Technology is making life easier for some dairy (奶制品) farmers. They use robotic (机器人的) systems to milk their cows. Cows are _______ to follow a series of paths that lead to milking stations. Only one cow at a _______ can enter a station.

Once inside, the cow is fed with food. As the cow eats, a robotic arm cleans and connects the animal to the _______ machine. A few minutes later, the milking is completed. The gate is opened and the next _______ enters.

The robotic system is designed to operate 24 hours a day. The cows get to decide when they want to be milked. Cows are milked an average of about three times a day.

The cows _______ something around their necks that identify them to the system. A computer keeps _______ on their eating and milking. A cow is released (释放) from the station if the computer decides it should not be milked. The system also measures the temperature and color of freshly produced _______.

Professor Plaut believes the systems will be _______ with the next generation (一代) of farmers. She means young people who are more interested in technology and less interested in working all the time on the farm. Still, she says the price of robotic milking systems will continue to limit their _______.

Doug and Tina Suhr have more than one hundred milking cows on their __________ farm. Last year it became the fourth farm in southeast Minnesota to get a robotic milking system.

Scientists have worked for more than twenty years to develop what they call Green Super Rice. The “Green” in Green Super Rice means environmentally (有关环境方面) friendly. “Super” means the rice can grow well in bad soil conditions and keep away insects and diseases. Researchers say it will produce at least as much grain as other rice plants but with fewer inputs.

Modern rice plants produce two to three times more grain than what was possible before the 1960s. But they also require large amounts of water and chemical fertilizers. In the 1960s, scientists created crops that produced bigger harvests in what became known as the Green Revolution. It helped many people to get rid of hunger. But modern rice plants require too much water and too much use of chemical fertilizers and pesticides (杀虫剂) that can hurt the environment. And farmers may be too poor to buy these things to grow modern rice plant.

The developers of Green Super Rice do not use genetic (基因的) engineering. In that way they avoid the high costs as well as the problems connected with getting permission to plant genetic crops.

Anna McClung leads a rice-breeding (培育) center for the United States Agriculture Department. She praises the researchers working on Green Super Rice. But she also says that combining many different genes into one plant without genetic engineering requires a lot of plant breeding.

The research is still going on. The researchers on the Green Super Rice project continue to help farmers produce more with less.