A sprayer moving across a field worries some of the public because they do not understand what it is doing there or why. If the machinery is old and the farmer is stuck in the last century, it is indeed worrying, as everyone will have seen the blue smoke coming from old cars. The good news is that farmers' interest in future technologies and sustainable management, provided by precision farming technologies, is growing. Even medium-sized farms are renewing their machinery fleets to achieve new goals, to farm not only more efficiently but also in a more environmentally friendly way.

Sitting behind the wheel of the latest tractors, the feeling is like being in a computer game or like a plane pilot – because there are so many switches, screens and other features that such machinery must be operated by skilled drivers. While we could not have imagined in the past that robots would sweep and wash the floors in our homes, a similar technological leap has taken place in agriculture. It is hard to grasp that, for example, a sprayer not only recognises weeds but also their developmental phases. While driving across a field, each nozzle switches on or off individually, as they know their location with an accuracy of up to two centimetres using GPS data.