As transportation, manufacturing and other industries boost use of advances in automation and autonomous technologies, agricultural operations remain slow to take advantage of increasing opportunities to automate. Rene Villalobos, a Fulton Schools associate professor of industrial engineering who studies innovation in agriculture, says both agriculture businesses and consumers of farm products can benefit from new high-tech tools and systems that would make growing, harvesting and delivering food to the marketplace more efficient, economical and environmentally sustainable. And while using new technology will enable streamlining supply chains and bringing logistics to agricultural operations, Villalobos doesn’t foresee the automation that would be involved in those ventures displacing agricultural workers but instead creating news kinds of jobs for them in the industry.