Machines Replace Farmers in the Fields, and Humans Reap the Harvest Without Lifting a Finger

The next time you stand in line at the supermarket checkout, spare a thought for the farmers who fill your shopping basket. These days they are having a hard time, and you will certainly have to pay more for food because of it; for the millions of hungry people around the world who cannot get enough to eat, this is a matter of life and death.

Research indicates that by 2050, the world's demand for food will double. For farmers, while extracting more harvest from the land, they must also reduce the damage farming does to the environment. All of this shows that we should rethink the way we farm and take automation to an entirely new level.

Precision Farming

On the new model farms, precision will be key. If chemicals can be sprayed exactly where the crops need them, why bother treating the whole field? In the future, every single plant will receive just the right input, no more and no less, which will not only cut the use of chemicals but also produce a better harvest. But that is easier said than done: the large farms of Europe and the United States often cover thousands of hectares, and to farm them with precision, automation becomes the key. Specifically, agricultural engineers point out that precision farming requires robots to act as farmers.

It may not be long before agricultural robots can identify individual seedlings and urge them to grow with measured doses of fertilizer and water. Other machines will identify weeds and destroy them with a tiny drop of herbicide, a burst from a flame gun, or a beam of high-energy laser. Not only that, these machines can also recognize various ripe vegetables and harvest them.

Machine Farmers

Robots will also bring dramatic changes in other ways, such as in agricultural jobs, in the way we farm, in the soil and its quality, and in the energy and carbon content invested in farming. They can reduce pollution and cut water use. But for ordinary people, what may be most striking is the change in the appearance of farmland. With robots involved, crops can be grown in carefully divided small plots, and orchards will be filled with rows of two-dimensional trees.

Not only that, machine farmers may even affect the variety of fruits and vegetables that end up on the dining table.

More than a century of mechanization has already transformed agriculture in most parts of the world into an activity on an industrial scale, with grain-producing farms being the most highly mechanized. Other crops, such as oranges and tomatoes used to make processed foods, are already harvested by machines. On thousands of dairy farms, cows are already milked by robots. None of these products passes through human hands before reaching the store near your home.