Robotic farm machinery (video screenshot)
(SCIENCE FOCUS) – In the last 70 years, agriculture has lost the majority of its workforce as generation after generation has turned away from family farming businesses. Despite this, agriculture has found ways to increase food production, with machines playing a key role.
But in 2020, the United Nations warned that agricultural productivity would need to increase by 60 per cent in order to feed the predicted global population in 2050. With big producers like the US still struggling to find agricultural labour, that demand simply can’t be met if farming doesn’t change how it operates.
“There’s still a massive gap between the labour that agriculture needs and the labour that agriculture has,” says Walt Duflock, vice president of innovation at Western Growers, a crop growers’ association covering the western U.S.
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