Agriculture is one of the oldest industries on the planet. Each year, billions of pounds of food-based products emerge from farms to keep communities healthy and thriving.
If you’re looking to expand your farming business, it’s important to focus on areas where you can improve efficiency. Here are the best new tools to improve efficiency on the farm.
Remote Pivot Controls
What could be better than never having to actually tend to your crops yourself? The added ability to maneuver your farming equipment down to the smallest movement.
This is what you’ll get with advancements in pivot controls. You can avoid driving out to the field with a remote pivot management system.
It’s an innovative technology that uses satellites, cellular networks, and complex math to allow you to operate your farm equipment much like you could a car in a video game.
Growers can turn pivots and chemigation on and off while changing speeds or monitoring the machine’s position. The technology uses GPS helping farmers save lots of time and fuel resources each day.
With farms spanning thousands of acres, there’s no substitute for avoiding having to manage field activity in person.
See & Spray
This startup tech company is using machine learning to help farmers avoid pesky weeds on the farm. Machine learning is when a computer learns your needs and starts responding to them on its own.
With the See & Spray technology, you won’t have to monitor invasive plants on your own. The machine ‘monitors’ your farm for the presence of invaders and takes action as necessary.
It’s very different than simply putting equipment on a timer. The machine is ‘thinking’ about what to do next based on the present circumstances.
If no weeds appear, it can save on herbicide by not spraying on a particular day. This helps you say money in the long term and takes one more item off your to-do list so you can improve efficiency in other tasks like using your piggyback forklift brand.
Robotic Milking
How many farmers does it take to fill up hundreds of gallons of milk jugs each day before dawn? The answer is too many.
Milking cows and goats is a painfully time-consuming process. You’re also risking leaving milk behind as your calloused hands grow fatigued.
Instead of investing in more bodies to work on your farm, why not invest your capital into a long term solution like robotic milking? This is the best option for your physical and financial health.
You won’t have to stoop over for hours trying to quickly get as much milk as possible. The rush of the activity can make you more prone to injuries since there’s a short window of time you can milk a cow.
It’s important to think ahead of other tasks that can’t be done by robots instead of wasting your man-hours on cows. The best part about robotic milking stations is that they a single person to feed and milk droves of cows.
You’ve just cut your workforce down by a fraction and freed yourself from tending to the cows for weeks at a time. You can improve efficiency by checking up on your one employee rather than a host of people trying to keep the cows in order.
Research shows that cows enjoy mechanical milkers and even allows themselves to be milked more than once per day.
Precision Soil Samples
Need better data on how your soil is doing? You won’t have to guess whether next year’s crops will grow disease-free if you have precision soil sampling technology on hand.
It’s the best intelligence you can get on your farmland. The sampling process involves an AutoProbe that routinely digs around 6 inches below the surface of the soil to get samples.
The device is pulled by a tractor and not your bare hands. This takes away the trouble of hunting and pecking using your metal pole.
Farmers get reliable samples using GPS technology. They can then compare these samples over time to find out how the soil is doing.
This information is critical to making sure you’re buying the right kind of fertilizer to supplement missing nutrients. You’ll be less wasteful in the long run with precision soil sampling.
Invest in this tool to improve your overall crop yield while saving yourself sampling time during the season. The increase in yield is how the technology basically pays for itself in the long run.
Nitrogen Sensors
You need to make sure your fertilizer always has enough nitrogen to properly feed the crops on hand. Nitrogen is one of the best ways to increase the number of crops you produce in a season.
Most farmers have trouble keeping this essential chemical from also entering the groundwater. It’s a major issue when it comes to climate change and is toxic to fish and other wildlife.
Be a part of the global warming solution by investing in nitrogen sensors to keep your fertilizers under control. Too much nitrogen is even bad for the crops themselves.
A new technology called GreenSeeker uses an optical sensor to measure plant health. This is important because it means farmers won’t overfertilize their crops.
Reducing the amount of fertilizer reduces the amount of nitrogen in our groundwater.
Improve Efficiency with Farming Technology
The only way to improve efficiency on a farm is by using agricultural technology. The technology uses resources that go beyond available time and physical space.
You get instant reads from places you can’t see with your naked eye. Equipment is controlled from beyond our planet’s atmosphere so you don’t have to drive hundreds of acres each day.
Try incorporating agricultural technology today to transform your business into a profitable machine. For more information and tips, visit our blog for updates.
