Automated farming: good news for food security, bad news for job security?

• News & Highlights

New technology is revolutionising modern farming, but this brave new world of robot farms and hi-tech sensors could have consequences for rural livelihoods.

Around the world, but especially in the developing world, food and farming systems continue to rely on 20th century technology. But this is changing. The same information technologies that brought us the internet and transformations in medicine are now revolutionising farming. It’s a new era for agriculture and it’s taking off in at least two distinct areas.

On the farm, technology is changing the way farmers manage farmland and farm animals – such as the use of satellite driven geo-positioning systems and sensors that detect nutrients and water in soil. This technology is enabling tractors, harvesters and planters to make decisions about what to plant, when to fertilise, and how much to irrigate. As this technology progresses, equipment will ultimately be able to tailor decisions on a metre-by-metre basis.


Gene editing could create medicines and self-fertilising crops. But are we facing another GM food-style furore?
Read more
Robots already do much of the harvesting of lettuce and tomatoes in our greenhouses. And it’s even becoming feasible to place fitness trackers on farm animals to monitor their health and welfare. The dairy industry has been at the vanguard of this where robotic milking and computer controlled feeding equipment allow for the careful management of individual animals within a herd.

A similar tech revolution is happening with the genetics of the plants we grow and the animals we raise. Genomic tools are on the cusp of allowing scientists to rapidly and inexpensively evaluate the genetic code of individual plants and animals. This makes it much easier to identify individual plants and animals that are particularly robust or productive.

This knowledge, in combination with traditional breeding, can accelerate how quickly we improve the genetic potential of our crops and livestock. Scientists at UK research institute the John Innes Centre, for example, are attempting to create a strain of barley that would make its own ammonium fertiliser from nitrogen in the soil, something which could save farmers the cost of artificial fertilisers.

Taken together, both farm and genome-scale technologies are boosting the efficiency of modern farming, which is increasingly important to feed a growing population set to reach almost 10 billion by 2050. But this is just the beginning.