Although real-world data is scant, proponents say robotics and AI will soon revolutionize agriculture.
, and only works until, as Iowa farmer Earl Slinker puts it, “you go out and spray it one year and it doesn’t do anything.” The result is a smaller harvest, according to Slinker, which in the low-profit-margin business of farming can mean disaster.
“So few people have experience with farming,” says Joe Anderson, an agricultural historian and professor at Mount Royal University in Calgary. “They assume there’s more stasis than there has been. There are lots of innovations. There have been lots of changes.” “When I stop and think about an autonomous tractor, that seems like a really big leap,” Sarah Schinkel, who leads John Deere’s technology stack innovation group, said at the National Farm Machinery Show, “but when I stop and think about it and how much automation is already a part of our equipment, maybe it’s not that big of a leap.”
“When we think about this global challenge of feeding everyone, our current system is not set up to do that,” says Duncan. “The fix isn’t to throw more tech at it. It’s to question the system.” “Their tree canopy is trained to be essentially a two-dimensional object,” Kantor says. “It’s a wall with a bunch of apples hanging off of it. We don’t have anything that can harvest your grandfather’s apple tree, that can reach inside the canopy and pick an apple. But these fruiting walls, it’s a much easier problem.”labor shortage is most intense, robotics are gaining ground the fastest.
Wolf grew up in Wisconsin at a time when 150 cows was a large herd, but still manageable by a single large family. Adding robots to dairy farming creates the same potential economies of scale that have industrialized row crops like corn and soybeans. A single robotic milker can care for over 60 cows, and the second milker is cheaper than the first, and the third cheaper than the second.
That will likely happen first in an agricultural sector with few traditions to change, a very small installed technical base to replace, and a high rate of potential return—which is a pretty apt description of the embryonic cannabis industry. Legal cannabis is already thein the US, and producers are adopting new technology in ways traditional farmers are not.
Khanna cites another factor that is often forgotten: consumer perceptions. If consumers start to demand, for example, more crops produced without today’s heavy application of chemicals, it could drive adoption of robotics.
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