The road ahead is exciting. It will be fully automated and very environmentally friendly. In fact, the move to fully automated farming is already underway.
Moonshot Factory. They realize that if farmers are going to map every plant in a field, that's a big data problem. And who are the best data people? Google.
Farming with smaller bots
Agricultural engineer Kit Franklin of Harper Adams University in the UK says that one percent of the population produces food for the other 99 percent.
They also fight against climate change. He says that to mitigate this, future farmers will need to do what he calls precision farming.
We need to divide our land areas into smaller parts and be more precise with the way we farm. The idea is to reduce waste and increase efficiency by managing each individual part of the field as a smaller and smaller part.
Current Machinery
The harvester Machines have gotten bigger and less precise. A huge sprinkler can cover a large amount of area. But treat everything the same. These big machines are great for production, but not for precision.
AI farming the alternative
If a huge tractor is automated but things go wrong, it will go through the hedge, it will go across the road, it will go through the ditch, it will go through the house and it will kill the baby. It's not a great story. But if the vacuum cleaner is automated, it hits the hedge and the story stops.
the researchers took a small tractor and made it autonomous using existing open source technology. This technology came from drones. The idea was to show the world that it was ready for autonomous agriculture.
Hands Free Hectare
Franklin's fascinating project, called Hands-Free Hectare, is being used to see how AI can learn as it goes. The researchers set aside one hectare and planned to farm it using only autonomous machines.
They had a tractor that drove itself. They put it in the field and got the tractor robot to plant the seeds. Once the crop grew, the bot sprayed it, fertilized it, and ended up with a perfectly good crop.
AI Farms and Weather
In the year in which the study began, it was very rainy. The farms became very muddy and boggy. This did not affect the bot farm, which fertilized its crop on time.
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