There’s no doubt that farming practices have come a long way in the thousands of years people have grown crops and held cattle. But how did we come to the level of technology we’re using today, and what further advances should we expect? Keep on reading to find out.

Humans have been cultivating crops and cattle for over 10,000 years. And throughout most of that time, we’ve been trying to come up with increasingly newer, better, and more efficient ways to carry out agricultural operations. This started with relatively simple wooden and metal tools, and the technology has advanced all the way to plows, seeders, harvesters, and tractors. But all of these tools are part of low-tech mechanization, which replaces or simplifies hard labor that was previously carried out by humans but doesn’t have an intelligence component that would allow the tech to aid farmers in making decisions.

Over the past few years, agriculture has started its transition from low-tech to high-tech mechanization. This new type of technology is much more flexible and can adjust to different working environments and tasks. High-tech farmers’ technology uses a variety of sensors and software solutions that utilize artificial intelligence and data analysis. As a result, these devices can perform tasks even more precisely than humans, collect information using sensors, and use that information to make decisions.

Interestingly, high-tech mechanization has been predicted for many decades. However, it’s only starting to appear in our fields today due to incredible progress in technology and the low cost of high-powered computers. In livestock farming, these high-tech devices are represented by automatic milking, egg collection, and barn cleaning machines, and feed dispensers. At the same time, in arable agriculture, autonomous tractors and devices that enable autonomous steering have been at the forefront of technological advances.

While technology has come a long way, there are still many challenges that need to be solved. For instance, while tractor autosteering technology such as FieldBee is widely available today, fully autonomous tractors still exist primarily as test models that researchers are developing. Novel camera vision technologies, artificial intelligence, deep learning, and other technologies will be used to create robots that can autonomously weed fields, harvest fruit tree crops, and carry out other labor-intensive agricultural problems that are currently done by humans.