In the days of old, farming was seen as a dirty job, a dirty career, a business for the rural community and a minor affair for the less privileged in society until the rise of farming technology set into the scenes. However, It is quite incomprehensible knowing that the central industry in the world, Agriculture remains less digitalized compared to other industries globally.
Digital farming concerns itself with applying precision location methods and decision quality agronomic information to illuminate, predict and affect the farm. In simple terms, the lay man would say, digital farming is the use or adaptation of farming technologies to complete the farm activity management.
The world government summit launched a report titled “Agriculture 4.0 – The future of farming technology in Ghana.” In this report, it was made clear that by the year 2050, there will be the need to produce more food that analyzing carefully the trends of the farm market.
It was estimated that, 800 million people are suffering from hunger and 8 percent of the population which is a makeup of 650 million people are likely to be malnourished by the year 2030. With an industry that hasn’t readily embraced little innovations that can fasten the food making processing, it definitely has shown no signs of readiness to combat the scarcity and hunger likely to occur in the coming years. This is the more reason why farmers need to embrace the agric-technological world.
Farmers will thus be concerned with why and how this can be achieved. Some farmers will make daily lamentations to spell out the notion that finances aren’t enough to finance digital farming. However, there have been successful cases of farmers who picked up the digital farming practice and are now on the list of the world’s richest men.
Notable amongst them is Liu Yongxing, a business man in China who started a small farm of chickens and quails back in the 1980s. He currently has a net worth of US$6.6 billion based on numerous facts and means, amongst them is he adopting modern farming.
Surprisingly most of the world’s richest farmers don’t own the biggest farms in world. Most of them find themselves in the offices, leaving the technological machines on the field with few laborers to do the work. They sit at the office and conduct the pattern of the business. It is important to note that they invested time and money to make their wealth today possible.
There are ready available technologies such as robots, temperature and moisture sensors, aerial images and drones, GPS technology, harvest automation, autonomous tractors, merging datasets, weather monitoring, animal monitoring, packaging material, geospatial monitoring, artificial intelligence and mobile technology. These technologies have proven helpful to most farmers and will help farmers who want to achieve the goal of high production with speed, ease and beyond.
There is the utmost need for farmers to adopt this practice as it efficient, profitable, easy to use, highly productive, and highly secure for workers or laborers. Digital farming goes a long way to decrease the usage of fertilizers, decrease risk of ecosystem, decrease risk of water pollution with chemicals, increase the efficiency of water and other inputs an increase high conservation of biodiversity
With the world population on track to 9.7 billion by 2050, new innovations must surely be adopted. If scientists have been able to successfully grow crops on the desert and other adverse conditions through genetic engineering and other technologies, then it is a clear indication that a farmer adopting these technologies to use on the fertile land will excel in his or her farming activities. We won’t have any hunger crisis to combat in the coming decades to come. “All you need as a farmer now is to learn how to use these technologies,” scientists say.
Over the years, farming has experienced a heavy impact of technology. Making mention of how technology made it easier for farmers to transport their produce, reducing the work load by introducing machines on the farm and increase in yield. These benefits were seen when technology was at a low peak and now that there is the availability of sophisticated farming technologies, farmers will enjoy a great deal on whiles on the job if they are to embrace digitized farming.
Most industries surrounding the agricultural sector are fast-growing with the help of technological advancements. Technology has gone a long way to influence and change how businesses are conducted, with some industries undergoing drastic changes and this has been since the dawn of the 21st century. The failure of some farmers to adopt digital farming will lead to a gradual depletion on the market which is now dominated by the new dawn of technological upsurge on their side. They wouldn’t be able to fit into the new dawn of demand and supply.
The National Institute for Food and Agriculture (NIFA) has acknowledged the positive impact of technology as it notes that it has reduced waste. He says that, technology has shown that farmers can simply target specific areas or even treat plants individually. That saves time NIFA explains, and allows farmers to use only minimal quantities of water, fertilizer and pesticides.
It is hence incumbent on farmers to embrace the new dawn of digital farming within the shortest possible time.
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