Agribusiness: celebrating world food day by charting innovative paths to increase productivity.

 

Celebrating world food day by creating innovative agricultural solutions to end poverty, tackle malnutrition and save our planet.

The exponential population growth to 9.7 billion by 2050 means all hands must be on deck to  rise to the challenge. There must be inclusion of innovative ideas in the way farming, processing and marketing of farm produce is done now to ensure increase productivity.

The use of design thinking comes into play here to chart the path to  productivity using smart agricultural constructs.

Robotics has been incorporated to livestock and general farming to increase productivity and also increase revenue by preventing losses. Africa needs to embrace more of technology-based agriculture to produce more and ensure food security. 

 Agricultural solutions are basically centered around :1) increased productivity which can be achieved by improved seeds, improved animal breeds, new farm practices,education of farmers, adoption of climate smart agriculture .

 2) Leveraging technology to provide data to farmers to improve productivity like Zenvus .The use of robots to enhance productivity such as use of

  3) Curbing food waste this can be by provision of cold hubs for farmers, provision of processing hubs to convert excess products or left overs to a new product with longer shelf-life.

4) Funding for farmers which can be in form of loans or private partnership in form of investment platforms.

5)Access to market: creating linkages for farmers to sell produce at  reasonable prices. The creation of new markets to improve productivity by adoption of circular economy in all agricultural value chains.

  Circular economy not only curbs wastes but closes loops in production cycles.

  6)  Adoption of clean energy to drive innovations in agriculture to reduce cost of production while saving the planet by reducing emissions.

VETERINARY MEDICINE: Prototype of robot dog nose.

VETERINARY MEDICINE: Prototype of robot dog nose.Every day, thousands of trained K9 dogs sniff out narcotics, explosives and missing people. These dogs are invaluable for security, but they're also expensive. Researchers have made the beginning steps toward an artificial 'robot nose' device that officers could use instead of dogs. The heart of the system would be living odor receptors grown from mouse genes that respond to target odors, including the smells of cocaine and explosives.

Roles of Robots in Agriculture: Robotic Dairy Farms.

This is the future of agriculture,as the largest robotic dairy farm in Michigan will go online in 2017. DeLaval International, a large Swedish producer of dairy and other farming equipment, is installing 24 robotic voluntary—meaning the cows approach the stations on their own—milking machines at TDI Farms LLC of Westphalia that will be able to milk 1,500 cows. 

Roles of robots in agriculture.

The new system will be operational sometime next year (no firm date has been set yet), according to Muhieddine Labban, solution manager of automatic milking systems at DeLaval. 

 The farm is owned by the Trierweiler family. They decided to transition to a robotic milking system after seeing improved longevity and lower cull rates of cows in dairy farms using these systems. Here’s how the Voluntary Milking System machine works(VMS): the cows are free to come to the machine to be milked as they please, drawn by the feed that is dispensed during milking. 

    Robots in agriculture.

 The animals are creatures of habit, they learn this routine within a few days, says Labban in an email. The system cleans, pre-milks, dries and stimulates each teat individually using water, compressed air and a vacuum. After this preparation stage, the cows are milked via a robotic attachment that scans their underside to detect where the teats are located and checks the milk flow before releasing the suction cup at the end of the milking session. 

 According to DeLaval, the VMS is better for cows than traditional milking systems since it has an open structure that allows the cow to see her surroundings and to stand in a comfortable position without human management, which can be stressful for the animals. The VMS also monitors udder health and can detect potentially life-threatening mammary gland infections. The VMS increases efficiency, providing the dairy producer with the opportunity to hire fewer, but higher-caliber trained and qualified people.see

#agriculture #agribusiness #robots #roles of robots in agriculture.

Agriculture and robots.

The future is really wrapped around technology to ensure food security and safety .In the world today, robots have been assigned more tasks than you imagine.Robots are gradually taking over jobs performed by man and a report shows that by 2025 robots will put humans out of work. They are already employed in various industries from administration to agriculture.

 Robots in agriculture ease labor force,ensure expected performance as the case in precision farming. The ability of robots to blend seamlessly with any organization and task makes them indispensible. Nadine, a "receptionist" at Nanyang Technological University in Singapore. She is friendly, and will greet you back. Next time you meet her, she will remember your name and your previous conversation with her. She looks almost like a human being, with soft skin and flowing brunette hair. She smiles when greeting you, looks at you in the eye when talking, and can also shake hands with you,and she is a humanoid. See 

The role of robots in agriculture and by extension food security has been redefined by a Japanese company that is set to open the world’s first “robot farm”, as agriculture joins other sectors of the economy in attempting to fill labor shortages created by the country’s rapidly ageing population.

Spread, a vegetable producer, said industrial robots would carry out all but one of the tasks needed to grow the tens of thousands of lettuces it produces each day at its vast indoor farm in Kameoka, Kyoto prefecture, starting from mid-2017. 

 The robots will do everything from re-planting young seedlings to watering, trimming and harvesting crops. The innovation will boost production from 21,000 lettuces a day to 50,000 a day, the firm said, adding that it planned to raise that figure to half a million lettuces daily within five years.

The seeds will still be planted by humans, but every other step, from the transplanting of young seedlings to larger spaces as they grow to harvesting the lettuces, will be done automatically,” said JJ Price, Spread’s global marketing manager. Read

Robot carries out first autonomous soft tissue surgery.

A robot has for the first time carried out fully autonomous surgery on a live subject: an intestinal anastomosis on a pig, during which two loops of intestine were stitched together. Four surgeries were carried out and all the subjects survived without complications. A paper in Science Translational Medicine shows how , the Smart Tissue Autonomous Robot (STAR) was created by a team of surgeons and scientists at the Sheikh Zayed Institute for Pediatric Surgical Innovation at the USA's Children's National Health System in Washington, DC. As well as live (in vivo) surgery, STAR also carried out surgeries on inanimate (ex vivo) porcine tissue, including both intestinal anastomosis and linear suturing. When compared to the intestinal anastomosis procedures carried out both manually by experienced surgeons and with existing robot-assisted surgical techniques using the daVinci Surgical System, STAR was found to outperform both in terms of surgical quality. The results of the procedures were assessed on factors such as "consistent suture spacing, which helps to promote healing, and in withstanding higher leak pressures, as leakage can be a significant complication from anastomosis surgery". However, STAR currently takes longer than a surgeon working manually: 35 minutes, to a human's eight minutes. Its time is comparable to the time it takes humans to carry out laparoscopic intestinal anastomosis – keyhole surgery that relies on tiny cameras to track progress and haptic feedback instruments to do the suturing. Dr Peter C. Kim said that "the intent of this demonstration is not to replace surgeons, but to expand human capacity and capability through enhanced vision, dexterity and complementary machine intelligence for improved surgical outcomes." STAR is designed to improve the accuracy of always-challenging soft tissue surgery, allowing a human surgeon to invest their expertise by supervising the procedure and interrupting if necessary, while the robot plans and performs the soft tissue sutures. Technical lead Axel Krieger says that "by using novel tissue tracking and applied force measurement, coupled with suture automation software, our robotic system can detect arbitrary tissue motions in real time and automatically adjust." Until STAR's development, says Krieger, "autonomous robot surgery has been limited to applications with rigid anatomy, such as bone cutting, because they are more predictable." STAR tracks the position of flexible soft tissues using near infrared florescent (NIRF) markers applied to the areas it needs to suture, monitored by a camera system that's able to see in three dimensions. An intelligent algorithm guides the robot's surgical plan and allows it to autonomously adjust and react in real time as tissue moves. It also has finely calibrated force sensors and actuators and an articulated laparoscopic suturing tool with eight degrees of movement – one more than the human arm, according to Science, which also provides video footage of the robot performing surgery on inanimate tissue. Dr Kim says that the next step in STAR's development will be to create improved sensors and further miniaturise the tools used by the robot. He says that, if the team can find a suitable partner to develop the technology, we could be seeing it in clinical use in as little as two years. culled from wired.co.uk

HEALING HORSES WITH A LIFT.

A New device gives healing horses a lift,researchers and engineers in Saskatchewan hope that a robotic lift system will help to improve the odds for horses recovering from limb fractures and other traumatic injuries. The researchers teamed up with Saskatoon's RMD Engineering to design and build the lift. It is designed to help rehabilitate horses suffering from injuries and other musculo-skeletal problems by providing mobility, weight distribution and support. Research team members include engineering experts, an equine biomechanics specialist and a veterinary radiologist. Hundreds of horses are fatally injured and euthanized every year in North America due to racetrack injuries, a large majority of which are fractures. The horses used for pleasure riding can also break a leg. After a horse undergoes surgery to fix a broken leg, it's normally confined to a stall and given pain medication. However, due to a horse's heavy weight and its strong flight response, recovery is often with complications and secondary issues such as supporting-limb laminitis. The famous racehorse, Barbaro, the Kentucky Derby winner shattered his right hind fetlock while racing in the Preakness Stakes in 2006. Surgeons successfully repaired his leg, but eight months later, Barbaro was euthanized after developing laminitis in his other feet. Veterinarians regularly use slings to help support injured horses, but current designs significantly limit the animals' normal activity and support all of their weight on the thorax and abdomen. This leads to further problems because of compression on the lungs and development of pressure sores. Dr. Julia Montgomery, a large animal internal medicine specialist at the Western College of Veterinary Medicine (WCVM) at the University of Saskatchewan (U of S),said the new lift system allows clinicians to dynamically reduce and redistribute the weight the horse is carrying. This allows the animal to be mobile with its weight partially or fully supported. Montgomery noted that the horse is allowed to move around so there is no issues with muscle wasting, adding that this function will also allow for more controlled rehabilitation of horses.Leg fractures are one of the most common injuries that will benefit from this new technology, but the lift can also be used with equine patients suffering from other musculoskeletal and neurological problems Montgomery and her team have been conducting initial trials with the lift on three healthy horses to see how they tolerate hanging out for extended periods of time in the sling and prototype system. Next, they will use it with horses with limb fractures that would otherwise be euthanized. These trials will help them find out how the lift affects horse behavior and physiological parameters such as muscle enzymes and blood flow. Materials from University of Saskatchewan

Agriculture: farming robots and food security.

Robotics has been incorporated to livestock and general farming to increase productivity and also increase revenue by preventing losses.Africa needs to embrace more of technology-based agriculture to produce more and ensure food security. 

 Africa needs to make greater investments in science and technology to become more efficient and competitive in agriculture, says the African Development Bank (AfDB). 

According to the Bank, science and technology are critical in transforming the agriculture industry from one that manages rural poverty to a wealth creating sector. “There cannot be a secure Africa unless we first and foremost revive the rural economies. 

We must turn these areas into zones of economic prosperity. And for that to happen, we must transform the main source of livelihoods – agriculture – into a wealth-creating sector,” said Dr Adesina. The use of robots in agriculture will not only guarantee more harvest,but smart production methods.

 New agricultural practices such as hydroponics farming, biocrops and selective breeding will not only ensure food security but provide more jobs. read more

Agribusiness: Agricultural robots.

The release of the film Terminator,which featured a cyborg with the sole aim to destroy mankind really shook the box office. Little did we know it was an introduction into the future of possibilities. The world has evolved over time with the introduction of phones,internet and robots.

The machine actually called a cyborg was actually flesh over iron and steel programmed for an assignment. 

 The cyborg was really a type of computer; with a microchip with million of information that can be easily accessed.This cyborg could be anybody and could do any thing; he could change form, voice and was extremely powerful with laser-sharp focus.

The follow up was a build up to the first with more advanced technology;this time exploring the power of liquid metal to achieve the purpose of destruction.

 WELCOME TO THE WORLD OF ROBOTS!!!!. Technology is dynamic, really evolving over time and helping us get things done.Did you know that the cyborg was actually a super-duber computer with a microchip of stored data?

 Do you know that the same principle is being harnessed today to ensure safety, food security/food safety ,provide entertainment and employment. 

 Robots are used now a days to carry out activities on the farm, these are programmed and set up to supply food and water to animals .This reduces labor costs as a robot can serve so many animals with a time frame .There is also the assurance that the animals are fed. Read how a pig farm is using robots;http://www.wattagnet.com/articles/902-robot-takes-the-strain-out-of-strawing. 

The use of robots is not limited to any specie or function, as they operate according to specification. Read how robots work on dairy Precision farming , a method to ensure food security, also uses robots to ensure maximum production Precision Farming techniques, aim to vary the inputs in production systems so the output is optimized from both an economic and environmental perspective.

  Read Robots are also involved in food safety when you talk about the QR codes, this reading system works on the basis of stored data,information and analysis.

The robots basically operate on data, analysis and data generation which is basically what the computer world offers. Did you know that robots, biotech and mash up are intertwined???? Robots function on data/information; so does genetic engineering.

The scientific mixing and matching of desired traits(DNA) into another to produce a more stable and viable specie that is usually more productive.

The mashup is the same technique of mixing and matching to produce content from various sources. The future is really wrapped around technology to ensure food security and safety 

.In the world today, robots have been assigned more tasks than you imagine; ;

Nadine, a "receptionist" at Nanyang Technological University in Singapore. She is friendly, and will greet you back. Next time you meet her, she will remember your name and your previous conversation with her. She looks almost like a human being, with soft skin and flowing brunette hair. She smiles when greeting you, looks at you in the eye when talking, and can also shake hands with you,and she is a humanoid. Read more (photo credit; internet)