Mr Edwards made the comment before yesterday’s opening of the event’s first Agri-Centre pavilion — a hub showing off the latest in farming technology.

“Looking around, you see unmanned aerial solutions and those sorts of things,” he said.

“In the future, they will be sending those things out to check on sheep, to check on cattle and to check on water.

“They will bring pictures back to you and you can be doing some other job on the farm rather than that mundane job.”

Mr Edwards looked around the pavilion and also pointed out automatic steering technology.

“The day is coming when the tractor will operate itself in a paddock — it’s not that far away,” he said.

The centre is designed to promote technology in farming and provide guest speakers in the field who can answer questions.

A team of workers from the Australian Centre for Field Robotics at the University of Sydney received a lot of interest for its robot, aptly named Ladybird.

The black-and-red solar-electric-powered robot is designed to transform the way farmers monitor and harvest vegetables.

A research fellow at the University of Sydney, Dr Calvin Hung, said four cameras worked to collect images of vegetables.

“We do a 3D reconstruction so you can see a vegetable’s structure and, from that, you can estimate its volume,” he said.

“This gives a farmer information like how much yield they are likely to get on their farm.

“A hyper-spectral camera also can be used to monitor the health of vegetables.”

Research is now being carried out on using the machine for weed and pest protection.

“It’s basically an information system because it provides the intelligence that was previously not available to a farmer because it would be too expensive to collect,” Dr Hung said.