Farm Machinery. Part-One.

Picking?

There has been much advancement in farming over the last seventy years with the introduction of automation and the cutting of the workforce. Seventy years ago it took fifty people to do a good job on an average sized farm, but today this is now down to less than a handful!

One area that has not as yet been effective is that of picking fruit, lifting vegetables is fairly fine but fruit is more difficult than it would seem? The robotics can do the job with apples and larger fruits, but soft fruit has not yet come up to the standards of the human touch or hand.

Wither Brexit comes or not the immigration policies on restricting European labour may decimate much of the British countryside when it come to asparagus and soft fruits? Many farms will have to stop growing strawberries, because it is well established as a fact that young people in this land see picking as below their demeanour?

Farm Machinery. Two.

Sophistication and the Robotic Age?

Most of the new machines of various type coming on to the market are now built for one role, thus the days of the common tractor may be coming to an end? Over the last one-hundred and fifty years the need for labourers has gone down from 50 to 5 on most farms.

The steam engine began the mechanised decline and this was followed by the ever increasing size of the fields in Europe. Today we are entering the driver less car and soon the farm machine will follow, with the operator working from the laptop in their home.

What started off as a game, will soon become a reality in robotic farming. What of the machines, well perhaps all will be repaired by themselves, even cutting out humans? But the updating and programming will remain a human intervention for some time yet?