What will farming be like in 50 years

Harry is the planting robot, complete with a robotic drill. Together, they carry out the monotonous tasks conventionally done by a human — with greater accuracy and less waste. One reason small, mobile robots could be good news for farming is that they can replace a lot of the work done by large conventional tractors. Ordinary tractors are heavy.

When they roll across the field they compact the soil. That crushes the gaps inside, reducing the size of the pores that hold air and water. Using smaller, lighter robots to do the jobs currently performed by tractors could hugely help reduce these issues.

One of the most shocking facts I learned is the sheer amount of good, edible food that gets wasted. One country with a big waste problem is the Netherlands — the second biggest exporter of agricultural products by value after the US.

The sheer scale of the flow of food through the Netherlands means waste is a big issue. The Dutch government has pledged to become the first European country to halve the amount of discarded food by To get to me they will have been picked green, perhaps spent 40 days on a boat, and then eventually ended up in the supermarket where, in order to be picked from the shelf, they have to be a perfect yellow, with no black spots or brown patches.

That takes incredible, careful management to achieve. If a banana ripens too early in the process, it releases ethylene gas, which triggers ripening in other bananas.

What some scientists in Norwich, UK, are doing is editing the genome of the bananas — modifying specific letters in their DNA — so that they produce far less ethylene. However, the legal and regulatory issues surrounding robots must be bridged first. With its regulations already in place, drone technology is poised for a boom in farm usage.

In the next 10 years, the agricultural drone industry will generate , jobs in the U. Potential use of on-farm drones by is huge, from imagery and product application to transporting supplies and jobs not yet imagined. As farming relies more on complex equipment with lots of electronics, data collection will play an increasingly larger role in farm management.

In the future, farms will have an increased need for data and information technology specialists, Widmar says. Experts anticipate major changes in the ag industry over the next 30 years. SyngentaUS click to tweet. Syngenta Thrive Spring You also have to make it meaningful with artificial intelligence and machine learning that will help farmers with actual insights for change.

Hildebrand offers this example. Technology can now offer dairy farmers more insights into what each dairy cow is producing and connect that back to the products the cow produces. Bridgeforth leverages technology for efficiency on his operations. Satellite imagery reduces the man hours needed to visit each field individually.

Electronic rain gauges, weather patterns and GPS give regular insights, and he receives alerts on equipment breakdowns before they happen. Innovation will unlock solutions to produce more food in ways that are environmentally sustainable. And it's a question of how do you optimize productivity?

Ultimately, Reiter says technology should offer the farmer insights to manage each square meter, from the number of seeds planted, to planting density, fertility requirements and more. ROI will drive data sharing. For years farmers have shared their data with USDA and with input providers for test plots, for example.