Just like in any other industry, continuous innovation is extremely important such as in cryptocurrency. The same thing goes in modern agriculture. Now, the industry is facing major challenges from shortage of labor, rising supply cost, changes in consumer preferences for sustainability and transparency and so on. There’s actually increased recognition from agriculture corporations that there should be a solution introduced to deal with these challenges.
In the past decade, agricultural technology has experienced massive growth in terms of investment with around 6.7 billion dollars in the past 5 years and 1.9 billion dollars just last year alone. Significant technology innovation have centered on the following:
Indoor Vertical Farming
This helps in increasing crop yields, reducing the impact of farming on the environment by means of cutting the distance traveled by supply chain from their facility to the farmer’s land and lastly, overcoming limited land area.
Basically, indoor vertical farming may be described as the practice of growing crops and other produce that’s stacked one after another in a controlled and enclosed environment. By making use of shelves that are vertically mounted, it helps a lot in reducing the amount of space required in growing plants than using the traditional farming methods.
Farm Automation
This one is linked with “smart farming”. It’s a technology that improves farming efficiency and automating production cycle of livestock and crops. As a matter of fact, there are more and more companies that are working on research and development for robotics innovation in developing various machineries focused on farm automation like:
- Robotic harvesters
- Autonomous tractors
- Drones
- Automatic watering and;
- Seeding robots
While the technology is still a new concept, the industry sees a big jump from sticking to the traditional agriculture methods to modern and automated farming process.
Livestock Farming Technology
Conventional livestock industry is actually a sector that’s usually overlooked and at the same time, underserviced. Still, it is without a doubt the most important. Livestock is providing the needed natural and renewable resources that we depend on daily.
Proper livestock management has known for being the core of poultry farms, cattle ranches, dairy farms or any other livestock related agribusinesses. Livestock managers should keep accurate financial records, supervise workers, ensure correct feeding of animals while guaranteeing proper care as well.
On the other hand recent trends showed that the technology is revolutionizing the world of livestock management. There were new developments for the past 8 to 10 years which makes tracking and managing livestock a lot easier as well as data driven. This technology comes in form of genetics, digital technology, nutritional technologies and a lot more.