Smart Farming: The Only Way To Go Mayowa Afolayan, August 7, 2021 The world population is growing steadily and is projected to reach 9.7 billion by the year 2050. Agricultural production will need to increase by at least by 70% from the current level to meet up with nutritional requirement. Now more than ever, the pressure on farmers to produce more is right there and with more months to feed, sustainable agriculture is the way to go. Smart farming is now coming through and to the rescue. Food security and sustainable agriculture can only be best achieved through smart farming adoption and utilization. Farm automation, often associated with “smart farming”, is technology that makes farms more efficient and automates the crop or livestock production cycle. An increasing number of companies are working on robotics innovation to develop drones, autonomous tractors, robotic harvesters, automatic watering, and seeding robots. Although these technologies are fairly new, the industry has seen an increasing number of traditional agriculture companies adopt farm automation into their processes. As a result, farmers way of working is bound to change completely. Robots can keep a much better eye on crops than humans can. A robot can use sensors to measure each plant to see how it is doing. This enables a robot to recognize diseases sooner. Another advantage is that robots can also be used to replace human labour. To bring it home, here in Africa and specifically here in Nigeria, we need to do more in the area of smart farming – farm automation to close the gap in food production and reduce post-harvest food waste. I hope our universities and research institute will look into this as part of their contribution to MDGs in eradicating extreme poverty and hunger. Agri-Tech AI Robotics Technology AgricultureMDGsRoboticsTechnology