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GFMM desk: Increasing people, increasing demand for food, not increasing the land of food production, but cultivating land due to construction of settlements and socioeconomic development. In this situation, the need for more food production in small land, needs digital farmer. Now world famous high-tech agricultural machinery company does not build the tractors. Instead, it adapts the sensors and actuators needed for driver-less plowing to existing tractors produced by major manufacturers.
That step is not as sci-fi as it might seem. From equipment automation to data collection and analysis, the digital evolution of agriculture is already a fact of life on farms across the develop country.
The need for driver-less farming equipment is intensifying, because of a crushing labour shortage, which drives up wages and worker mobility. Tractors equipped with Bear Flag technology are able to work fields around the clock, without a driver, using sensors similar to those in autonomous road vehicles under development: lidar, radar and digital video.
The sensory devices provide more than what Cafiero calls situational awareness, vital for safe operation where workers and livestock may be nearby, also collecting data on the land to improve efficiency. While Bear Flag pursues expanding capabilities to tasks like planting and spraying that have long demanded human supervision, it also plans to expand to the labour-intensive harvest duties of crops including tree nuts and row crops.
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The drive to increase productivity is urgent in all phases of agriculture. Feeding a world population expected to reach 9.7 billion by 2050 faces dire challenges, according to the summary of a UN report released in August. The effects of climate change — extreme weather, soil loss, migration pressures — will strain land and water resources, potentially disrupting food supplies.
Yet growing crops has historically been an uncertain enterprise, a livelihood that increasingly depends on forecasts of weather conditions, commodity prices and complex factors like maturity index and projected yield. Agriculture is seen as an industry ideally suited to large-scale data collection and analysis, and technology companies more closely associated with databases and computer hardware are seeing opportunities.
With more than 2 million acres of farmland around the world covered, the platform provides hyper-local six-month weather predictions based on satellite and atmospheric data. Agricultural scientists say, ’We don’t want to be in the business of full automation.‘
But a farmer inspecting field conditions can take an image from a smartphone or iPad, automatically uploaded to the decision platform, to diagnose crop health. The system provides a quick analysis and suggested remedy, sort of a WebMD service for crops. The longer-term goal is to deliver real-time growing advice; partnerships with equipment makers also hold the potential to make better use of sensors, equipment monitoring and drones to make remote inspections less labour-intensive. Finally the question arises, will tomorrow’s digital farmers spend more of their long days at the keyboard than in the field or the barn? The answer will tell the time.
Source: Online/SZK
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