Our Environment, Animal Tips & the Great Outdoors

By Ian Strever & Daniel Moran

Daniel Moran is a student at Housatonic Valley Region High School who has been learning about drones and sharing his expertise with peers and adults throughout the Region 1 School District in Connecticut.

Imagine yourself standing among the most perfect 100-acre field of soybeans, planted autonomously by a GPS tractor, with rows like the lines on a notebook. Then, all of a sudden, you hear a faint hum coming closer and closer. It’s a drone, flying completely autonomously over the field, targeting unwanted vegetation by spot-spraying herbicides.

Farmers strive to improve their operational efficiency by incorporating new technology into everyday tasks. Farmers have always been innovators, whether thousands of years ago when they invented the plow or today with fully autonomous tractors, drones, and robotic milking operations. Technology is progressively becoming the future of farming.

Agricultural advancements

Technology has increased the productivity of operations throughout the country. The United States Department of Agriculture says that output from farms has tripled from 1948 to 2021, largely due to advancements in technology even as the amount of farm labor, land, and other inputs declined. The USDA says that outputs still increased even when labor and land declined as a direct result of improvements in agricultural technology. 

Automated tractors and implements collect data such as soil fertility measures that, in turn, free up invaluable time for farmers to focus on other tasks. However, this does not mean that there are fewer jobs on farms.  Some jobs in our current state of technological advancement can’t be automated yet, such as veterinary care, as well as specialists in areas like drone repair and software coding that are extremely important and in some cases indispensable to robots and automated systems. 

Another component of agriculture that has been affected by technology is the land use associated with farm production operations. Fewer acres are being used today to harvest crops, milk cows, and raise beef cattle. The 2018 American Farm Bureau Federation report revealed that, thanks to advances in both knowledge and technology, farmers needed eight million fewer acres to achieve the same wheat yields in 2018 as in 1990. Farmers are taking a large leap into the world of biotechnology, taking advantage of genetically modified organisms that allow farmers to create more resilient and easier to manage crops that require fewer pesticides and herbicides, thus bringing down overall costs and increasing the profits of farms. 

Technological challenges

There are many reasons why new technology has improved farming, but just like all good concepts, there are aspects of technology that financially strain local and small-scale farms.  The cost of a new tractor averages around $600,000, and a larger piece of machinery like a chopper or combine, can easily exceed $1,000,000. This high cost can burden small-scale operations. In Connecticut, the average annual income for a farm is only $143,787,000 and the average expenses are $648,979,000 annually. This is one of many reasons that some of these “smaller” operations tend to stick to more traditional and manual farming equipment.

Another reason that farms tend to stay away from technology is the extreme learning curve that comes with these programs and software. This technology also has a very high maintenance cost, often upwards of $200 dollars per hour for field repairs, according to John Deere, and the cost of having to replace any electrical parts – harness, wires, motherboards, etc. – can and often will, get extremely pricey. Local farmer, Greg Lloyd, recently dealt with a simple dead battery, but unfortunately, the computer lost connection with the transmission, preventing the tractor from going into gear. Lloyd had to have a technician come out and reprogram the computer, which cost around $700.

Even though there are challenges integrating different types of technology, farms can greatly benefit from the savings in time and labor costs. Precision agriculture uses global positioning systems, on-board cameras, and satellites to compile and analyze data to optimize growth and planting patterns, as well as irrigation and fertilization. These aspects of technology allow farmers to be mindful of their resources. 

Not your average drone

 Drones are also used in other forms of agriculture and wildlife applications as a way to monitor crop growth, health, and field conditions. Wildlife biologists can use drones to survey large areas of land for animal populations and habitats as well as animal and herd population health. First Selectman of Cannan, CT, Brian Ohler, uses his personal drone with infrared technology to help locate lost people in search and rescue missions. Within three minutes of a flight last summer, he was able to find and identify a fawn lying in the woods, bedded down. Having a piece of equipment doing these kinds of jobs can greatly reduce the labor costs and chance of injury and increase crop yields. 

The upfront costs and investments of these various technologies can be intimidating to farmers. However, the long-term investment will often override the initial cost. Resources and support from local agriculture agencies such as Cooperative Extension and the State Department of Agriculture, can all assist with grant support for innovative technology. These organizations may also be able to provide a working relationship with those who own supportive technology. Freund’s Farm in East Canaan, CT, applied for the Long Island Futures grant and received a little over $300,000 dollars to put in place a new manure-holding tank to reduce the emission of nitrogen. This grant organization awards millions of dollars every year for farms that want to integrate conservation tactics. 

Farms can learn how they can most profitably integrate technology to improve, enhance, and promote overall sustainable practices that are becoming more and more important to today’s consumers. The next time you hear a humm overhead in a field, please know there are licensed technicians who strive to support crop health and productivity in all that they do. •