The Rise of the Agribots Reading Answers: IELTS Reading Practice Test

The Rise of the Agribots Reading Passage

Paragraph A:

Remember the farmers who helped fill your grocery basket the next time you're at the supermarket checkout since life is tough for them right now. This, in turn, means higher grocery expenditures for consumers and more misery for millions of people in nations where food scarcity is a matter of life and death. Worse, projections indicate that by 2050, the globe will require twice as much food. Farmers must squeeze more out of the land while also addressing the need to reduce their effect on the soil, rivers, and environment. All of this requires rethinking agriculture and pushing automation to a whole new level. Precision will be essential for the new model farms of the future. Why cover an entire field with chemicals when you can spray them only where they are needed? Each plant could receive just the proper quantity of everything, no more or less, reducing chemical use while increasing yields in a single step. Yet, this is easier said than done; the largest farms in Europe and the United States can span thousands of acres. That is why precise farming requires automation. Precision farming, according to agricultural engineers, requires robot farmers.

Paragraph B:

One day, we may witness fields with 'agribots' (agricultural robots) that can recognise individual seedlings and stimulate them with fertiliser drips. Other devices would recognise troublesome weeds from crops and destroy them with high-powered laser blasts or a chemical microdot. These devices will also be able to recognise and gather various types of crops. Farming has already become an industrial-scale enterprise in much of the world after more than a century of mechanisation, with cereal farms being the most intensively mechanised.

Paragraph C:

Nevertheless, a number of other crops, including oranges and tomatoes meant for processing, are also picked mechanically, albeit to a lower extent. Yet, the next generation of self-driving agricultural gear is already in operation. You probably didn't notice since these robots are camouflaged as tractors. Many self-steers utilise GPS to travel a field and can even 'speak' to their equipment, such as a plough or sprayer. The implements can respond by warning the tractor that it is travelling too quickly or that it should go to the left. This type of communication is being explored in other agricultural vehicles as well. A new technology, for example, allows a combine harvester to transmit a call to a tractor-trailer driver, who can then unload the grain as needed.

Paragraph D:

Nonetheless, when completely autonomous systems hit the road, they won't look like tractors. Because of their massive size and weight, today's agricultural tractors have substantial drawbacks: they compress the soil, limiting porosity and eliminating beneficial life, resulting in poor crop growth. Simon Blackmore, an agricultural technology researcher at Harper Adams University College in England, believes fleets of lightweight autonomous robots have the ability to tackle this problem and that substituting raw force with accuracy is critical. 'A seed requires only one cubic centimetre of soil to flourish. We can cultivate with very little energy, and the plants will still develop wonderfully. According to Eldert van Henten, a robotics researcher at Wageningen University in the Netherlands, there is another reason why automation may be the way forward. 'As the population grows and has to be fed, a progressively declining number of individuals are prepared to work in agriculture,' he observes. Other academics, like Linda Calvin, an economist at the United States Department of Agriculture, and Philip Martin at the University of California, Davis, have researched mechanisation patterns to forecast how American farms would perform in the future. Calvin and Martin have previously noticed how increased labour costs have resulted in developing labour-saving farm technologies, citing the raisin sector as one example. A record harvest in 2000 drove down prices, and with earnings constrained, farmers sought a solution. With labour being one of their major expenditures — 42 per cent of production expenses on US fields on average — they began employing a mechanised harvester modified from a winemaker's equipment. By 2007, about half of California's raisins were machine-picked, and a 50,000-person labor force had decreased to 30,000.

Paragraph E:

In addition to having an influence on the employment sector, the broad adoption of agribots may result in changes at the supermarket. According to Lewis Holloway, an agricultural researcher at the University of Hull in the United Kingdom, robotic milking is expected to alter the genetics of dairy herds as producers choose 'robot-friendly' cows with udder form and even attitudes suitable to automated milking. Similarly, he believes that agribots might affect which fruit and vegetable types reach the market because farmers may choose to plant those with, for instance, leaf forms that are simpler for their robots to distinguish from weeds. These devices will very certainly change the landscape as well. According to Salah Sukkarieh, a robotics researcher at the Australian Center for Field Robotics in Sydney, the true tipping point for robot agriculture will occur when farms are planned with agribots in mind. This might mean that crops are planted in grids rather than rows, and fruit trees are trimmed into two-dimensional patterns to make harvesting easier. This extraterrestrial environment nurtured by robots, he argues, is still a long way off, but it will happen.

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