A new generation of agricultural equipment promises to take more of the toil out of farming by automating the business of growing fruit

In the early 1830s, spurred on by his hatred of sweaty field work, Cyrus McCormick took an idea his father had been working on at the family farm in Virginia and produced a mechanical reaper. Others devised similar machines. Despite initial skepticism, farmers eventually

bought them in droves. With one person riding the horse that pulled the reaper, and another raking the cut stalks off the back, the machines could harvest as much grain in a day as a dozen men breaking their backs with reaping hooks.

Mechanical reapers became even more efficient after being adapted to bale the stalks into sheaves, too. Development continued: today a driver in the air-conditioned cabin of a combine harvester may be guided by satellites as he cuts, threshes and pours clean grain into a fleet of accompanying trailers.

One machine, the New Holland CR9090, holds the record after harvesting a colossal 551 tons of wheat in just eight hours from a farm in Britain in 2008. Given that such machines cost around £350,000 ($580,000), agricultural automation must make economic sense - because farmers don’t spend money on frivolities.

But there are farms where people like McCormick still dream of taking hard, manual work out of agriculture. These farms grow crops that mostly have to be tended and picked by hand, such as apples, oranges, and strawberries. In rich countries it is becoming increasingly difficult to find people to do this at wages farmers say they can afford. Even Japan’s exquisite and expensive strawberries are

becoming too costly to pick because of a shortage of workers, in part caused by an ageing population.

Just as the mechanical reaper transformed the economics of cereal farming, a new wave of agricultural automation promises to do the same in other areas of horticulture. Because picking apples is very different to plucking strawberries, the machines are taking various forms. Some have giant mechanical arms and are towed behind tractors through orchards and vineyards. Some are fully autonomous and able to scurry around on their own, even in paddy fields, like the robotic rice-planter developed by Japan’s National Agricultural Research Centre. Others trundle about inside experimental greenhouses.

The Economist

Read the article again carefully and work out the questions to the given answers.

a) In the early 1830s.

b) After being adapted.

c) 551 tons. d) £350,000.

e) Because picking apples is very different to plucking strawberries.

f) By Japan’s National Agricultural Research Centre.

Translate the last paragraph of the article in written form.

Skim the following article to find the sentences with the Gerunds and state their functions.

Metal, heal thyself

A way for the damaged surfaces of metals to repair themselves has been devised Sadly for engineers, inanimate objects cannot yet repair themselves. But scientists have invented a way of healing damaged metals.

The surfaces of many metal objects are coated with other metals for protection. Iron, for instance, is frequently galvanized with zinc. The basic idea of the new technology is to infiltrate this coating with tiny,

fluid-filled capsules. When the metal coating is punctured or scratched, the capsules in the damaged area burst and ooze restorative liquids, in the form of compounds called trivalent chromates. These react with nearby metal atoms and form tough, protective films a few molecules thick to ameliorate the damage.

The idea of doing this has been around for years, but it has proved difficult in practice because the capsules used were too big. Surface coatings tend to be about 20 microns thick. The capsules were 10-15 microns across - large enough to disrupt the coatings, and thus do more harm than good. The trick worked out by scientists is how to create capsules a few hundredths of this size.

The capsules researchers have come up with are made by mixing

butylcyanoacrylate, a chemical found in superglue, with an oil carrying the healing compounds. This mixture is then, itself, mixed with dilute hydrochloric acid. The result is an emulsion of droplets between 100 and 300 nanometers across. Each droplet has an oil core surrounded by a thin layer of butylcyanoacrylate molecules. To make the droplets stable, phosphate is added to the emulsion. This triggers the polymerization of the butylcyanoacrylate into a tough plastic, which forms the outside of the capsule.

The greatest challenge, however, was not making the capsules in the first place, but stabilizing them during the plating process. Though galvanization is often done by dipping steel in liquid zinc, it is sometimes done by electrolysis - and nickel and copper plating are normally done this way. The capsules, though, tend to stick together in the liquids used as electrolytes during electroplating, and are also destroyed by the extreme acidity or alkalinity that is often involved in the process. To overcome these problems special detergents that stick to polybutylcyanoacrylate were used, and thus both stop the capsules sticking together and protect them from the electrolytes. The techniques were proved in electroplated layers of copper, nickel, and zinc, and self-repairing metals are believed to commonly be available in the years ahead.

The Economist