We've briefly touched on this in our article on food tech inventions, but the future of home farming is here.

Farmbot has developed a machine that will take care of all of your home gardening needs for you. Not only does the robot plant the seeds for you, but it can also water, monitor for weeds and kill them, and keep track of the soil quality of your home garden.

Photo: Farmbot

Farmbot comes equipped with a variety of tools to perform the above functions — including a soil sensor, camera, weed suppressor, seed injector, and watering tool.

The robot works via an open-source platform that anyone can access, meaning that you can download the software for free and use it to construct your own Farmbot (instructions and equipment needed can be found on the website). However, the company does sell kits with all of the pieces needed to construct your own Farmbot.

You can control the Farmbot from online or via an app, using it to monitor and set what crops you want to grow in what locations, and to monitor water and soil nutrient quality. In terms of what crops you can grow, there is a large variety of crops in the software that you can program to grow — you just have to provide the seeds.

You can then make applicable changes through the app or online platform. By using the software, you can create growing sequences that set up growing procedures for the robot, or you can manually control from your phone or computer.

Farmbot is an incredibly stable machine that not only lasts a while (and can be solar-powered), but is weatherproof and versatile enough to fit various garden sizes. It takes away the time and care normally needed to properly grow crops in your backyard, making it incredibly easy to grow your own fresh produce!

The Farmbots are currently available for pre-order, and plan to ship in February 2017. The software is free to use, and the pre-made kits cost about $3,275.00, including shipping — a reasonable price for something that will be able to grow you produce for years to come.