In the palm of farmer's hands
In the palm of farmer's hands
Farmers could soon be managing their farms from their palm of their hands through the use of palm pilots, as well as using wireless laptops to steer tractors and monitor soil moisture.
At the moment in Australia, farmers can set their tractors to run on auto-pilot by pressing a red button whilst they sit in the front seat. The tractor can be programmed to cover 10-15 km of harvesting ground automatically via a satellite connection.
In the future, scientists from a University of Georgia agricultural lab will be used on farms in about five years to help grow insect control, open gates for livestock, control irrigation pumps and a video to monitor vegetable packing.
Here in Australia, there are plans to release palm pilots to farmers as soon as next year. These will be used to record invaluable information about livestock. Chris Weber, the project officer for designing palm software at the Institute for Rural Futures said.
"I think palm pilots will catch on quicker than Wi-Fi wireless laptops because they are so much more cheaper, simpler and convenient to use. The software I am designing will help farmers with utilities. At the moment, farmers make records with notepads, which get damaged easily and the information always has to be inputted later into a central system. With a palm pilot, the work can be done on the spot and then downloaded to a desktop back at the farmer's home. Eventually, this could even be linked to a wider database too.
"The palm pilots will allow farmers to count livestock, type in additional chemical information or useful data, refer to safety requirements stored on the handheld and keep up to date with maintenance records on the spot."
Weber spent a year speaking to farmer about how the use of wireless technology would be useful to them and he found that they were hugely in favour of the palm pilots because of the ease of use and the convenience of keeping track of information whilst going out their usual business.
Related Article: