If anything, farms are incredibly high-tech these days. I won’t object that marketing teams have a vested interest in making farms seem quaint and warm and fuzzy and all about being close to the land. But one of the greatest users of applied automation has to be the modern farm. I remember when I was in elementary school touring a dairy farm with my parents and seeing that the entire setup is completely automated with the cows operating on their own schedule.
The cows had the run of the pastures and barns, and when they felt like being milked, they went to a stall in the barn where their ear-tag’s RFID chip activated the stall’s automatic sanitizer which cleaned the milking machine and the cow’s undercarriage (it looked like a sanitizing spray, maybe something like lysol). The milking machine automatically attached itself to the teats, spent about 20 minutes doing its thing, detatches, re-sanitizes itself, opens the gate in front of the cow, and powers down. The cow then ambles back to pasture.
