Article by Eli Tan: “The devices are part of an industry known as precision farming, a data-driven approach for optimizing production that is booming with the addition of A.I. and other technologies. Last year, the livestock-monitoring industry alone was valued at more than $5 billion, according to Grand View Research, a market research firm.
Farmers have long used technology to collect and analyze data, with the origins of precision farming dating to the 1990s. In the early 2000s, satellite imagery changed the way farmers determined crop schedules, as did drones and eventually sensors in the fields. Nowadays, if you drive by farms in places like California’s Central Valley, you may not see any humans at all.It is not just dairy farms seeing a change. Elsewhere in the Central Valley, which produces about half of America’s fruits and vegetables, autonomous tractors that use the same sensors as robot taxis and apple-picking tools with A.I. cameras have become popular.
The most common precision farming technology, like GPS maps that track crop yields and auto-steering tractors, are used by 70 percent of large farms today, up from less than 10 percent in the early 2000s, according to Department of Agriculture data.
“The tech is getting faster every year,” said Deepak Joshi, a professor of precision agriculture at Kansas State University. “It used to be we’d have new technologies every few years, and now it’s every six months.”The new products are helping farmers reduce costs as tariffs and inflation raise the prices of farm equipment and feed. They also allow farmers to do more work with fewer people as the Trump administration cracks down on illegal immigration.
Precision farming has boomed as the costs of cameras and sensors have plunged and A.I. models that analyze data have improved, said Charlie Wu, the founder of Orchard Robotics, a farming robotics start-up in San Francisco. Much like the rest of the A.I. industry, agricultural technology is now anchored by chips made by Nvidia, he said…(More)”.
