Technologies used in natural manufacturing and agricultural manufacturing. As more and more technology is available for the public, like through the exapta.com website, we should look at the future to know what to expect. Many interesting emerging agricultural technologies can be mentioned, with the following gathering much popularity in the past year.
Sensors
- Air & Soil Sensors – These are fundamental additions to automated farming, sensors that can enable real-time understanding of the current water body conditions, forest conditions, or farm conditions. The technology is already used and financially viable.
- Equipment Telematics – This is useful for mechanical devices, like tractors, to warn the mechanics that failure might soon happen. Using intra-tractor communication can lead to a rudimentary but effective farm swarm platform that increases efficiency. On www.afgri.com.au, you will find state-of-the-art tractors able to meet all the demands of any work on the farm.
- Livestock Biometrics – Although the technology is only financially viable by the year 2020, it can help livestock grow. There are collars that include GPS, biometrics, and RFID that can automatically identify vital information and then relay it.
- Crop Sensors – Field fertilization usually is prescribed before the application stage. Using high-resolution crop sensors is helpful since it informs the application equipment of the necessary amounts. Drones or optical sensors can easily identify health issues with crop, all across fields.
- Infrastructural Health Sensors – You can use these to monitor material conditions and vibrations in bridges, buildings, farms, factories, or other infrastructures. They are typically coupled with intelligent networks. The sensors can feed vital information to robots or maintenance crews. By the year 2027 we could see this in various crop fields from around the world.
Lab-Grown Food
- Genetically Designed Food – This is basically the creation of completely new food strains (plants and animals) in order to properly address physiological and biological needs. It is a move from genetically modified food as genetically designed food practically completely engineers food from zero. By 2022 we might see this to be financially viable.
- In-Vitro Meat – This is also known as tubesteak or cultured meat. It is practically flesh product that was never in a living, complete animal. In-vitro meat is now experimentally grown by different research projects, even if no meat was produced and available for public consumption.
Automation
- Variable Rate Swath Control – This builds on geolocation technologies but can save on fertilizer, minerals, herbicides and seeds through overlapping input reduction. Pre-computing field shape combined with relative productivity understanding leads to applying variable rates in proper field usage.
- Rapid Iteration Selective Breeding – New selective breeding with end-result being analyzed quantitatively will lead to improvements that are algorithmically suggested.
- Agricultural Robots – These are also known by the name “agbots”. They are used to increase automation of agricultural processes, like fruit picking, soil maintenance, planting, weeding, ploughing and
Engineering
- Closed ecological systems – Building ecosystems that do not rely on a matter exchange that would happen outside them. Closed ecosystems can transform waste products into food and water, supporting the life forms inhabiting the system. These already do exist, but there are some technical limitations that stop scaling.
