Farming goes techno
Farming has changed and is no longer about using simple rakes and shovels.
Major food production has gone from the crops to computers, soil to outer space and tractors to high-tech.
According to Bruce Miller, a professor in the College of Agriculture, new technology is being used in planting, growing and harvesting from satellites that take pictures of crops to sprinkler systems that save water and diesel engines that are environmentally friendly.
“Technology is making great strides and it’s all been in the last 10 to 12 years,” Miller said, adding that advancements in agriculture save farmers time, money and land as they are able to grow more food in less space.
Laser technology for planting and irrigation is all about being cost efficient during production.
Royce Hatch, USU agriculture instructor, said new technology is necessary as population increases and crops decrease. In Cache Valley alone, 640 acres of land are zoned out of farm production every year, Miller said.
“We certainly produce more food on less land than we used to,” said Bruce Bugbee, crop physiology professor. “And there’s a new discipline now called precision agriculture, where fertilizers and water are controlled through remote sensing from satellites. Plants receive not too much and not too little.”
Bugbee said farmers can also use balloon-like intstuments that take pictures of crops from above and relate information of the health of the whole field.
The information is sent to computers and farmers know what sections are stressed or need to be watered. The whole process costs less for the farmers.
Donald Snyder, economics professor, said productivity has increased tremendously over the last 20 years, but prices of food haven’t really changed, making it a win-win situation for producers and consumers.
Snyder said computers have helped farmers tremendously because data can be analyzed more quickly and pictures can be obtained faster.
New advancements aren’t just changing the way crops are raised, but it’s changing jobs too.
“As constraints on the environment keep increasing, so will the constraints on laborers,” Hatch said. “It shifts the jobs and more people are involved in learning the technology.”
At an ever-increasing rate, fewer people are working directly with land and soil while many more are working with computers and machines in farming, Miller
said.
There are approximately 900 undergraduates in the College of Agriculture and after they earn degrees, few of them will actually be farmers. Only 1.5
percent of the U.S. population farms, Miller said, and now most agriculturists will learn other parts of the business from nutrition and food science, plant science, soil science and animal science. They may work behind the scenes with computers or do research that takes them as far as working with NASA and the
International Space Station.
Agriculture technology
Currently USU students and professors are working with
high-tech agricultural research sponsored by NASA that is “as high tech as it gets,” Bugbee said.
Bugbee, who works in the USU research greenhouses, said the university has been growing plants for NASA for several years. In 2002, the space shuttle Atlantis delivered a plant-growth system to the space station, where it was tested and used to grow USU-Apogee wheat, a variety bred at USU specifically
for use aboard spacecraft. Bugbee said if people are ever going to be able to live in space for extended periods of time, they have to be able to eat there.
So reasearch has been conducted and found ways to grow plants using electric light rather than the sun.
“The whole idea is you can recycle waste of the plants and through photosynthesis, they make oxygen,” Bugbee said, adding that the university has most recently been working on growing tomatoes, lettuce, radishes, spinach and
green onions that can survive in space.
“We have computers to monitor and control the environment. The plants don’t
see the sun and don’t touch the soil. They are grown in hydrophonics and in
water with nutrients,” Bugbee said. “We do lots of tests here on the ground and then they are planted on the space station.”
Astronauts can currently stay on the space station for a year, Bugbee said,but there is still a lot more research that needs to be done. More kinds of
plants are being grown and they must be able to recycle.
“The big test will be people going to Mars,” he said.
For now, the research greenhouses will continue to grow plants in chambers and boxes with computers monitoring when they need water. Small, black wires
release moisture in the plants when needed.
-mnewbold@cc.usu.edu