Tag Archives: future of agriculture

Harvesting crops (and fruits…) used to make up to 40% of the total cost of farming. This is no longer so, thanks to automation. Robotic machines, ever more powerful, and smart, are not just taking the labour off this activity, they are slashing cost. They are so effective that we …

In spite of jokes on weather forecast we have to acknowledge the tremendous progress that have been made over the last 20 years, thanks to a pervasive network of sensors (both on the ground and up in the sky) and the increased processing crunching capabilities, leveraging on machine learning and …

Carbon Robotics is a start up focussing on what I would consider as a niche (although it is actually a very large niche): weeding. They developed an autonomous robot equipped with 12 HiRes cameras and AI software to detect weeds. Once detected a laser beam strikes, zaps, the weed without …

Being a farmer meant spending a good deal of your life in the open, tilling, seeding, weeding, watering and harvesting. A lot of these activities have been made easier, and more effective, over the last fifty years by using machines to the point that today a farmer is more similar …

Possibly the biggest impact of the Industrial Revolution has been on … agriculture. By using machines for farming it made possible to increase productivity 100 folds (both in terms of yield per acre and much more in terms of human work to till, farm, harvest the field). The employment in …

Agricultural Biotech aims at improving the yield of agriculture by increasing plant growth and adapting them to the specific environment. This includes creating a resistance to insects (pests) and to herbicides (used to kill competing plants). The selection process is nothing new. It started, probably by chance, some 10,000 years …

Vertical farms are moving from concept to industrial reality. The concept is easy: rather than using land to grow vegetables let’s use vertical structures. It is obvious that this reduces the amount of land for a given surface. There is more. The vertical “walls” on which to grow the vegetable …

Global Abundance Although we usually hear dark predictions on shortage of food for a world population that keeps increasing, production data tell a different story. As shown in the graphics productions is actually improving faster than the population growth (this is for cereals, it is true for several other areas, …

Last year, in June, I published a news of a robot that can pick up fruits, as small as raspberry, automating the harvesting. Now I have stumbled on a news of a drone/robot that can fly in orchards to pick up fruits. The news is impressive on several levels: flying …

Since humans understood they could plan for “food” through agriculture and livestock the surface of our planet has changed. Some species have spread to become dominant, like rice, wheat, barley … and chicken, cattle, pigs … As shown in the graph, 50% of habitable land is now dedicated to “food”, …