Written by Simran Nagpal
Agriculture remains to be a great player in the production of revenue and a source of food for many people all over the world. Over the past years, this sector has seen a lot of changes and advancements with regards to different farming approaches and techniques. Technology has played a big role in developing the agricultural industry. With the latest technologies, plants have been engineered to survive in drought conditions. The availability of such inputs has seen the need for the use of natural resources and process with aim of improving agricultural output and reducing costs. The use of the latest agricultural technology comes with a lot of benefits.
Technology in this sphere can be used in different aspects of agriculture such as farmers are able to grow crops in areas once considered barren, but this is only possible through agricultural biotechnology. Today’s agriculture routinely uses sophisticated technologies such as robots, temperature and moisture sensors, aerial images, and GPS technology. These advanced devices and precision agriculture and robotic systems allow businesses to be more profitable, efficient, safer, and more environmentally friendly.
There has, however, been a limitation on how to speed the process of new technology adoption in agriculture. This can be attributed to the fact that speeding up this concept involves a lot of knowledge and the understanding of some of the elements that influence the decision of farmers to adopt modern technology in farming. Institutional, social and economic are some of the factors that influence how fast or slow agricultural technologies are adopted. The land size, cost and benefits of technology, are some of the economic factors that determine the rate of agricultural technology adoption.
Farmers’ education level, age, social groupings, and gender are some of the social factors that influence the probability of a farmer to adopt the latest agricultural technologies. Small scale farmers face both internal and external challenges as far as the adoption of modern agricultural technologies is concerned. This aspect accounts for the slow rate at which such technologies are adopted.
However, the modern technology is changing the way that human operates the machines, GPS locators, as computer monitoring systems and self-steer programs allow the most advanced tractors and implements to be more precise and less wasteful in the use of fuel, fertilizer or seed. In future, there may be mass production of driverless tractors and other agriculture machinery which use electronic sensors and GPS maps.
