Robotic Farming Does More Good Than Harm to Humans in the 21st Century
- Farmers are increasingly under pressure to feed more people. The rate of population growth is increasing day by day and it is approximated that it will rise from 7.7 billion today to 9.7 billion in 2050. food to sustain this population has become a great concern to most of the countries in the world. Farmers have therefore, been forced to find ways of producing more food at a higher quality and a sustainable manner. With youth turning away from the farming profession, terming it as a dirty and heavy profession, there is also less labor available to drive the vision forward. So, to improve yields while reducing resources required and making farming an exciting profession, there has been invention of robots to help in farming. The first development of robotics in farming can be dated as early as 1925. The scientists in charge incorporate the automatic vehicle systems into the agricultural field and this research led to advancements between 1955 and 1960. Robots in agriculture continued to develop as technologies in other sectors began to develop as well and by 1980 after the development of computer the machine guidance vision of robots became possible. Europe is leading in robotic farming followed closely by United States of America.
Don't use plagiarised sources.Get your custom essay just from $11/page
2.I totally agree with the topic that robotic farming does more advantages than disadvantages and is making agriculture to become an exciting high tech industry. Robots are so helpful in increasing food production and this greatly helps to sustain and keep up with the demand by the high growing population. They contribute to increasing the overall food production in the world. Agricultural robots are automated to do repetitive, monotonous, slow and dull tasks for farmers and this gives the farmers an opportunity to concentrate more on improving overall production of yields. Some of the common activities done by robots include weed control sorting and parking, picking and harvesting, thinning, pruning, spraying, mowing, and seeding. Robots are very helpful in harvesting since they do it at higher speed and also more accurate than human beings and thus there is reduced waste from crops being left in the field. Robots when used in spraying can save up to 80% of the pesticides used by the farmers and thus at the end of the day, they are more economical. Farmers are also protected from effects of handling chemicals physically and through different methods like spraying.
3.Robotic farming will largely replace traditional farming in future and this can bring about loss of jobs. Most of traditional methods of farming has been replaced by robotic farming. For instance, seeding, more advanced seeding robots with accurate and well spacing ability have been invented and very few people now use traditional methods of planting, that is by the use of hands tools. Most agricultural companies use robots to do harvesting and spraying their crops. The diversion from traditional agricultural methods to robotic farming methods is increasing at the rate of 10% in the world. This at the end of the day will lead to loss of jobs in these countries. Heavy investment in robotic farming has led to few people being able find jobs. In China for instance about 250 million people are still farmers and all these people are at risk of losing their jobs if robotic farming becomes more common. In US there has been acceleration in robotic milking in the last couple of years and this has ed to displacement of many people from the job including the peasant farmers. The trend shows that in the next few years a lot of people we be displaced from their jobs as traditional farmers.
4.Robotic farming can greatly help to solve world hunger problem. One of the ways in which robots will to solve hunger problem is that it will address the problem of labor shortage. Robots can do more work compared to human beings and thus in countries where there has been low labor in the field of agriculture robots can greatly help. Many robotic can do work that 40 workers can do. Another reason why robotic farming can help to solve hunger problems is that more plants will be harvested and cared for by robots. Robots can do tasks such as weeding, spraying, fertilizing, scouting operations and weed control. They can also perform operations such as thinning, that will enable crops to be sufficiently spaced apart making them to grow faster. Robotics will also help to increase crop yields. For instance, TerraSentia robot developed by Earth Sense can move through fields and measure various plant parameters using advanced sensors and reporting back to human operators so that they can analyze the crops. It also detects the disease of the crop and also they are able to detect which environment is best for which crop or which environments or places are healthiest for which plants.