Surprising Tech That Plays a Role in Farming Today
/We often think about farming as an industry that is trapped in the past. When you think of a farm, you might imagine a team working tirelessly on the land farming livestock or crops. But farming isn’t like this at all anymore. These days, farming is far more technologically advanced than most people think. Here are a few of the different types of technology that you will find being used on a typical farm today.
Electronic Animal Tags
You might have seen that animals often have tags attached to their ears. This allows farmers to keep track of their livestock, and it’s particularly important for animals that are going to roam freely in wide open areas like sheep. However, you might not realize that they are actually electronic. The tags work like an ID chip and can contain a lot of data on each animal rather than just being used as a tracking device. Https://www.iotag.com.au/ has more info on the type of devices available. Some of these tags are so sophisticated that they can track feeding times and amounts for each individual animal. Reductions in feeding often points to a serious issue with the animal, and this allows farmers to keep track in a more hands-off way.
Drone Monitoring
Farmers can own massive stretches of land. Drones allow them to see this land from a bird's eye view perspective. The types of drones used available from http://droneworldaustralia.com.au, will typically be automated to fly along a certain course. The drone will then take pictures of the land that will show farmers any potential patterns that they can’t see from the ground. Drones used to be incredibly expensive, but these days they are easily affordable and have become very popular with farmers who want to keep a check on their property without leaving their home.
Robot Milking
In the past, milking a cow would take hours and milking a herd would require massive amounts of labor. Not anymore, now cows can be conditioned to walk freely into a robotic milking machine. Using laser technology, the robot is able to calculate when a cow is standing in the right position and milk their udders correctly. There’s no human interaction needed at all except for maintenance of the machine. You might be wondering how cows are convinced to walk into the machine freely. Well, it’s quite simple. Cows are offered food when they enter the machine, and eventually, it becomes a conditioned response, so they walk in for daily milkings.
Automated Vehicles
Lastly, this is a type of technology that while becoming increasingly common isn’t quite on every typical farm just yet. But in a few more years it could be. With GPS tech and machine learning, it’s likely that everything from tractors to combine harvesters will soon steer themselves around fields. This means that there will be no need for a human driver to be inside operating it. You can learn more about this on http://www.abc.net.au.
It’s just one more thing that is going to make farming far easier for the next generation.
As you can see then, the farming world is filled with far more tech than you perhaps imagined.