Bayer: Now's the Time for Automation in Ag
PARMA, ID – An automation fever is gripping the ag industry, with science looking to provide us with the bots and mechanisms that will place produce at the forefront of the cutting-edge.
It is the time for technology in our industry, according to Bayer, which calls robots and autonomous tractors an important solution to improving farm efficiency.
“Agriculture still offers great potential for automation,” Peter Dahmen, a technology expert in Bayer’s research department, said in a release. “We don’t know what the future looks like. But it is quite conceivable that robots will help us to increase the productivity of farming in a more sustainable and environmentally compatible way.”
One of the machines the company listed as helping to lead the charge is a microplanting robotic “agricrab,” Prospero.
“Why not take the large machines of today and break them into thousands of smaller machines,” said the contraption Creator, Des Moines, Iowa-based engineer David Dorhout, according to Bayer.
With six legs and the capability of navigating the field, planting, and marking locations to spray, Dorhout hopes that, one day, a Prospero fleet will fill the fields, using infrared signals to communicate amongst themselves and direct needed assistance to any untended area.
“This approach completely frees the farmer from the farm machine, and gives him more time for the economic and scientific aspects of his agribusiness,” Dorhout said. “I’m really interested to see what the farmers of tomorrow will come up with if they are given a tool that tends their fields inch by inch or plant by plant.”
The farmers of tomorrow is a concept that many of us wonder about as more and more automated assistants come into play. As we reported recently, recent research has projected an agricultural robot market climbing up to $16.3 billion by 2020, and affordable driverless tractors in the next decade.
“Precision is the key to efficient agriculture,” Professor Simon Blackmore, Director of the newly-founded National Centre for Precision Farming (NCPF) in Great Britain, told Bayer. “And later robot generations will be intelligent enough to adapt to nature, the weather, and other environmental conditions.”
Dorhout predicted that robotics will have revolutionized agriculture in the next 20 years, with new technologies working alongside traditional machinery.
It’s quite a picture painted for our future fields, and as it approaches, AndNowUKNow will continue to report how the industry continues to make it happen.
