What technology can help you to automate your farm? Technology has come a long way throughout most industries pushing them along and finding efficient ways to produce the same amount of output with less input. With labour soaking up the majority of agribusiness revenue leaving them with low margins to cover the cost of running day to day.

Farm automation and precision agriculture technology and techniques are evident throughout Australian agriculture industry with just about any part of the industry can benefit from technological advancements. Who doesn’t want technology carry out the more tedious tasks that will improve your productivity and to become efficient. Two types of new technology that is impacting upon our farming world:

1. Autonomous robots
2. Drones

Autonomous robots have been seen planting, spraying and harvesting. With the increase of this new tech we will see an improvement in food quality through minimising human error (with the odd-malfunction). The most prevalent technology we have seen it the driverless tractor, see as the heart of any farm with the main piece of machinery that allowed farms to sew, spray and harvest. By reducing the amount of man power needed to carry out the hours sitting in a tractor it will allow for decision makers to spend time on other projects. With minimal effort required in the early stages to map out the boundaries/spacing etc. Can you see your enterprise adopting a driverless tractor once they have been established in the market?

Drones are being used today for imaging, planting and gathering data on paddocks, water. With data collection moving slowly from a farmers pocket book to the computer and then online cloud servers through smart phone applications. The data collected by the drones through a variety of sensors allows them to make decisions on fertiliser rates that can save thousands of dollars within the first year and to also retain the nutrients within the soil profile. The drone allows farmers to :

• planting through releasing seeds across a certain area.
• spraying: both surveying the area and light spraying abilities.
• maintenance checking water resources reducing the need to manually check reducing labour and vehicle wear and tear.
• reduce the rate of applying fertiliser which can improve crop yields and it is excellent for the long term.

How can we benefit from the new agricultural technology?

Through using the data that we can gather with the larger samples of data to work off we will be able to make more informed decisions, should I turn off these wethers at 8 months or can we get them to weight earlier. From know data that the new technology can collect we need to know how to process and use it in order for it to be a worth while investment. This isn’t always easy but there are tool to help with implementation. Even just Google it if you’re not sure.