high-tech farm equipment, data analytics, autonomous vehicles, sensors, and computing offers a promising path towards this delicate balance. Technology will likely change the landscape of agriculture substantially in coming years.
