Robot farmers cultivate human beings to enjoy the harvest

The next time you stand in line at the cashier at the supermarket, think of the farmers who fill your basket. They are having a hard time these days, and you are sure to spend more on food; for the millions of hungry people around the world, it is even more of a matter of life and death.

Some studies have pointed out that the world's demand for food will double by 2050. For farmers, while squeezing more crops from the land, they must also reduce the damage to the environment caused by farming. All this shows that we should rethink the way of farming and raise automation to a whole new level.

Precision tillage

In the new model farm, precision will be the key. If the chemicals can be accurately sprayed on the crops they need, why bother to apply them all over the land? In the future, every crop will receive just the right input, neither more nor less, which will not only reduce the use of chemicals, but also achieve a better harvest. But this is easier said than done: large farms in Europe and the United States tend to be thousands of hectares, and automation is the key to precision farming. Specifically, agricultural engineers point out that for precision farming, robots have to act as farmers.

It may not be long before agricultural robots will be able to recognize seedlings and use appropriate amounts of fertilizer and water droplets to promote their growth. Other machines identify weeds and use a small drop of herbicide, a blowtorch, or a high-energy laser to root them out. Not only that, these machines can recognize all kinds of ripe vegetables and harvest them.

Robot farmer

Robots can also bring about upheaval in other areas, such as in agricultural work, in the way we farm, in soil and soil quality, and in the amount of energy and carbon invested in farming. They can reduce pollution and water use. But for ordinary people, perhaps the most significant is the change in the appearance of cultivated land. With the participation of robots, crops can be planted in carefully divided small fields, and orchards will be covered with rows of two-dimensional trees.

Not only that, robot farmers may even have an impact on the kinds of fruits and vegetables served on the table.

The process of mechanization for more than a century has transformed agriculture in most parts of the world into industrial-scale activities, of which grain farms are the most mechanized. Other crops, such as oranges and tomatoes used to make processed foods, have also been picked by machines. In thousands of dairy farms, cows have also been milked by robots. None of these products have been manipulated manually before entering the shopping mall near your home.