DOWN ON THE ROBOT FARM

IN THE WEST, FARM WORKERS ARE IN SHORT SUPPLY... BUT ROBOTS ARE READY TO TAKE THEIR JOBS

- HAYLEY BENNET

ROBO-CROP

In the last 70 years, agriculture has lost the majority of its workforce as generation after generation has turned away from family farming businesses. Despite this, agriculture has found ways to increase food production, with machines playing a key role. But in 2020, the United Nations warned that agricultural productivity would need to increase by 60 per cent in order to feed the predicted global population in 2050. With big producers like the US still struggling to find agricultural labour, that demand simply can't be met if farming doesn't change how it operates.

“There’s still a massive gap between the labour that agriculture needs and the labour that agriculture has,” says Walt Duflock, vice president of innovation at Western Growers, a crop growers’ association covering the western US. “So labour is a huge problem and automation’s the only solution to close the gap.”

This is why farmers are now swapping more traditional machinery for modern, AI-powered farming robots adept at some of the tasks that once required human hands. The Naïo Oz Farming Assistant pictured here, for instance, is designed for hoeing, weeding, making furrows, seeding and transporting. There are nearly 150 of these robotic farmhands in circulation across 48 countries.

TECHNO TRACTOR