The mechanization of farming practices throughout the world has revolutionized food production, enabling it to maintain pace with population growth except in some lessdeveloped countries, most notably in Africa.
Automation applications will be orientated towards and assist in the attainment of environmentally friendly and sustainable systems of agricultural and food production. However, the difficulties in matching environmental concerns and sustainability with an ever-increasing world population cannot be underestimated especially in the developing countries. Thus, there may be a tension between maximizing food production on the one hand and implementing sustainable development and environmental protection systems (e.g. erosion control) especially, in poorer regions, where the demand for increased food production follows logically from an increasing population.

The concept of timeliness recognizes that there is an optimum time to perform certain crop production operations from planting through to harvesting. If one or more of these operations is performed too early or too late, a timeliness penalty is likely to accrue, that is, yield and/or the quality of the crop is diminished, yielding a lower price to the farmer. For example, the ideal time to harvest grain is when the crop is ripe and the moisture is low (see also, Maintaining Working Conditions and Operation of Machinery). European countries fell in between, with land in the United Kingdom about twice as abundant as on the continent. These differences in endowments were reflected in massive differences in factor prices. In Japan, a worker had to work nearly 2,000 days to buy a hectare of land, while his counterpart in the United States needed to work only one-tenth of that time.

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