Some people have perceptions that current farming is still largely a manual task.
However, farmers have already adopted a range of technologies to help them farm. For a farmer to make money they
need to have quality products that can be sold to consumers. To assist farmers to ensure that their crops,
fruits, vegetables, animal products and other products are at the required quality they have adopted a range of
technologies to help them manage their products.
Select to learn more
Select the arrows to move through the slides and view a range of technologies that some farmers use:
Read and reflect
Technology helps farmers with crop monitoring, precision farming, automated irrigation systems, pest control and harvesting techniques which help produce quality farm products.
Read the following articles to learn more about technologies currently used in agriculture:
- What To Know About Smart Farming Using IoT
- What is Agriculture drone mapping?
- Why Use Agriculture Drones? Main Benefits and Best Practices
- Robot rotary is world-first
Apply your skills
Document your thoughts to each of the questions presented. When you have finished, select Create document to export your content and keep for later.
Case study
Li is a student at an inner-city secondary college in a big city. Li is about to start her final year of schooling and is thinking about her future and what she will do. Her aunt and uncle own a dairy farm in a rural area. Li decides to ask her aunt and uncle whether she could stay at their farm for a week to see how the farm operates, as she is interested in working in agriculture when she finishes school.
Her aunt and uncle agree to let Li stay for a week to see how their farm operates. Li is surprised by the amount of technology she sees on the farm. She thought that most of the jobs would be done by manual labour, such as hand milking the cows to get milk and tipping the milk out of a small bucket into a big container when the milking is finished.
Instead of hard manual labour, all the cows are wearing trackers that monitor which cow they are, their weight and other health information, and where they are located. The cows get themselves into the shed and into the milking stations. A milking machine then automatically attached the teat cups to the cows’ udders for milking. The machine uses sensors to help monitor the milk flow. The milk is transported through pipes to a central collection unit, where it is processed before being transported from the farm to a processing facility to be bottled and ready for sale in shops.
Her aunt showed her how the trackers and sensors collect data, which is collected by the farm management software, so that they can keep track of the amount of milk produced and the health of their cows.