In a world with rapidly increasing population and technological advancements, conventional farming operations are quickly becoming oblivious and inadequate.
Traditional farming methods are struggling to keep up with the effectiveness required by today's market. These struggles are as a result of various factors ranging from an aging workforce to rising costs of labour, to harsh climates to mention but a few.
Farming is becoming more sophisticated. Farmers want to register increased production yields even as they keep their costs down. This has led to the advent of automatic farming and use of robots.
Robots have significant roles to play across all sectors of a farming operation. In this article, we are going to examine 10 of the ways robots can transform your farming.
1 Weeding and spraying: Manually removing weeds can be a very costly and time consuming process. And the use of chemical weed killers can be dangerous for the operators, environment and actual plants. Robots provide a more effective method.
Robotic sprayers could limit the amounts of chemicals used hence reducing the damages. Usually equipped with highly efficient computer vision, they can be programmed to detect weeds and spray certain amounts of herbicides on these weeds.
At the current rate of advancements, we would soon have robots not needing chemicals at all. These robots would mimic manual workers, and would be trained to identify weeds and uproot via a variety of ways.
2 Harvesting: A similar operation which consumes a lot of labor and time if done manually is the harvesting of mature fruits and crops.
Robots can of course improve the size of yields and reduce waste from crops being left in the field.
3 Automatic operations of other machines: Robots can now operate machines like tractors in place of humans. Using remote controls, farmers can now enable their tractors and other farm equipment to automatically run.
Usually embedded with tracking devices, the farmers can monitor the locations and progress made by the robot controlled machinery via various methods.
These robots can do a highly efficient job even as they reduce the possibilities of accidents in the field.
4 Nursery planting: A lot of plants begin their journey in the nurseries where as seeds, they are nurtured into young plants, which can then be transferred into the fields.
This is a process that can be automated too. Robots that offer solutions to manual maintenance of nurseries are being invented and introduced to the agricultural industry.
5 Fertilizing and Irrigation: Conventional ways of irrigating and fertilizing crops have become ineffective, wasteful and costly.
Robots used during irrigation or fertilization can significantly reduce these wastes. They reduce waste of water and fertilizers by targeting specific plants. These robots are intelligent and can carefully navigate between rows of crop and pour water directly at the required plants or apply fertilizers.
6 Seeding: While some plants begin their journey in the nurseries, others are seeds planted in the fields. Depending on the nature of the plant, the traditional methods for sowing seeds is to either directly sow them into grounds of heaped soil or scatter them using tractors across fertilized fields. Either of these methods aren't efficient ways as they involve lots of manual labor like in the first case and possible waste in the second case.
Robots are available to combat these drawbacks. These programmed robots may be attached to the tractors and they place the seeds in certain desired locations greatly reducing waste of seeds that may have been acquired at considerable expense.
7 Farm Monitoring and Analysis: Often, farmers are deterred from increasing the scale of their operations in terms of farming bigger portions of land simply because monitoring these vast farmlands is beyond them.
Monitoring can be automated though. Robots employing sensor effects can help farmers monitor and acquire data on vast farming lands which they may otherwise have been unable to.
8 Animal farming: Most robotic functions in agriculture are applied to crop farming, the roles of robots can be expanded to animal farming.
Robots could be programmed to guide or direct cattle across grazing lands or certain terrains.
9 Thinning and plant adjustments: Oftentimes after planting, adjustments need to be made to plants to boost their chances of developing properly. In some cases, plants need to be removed totally.
Conventionally a manual operation, robots can now be used to make these adjustments.
10. Robotic suits/ Exoskeletons: With rapid advancements in robotics and automation, robotic suits and exoskeletons will soon be available. These suits are lightweight, easy-to-use cloth like devices that ease physical pressure on a farmer.
Farmers will done on this devices before taking on their daily duties. These devices function to reduce the proneness to injury, stress and tiredness the farmer feels as he performs these duties.
Among others!
Farming has quickly become a high tech operation. The increasing demands for food has forced farmers to turn to robots to assist them meet these needs
It looks obvious that robots will continue to play an increasing role in both agriculture and other industries going forward.
As a farmer, the earlier you embrace these trends, the better equipped you'll be to stay ahead of the curve.
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