When you think of self-driving, you probably think of Google's self-driving car:
Or Tesla:
But it was not Tesla, not Google, that first achieved self-driving four-wheeled vehicles
John Deere tractor
John Deere started selling self-driving tractors 15 years ago, and as a famous American agricultural machinery manufacturer with more than 100 years of history, about half of the world's crops are harvested with John Deere harvesters.
Each of John Deere's tractors is equipped with sensors that map farmland and collect real-time data about farmland, which is then uploaded to a server.
All you have to do is get on John Deere's App or go to John Deere's website, and you can use your phone or tablet to look at the data on the farm. The App will tell you when to look at the farm, when to fertilize or harvest.
By 2008, China's agricultural economy was about 100 years behind that of the US, according to a report published by the Chinese Academy of Sciences. Why is American agriculture more advanced than ours? The main reason:
Large-scale farmland in the United States has basically been mechanized
Farmers don't need to go to the fields every day, and they rarely drive their tractors themselves.
For them, it's more about studying humidity, soil quality, and crop conditions at home.
This makes it easier for them to take care of their farmland.Only 2% of people in the U.S. currently take care of their fields, and automation in agriculture allows them to manage their fields and improve their crop yields in a less manual and easier way.
However, agricultural mechanization has made farmers more dependent on machinery, which has also led to:
Mechanical pressure
Farmers have to pay a lot of money to buy more sophisticated machines, maintain them, and replace them. To keep up production, it costs more and more (perhaps as much as one hundred thousand million dollars) . Once the tractor strike, may also take a few days to repair, these days, farmers can not work, farmland is basically in a state of waste.
Agricultural mechanization will not completely solve all agricultural problems, and the risk of pest attack on crops depends on biotechnology.
Nowadays we need to use dozens to hundreds of pesticides, the use of pesticides, so that pests evolve, develop resistance, in order to be able to both increase yields and fight pests, someone invented a new technology - genetically modified plants.For GMOs, some people can accept them, while others flock to them.
The agricultural revolution increased the production of food, but did not improve the quality of food, and after solving the problem of food and clothing, more people began to think about how to improve the quality of food.At this time, there was a form of agriculture that began to revive again, that is:
小规模农业
Some people in Detroit began growing vegetables in their backyards, believing it was part of the Green Revolution, where organic farming made people eat healthier than chemicals and genetic modifications.
For the United States, which has the largest arable land area in the world, agricultural mechanization is a trend, while homestead farming is a personal way of life.Compared with the United States, China's terrain diversity makes it conducive to agricultural production, but it is not conducive to agricultural automation, and most of the complex terrain still has to be planted and harvested manually, which makes our agriculture lag far behind the United States.
We prefer to believe that what we grow is healthy than what we grow with technology. Now many people also began to grow some small crops in their balcony, hoping to save money at the same time, let oneself eat better. Unfortunately, small-scale agriculture produces only a limited number of crops, in order to feed the human race, we still can not do without mechanized agriculture.
Mechanized farming is improving its technology to provide us with more food, and small-scale farming is slowly reviving to make us eat healthier, alternating between the two to make our lives secure.
问题来了，你会选择靠机器收割却种类多样的食物，还是选择自己种的但选择有限的食物？