Future Farming Careers

Kit Franklin is an agricultural engineering lecturer at Harper Adams University. He talks to us about exciting future farming technologies, skills and careers.

When you think of farming, your mind probably conjures up images of muddy fields, wellies and hard physical work. However, in this era of digitalisation, this picture is becoming far from true.

With a growing population and finite resources, it’s essential that the way in which food is produced continues to innovate, drawing on a wide-range of areas of expertise, including chemistry, IT, biology and engineering.

Farming isn’t only about the farmer in the field, but also a whole range of supporting careers and industries. This can range from scientists in labs formulating new animal feeds to an agricultural engineer designing a more efficient tractor.

There are still inefficiencies in how food is produced, and many opportunities and careers now, and will, exist to change this. One area that aims to tackle this is precision farming.

Precision farming aims to improve efficiency and reduce waste by monitoring each individual animal or plant area and ensuring they receive exactly what’s required for their optimum health and productivity. For example, rather than applying fixed doses of fertiliser to an entire farm, the amount used should be dependent on the individual needs of the plants in a specific area, applied on a day when it will have the best impact on performance and be targeted at the roots.

To enable this to happen biologists are needed to study the requirements of plants, chemists to develop fertilisers that can applied in an adaptive manner, IT specialists to interpret data from the field and engineers to develop smart machines that can apply the fertiliser with greater accuracy.”

Kit’s research into future farming systems led to the Hands Free Hectare project at Harper Adams University. Run in conjunction with

Precision Decisions, the project team, which includes Kit, grew, nursed and harvested a cereal crop using only autonomous vehicles and drones.

The project provided an insight into the farms of the future where tractors are operated and overseen by remote managers working in mission control rooms, where they can also concentrate on crop performance through information being relayed back by remote sensors and autonomous drones.

Some of the other exciting areas being looked into are the use of lasers to remove weeds, reducing the reliance on chemicals; 3D machine vision to identify ripe fruit for picking, and using fitness trackers on animals to highlight potential health issues before they emerge.

This means there are a number of stimulating careers to be had developing these future farming technologies and systems. Higher education is a key gateway to many of these careers but also importantly, alongside this, a wish to improve the world in which we live.”

Find out more at www.handsfreehectare.com and www.harper-adams.ac.uk