Thanks to sensors and computer control of water and nutrients, technologically advanced growers like California almond farmer Tom Rogers are leaders in what The Economist calls “smart farming.”
“Sowing, watering, fertilizing and harvesting are all computer-controlled. Farms, then, are becoming more like factories,” says The Economist in assessing “The future of agriculture.”
Farms are transforming into “tightly controlled operations for turning out reliable products, immune as far as possible from the vagaries of nature. Thanks to better understanding of DNA, the plants and animals raised on a farm are also tightly controlled.” The changes in hardware, software and “live ware” will extend to aquaculture and greenhouses.
To succeed, the shift in production practices must bring higher yields or lower costs to farmers while delivering food at lower prices to consumers. In the longer run, more precise use of water, fertilizer and seed in the field could keep food production on pace with the rising world population, says the magazine, noting that information technology can be handled in many ways in agriculture, ranging from expensive farm equipment with built-in circuitry to “a data-based farm-management system [that] can be put together by any businessman, even without a track record in agriculture.”