This blog post is a series about the future of farming through agricultural technology and agriculture in general.
You’ve heard about the latest technologies of things like driverless cars, virtual reality and Big Data — now it’s time to start hearing about Agri-tech. Agri-tech is an emerging industry focusing on developing new technologies and innovations in agriculture, food production, and livestock management.
There are all different types of technology that can help the farmers of the future and these agricultural technologies provide answers to the needs of the modern-day farmers which creates truly astonishing and enormous results.
The advent of agritech
The continuous development of new technologies and the ever-increasing need to increase the overall production of food (because there are more and more of us in the world) are some of the more compelling reasons why as a civilization, we need to look for new methods to improve the acquisition of food.
Agriculture is unparalleled in the production of fruits and vegetables – before mankind equips itself with printers that allow us to print food or other inventions that will change the world as we know it – it is worth improving what we already know and have been doing for thousands of years. Hence, it’s no wonder that agri-tech is one of the most important developments and challenges in the world of software development.
Different streams of agri-tech introduction.
Urban Farming
Urban farming is often confused with community gardening, homesteading or subsistence farming. Simply put urban farming focuses more on selling produce, produce grown as sold as opposed to being grown for personal consumption or sharing. Urban farming can support the well-being of individuals and communities in many ways. From providing fresh produce to communities, creating a sense of community belonging, job-creating and promoting healthy lifestyles.
Smart Farming
Smart farming is a management concept focused on providing the agricultural industry with the infrastructure to leverage advanced technology – including big data, the cloud and the internet of things (IoT) – for tracking, monitoring, automating and analyzing operations. Also known as precision agriculture, smart farming is software-managed and sensor-monitored. For example, smart farming can be applied in practice by all the solutions mentioned here and by, for example, irrigation sensors that make it clear to the farmer whether he should continue to irrigate his seedlings.
Vertical Farming
Vertical farming is exactly what it sounds like: a way of farming on vertical surfaces rather than traditional, horizontal farming. By using vertically stacked layers, farmers can produce a great deal more food on the same amount of land. Often these layers are integrated into buildings such as skyscrapers, housed in warehouses or shipping containers, greenhouses or otherwise placed in spaces that would otherwise be unfit for farming.
Satellite Farming
Satellite farming, or GPS farming, is the use of GPS technology to increase farm efficiency by the real-time mapping of fields and gaining actionable insights into the crops.
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