Agricultural technology includes tools and machinery used to support farming, such as ploughs and irrigation systems. Innovations have greatly improved farming, such as the cotton gin. Different farms require different technology, and advancements continue to be made, with the possibility of agricultural robots in the future.
Agricultural technology is the tools and machinery that are used primarily or entirely in order to support agricultural enterprise. Examples include ploughs, threshers and irrigation systems. These forms of technology, all of which are regularly used in modern agricultural settings, have a long history in agriculture and have been reinvented and redesigned many times. Plows, for example, were originally pulled by animals but are now usually powered by engines. For people interested in the history of agricultural technology, there are a number of museums that have preserved bits of old or obsolete machinery and have staff on hand to explain how they worked and why they were replaced.
Throughout the history of agriculture, there have been improvements in technology that greatly changed the ways certain types of crops were grown or harvested. Cotton gin is a good example of this. Before Eli Whitney invented the modern cotton gin in the late 18th century, the cotton fibers were separated from the cotton seeds by hand or using much older technology. Due to the effectiveness of the cotton gin, cotton production in the United States soared after this new piece of technology became available.
There are different types of agricultural technology for different types of farms. For example, the machinery required to successfully run a large-scale dairy farm is very different from that required to run a small winery. There are regular innovations, changes and improvements to the technology available to farmers. In some cases, the changes alter or improve agricultural techniques only slightly, but in others, such as with the cotton gin, they can completely change some aspect of farming.
As progress progresses, there are more and more changes in agricultural technology. The available technology is regularly modified so that it can be more precise in its functions and can perform more complex functions. For example, some people in agriculture believe that, in the not-too-distant future, many agricultural machines currently operated or driven by humans will be able to run themselves. In the future there may be agricultural robots doing much of the work that people did a century or so ago.
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