578
economic entity, to identify the presence of a deficit in resources that prevents the
transition to digital technologies.
Agriculture is one of the oldest
spheres of human activity, but today it
cannot remain aloof from total digitalization. In most developed countries, the
agricultural sector is moving away from the conservative approach, "a peasant with
a plow" and "an agricultural worker driving a combine", towards an automated
combine without a driver. So, in the UK, an experiment
was successfully carried
out, during which autonomous agricultural machinery carried out a full cycle of
work in the field and successfully harvested without human intervention, and this
is far from the only example of robots replacing farmers.
Around the world, companies are emerging that
are changing the approach
to farming. In 2010, there were about 20 such companies in the world, but by 2016
more than 13 thousand projects were registered, and their number is increasing
every year, and at least 500 new high-tech startups with an agricultural bias appear
in the world. Investments in agriculture are attracting colossal amounts: in 2015,
their volume reached an all-time high of $ 4.6 billion. Among the most active
countries that are changing the very essence of agriculture are the USA, Canada,
Israel, India and China.
Smart farming is a farming concept using
the latest information and
communication technologies. Smart farming includes: the use of drones for the
delivery of fertilizers, fire extinguishing or monitoring the state of fields; software
systems for managing agricultural enterprises that are able to process and analyze
information from satellites, weather stations or special local sensors; precision
farming, in which computer systems analyze the condition
of the soil in order to
achieve the maximum yield from each specific site; greenhouses with
supplementary lighting and built-in microclimate control systems; the transition of
enterprises to a partially or fully automated work cycle, which implies the transfer
of control over the processes to modern systems using AI (this, by the way, is
already happening today in Russia); marketplaces for farmers, with the help of
which manufacturers can sell their products via the Internet and deliver them to the
end
consumer, bypassing the intermediary in the form of ordinary food markets
and retail chains, quickly negotiate the transportation of their products and delivery
of fertilizers, conclude contracts with restaurants and buy or sell equipment.
There are many examples of the use of digital technologies in agriculture. In
New Zealand, farmers use drones not only for mapping and tracking field
conditions and crop growth, but also for herding. Using a recording of dog barking
and a loudspeaker, they significantly reduce the time for collecting herds, although
at the moment drones cannot replace herding dogs by 100%. The American
company JBM North America operates in animal husbandry,
which develops
solutions for monitoring the health of animals in a herd. A small sensor connected
to the internet constantly monitors each animal's location and health, including
nutritional status, making herd care much easier. The use of Smart farming allows
more rational use of pastures, forests and fields, preventing
soil depletion and