(FORTUNE Magazine) – For companies that develop new agricultural technologies, it's a season of drought: the doleful state of the farm economy worldwide has taken the near- term commercial luster off scores of promising innovations. At one U.S. company, a leader in applying electronics to farm equipment, an executive says, ''We could put our customers in a state of technological shock, but none of them are willing to pay for it.'' Nonetheless, betting that bad times won't last forever, researchers -- funded largely by governments and universities -- are plowing ahead. Even if some projects never pay off, you can't keep the researchers down, down on the farm. With a treeful of plastic oranges (right), reSsearchers at the University of Florida are learning how to build a robot that can pick citrus fruit. This prototype locates the fruit amid all the surrounding leaves and branches with the help of a TV camera, a filter that heightens contrast, and a computer that scans the image for bright objects. Eureka, the oranges. Once a recently developed robot hand is perfected and other problems are solved, researchers claim the machine will be able to harvest an orange every two seconds -- more than twice the rate a veteran worker can sustain. What's more, the robot will be able to pick at night. In parts of California and the Southwest, water is fast beScoming as precious as oil. The irrigation system above can save money: its central computer discerns when one spot in a field is especially parched or another area a little soggy, and alters the water supply to each area accordingly. Funded by the federal government and California State University at Fresno, and developed by Claude Phene, a U.S. Department of Agriculture soil and irrigation scientist, the system determines what's dry and what's not with infrared thermometers that monitor the plants' water needs as the elevated pipeline moves across the field. Using data on sunlight, humidity, rainfall, wind speed, and other variables collected by an on-farm weather station, the computer predicts how much water each crop will need the next day. The small tubes that trail from the overhead pipes also help save water. A good deal of water sprayed by conventional systems may be blown away by wind; in especially hot and dry climates, it may evaporate before it hits the ground. This rig, like others developed recently, avoids these problems by spoon- feeding water to the base of each plant. The environmental controls plugged into this chicken house (left) at the Southeast Poultry Research Laboratory in Athens, Georgia, can do just about everything but spot a loose fox. A computer keeps the temperature and humidity inside the house at optimum levels and controls blowers that constantly pump in clean, filtered air while removing old, dirty air. The principal purpose of the so-called FAPP house -- for filtered air, positive pressure -- is to keep out harmful bacteria and other airborne disease agents, much as a clean room in a semiconductor factory keeps out dust and other contaminants. The coop's surveillance system could also be commercially useful. On torrid days, for instance, a farmer must check periodically to make sure the watering and ventilation systems for each chicken house are working. The comSputer that runs a FAPP coop will make those house calls for him. It can be rigged to spot equipment breakdowns instantly and to let the farmer know about them -- with bells and whistles, if he likes, that sound off back at the farmhouse at the first sign of trouble. The focus is on the underside of the cow (above) at the Federal Dairy Research Center in Kiel, West Germany, where researchers are developing a fully automated milking machine. The device is designed to latch onto a cow's teats after she enters the stall, then drop away after milking her -- all without a human touch. Infrared sensors scan the cow's udder for the coolest spots, the teats, and can locate all four in about 20 seconds. Computer-age cowbells, these colorful electronic identification tags (left), implanted with tiny microcircuit chips, will help dairy farmers keep better track of how their cows are performing. When a cow wearing one of the electronic tags enters the milking stall, for instance, a computer recognizes the animal by detecting a signal that the tag emits. Other devices also being tested at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign automatically measure a cow's daily milk production and calculate how much chow -- and what mixture of it -- the cow should have. Scientists at Texas A&M University are grading hogs, sheep, and cattle with ultrasonic devices like those used to take pictures of human fetuses. Because producers sell their animals on the hoof, buyers have to make educated guesses about the leanness of the meat inside. By firing sound waves through living animals like this pig (right), researchers hope to eliminate most of the guesswork. The dark area in the upper third of the ultrasonic ''slice'' (far right) represents the eye of the pig's loin; the bluish-white areas surrounding the loin are fatty tissue. Strapped in a rotating cradle, this sheep (right) is getting a haircut from a robotic shearer designed by engineers at the University of Western Australia. At the heart of this technology is a three-dimensional digital map of a typical sheep, stored in the robot's computer memory, which initially positions the shearing arm. Sensors in the arm then guide it along the precise contours of the animal being barbered. The robot's developers don't yet know whether it can work as fast as human shearers, but the machine can cut contentedly around the clock. No ivory tower exercise, the semi-automated rice combine (left) has been improving the productivity -- and profitability -- of real, live farmers like Ryutaro Uchida since 1983. Made in Japan by Yanmar Agricultural Equipment Co. of Osaka, the machine steers itself with the help of a metal rod that brushes against a row of rice stalks. By monitoring the angle of the sensor to the stalks, the combine's computer adjusts the steering to keep the machine properly aligned. The farmer needs only to control the machine's speed and make the turn at the end of each row. A Yanmar engineer says this $16,000 combine and others like it, which have been exported to Taiwan, Egypt, and Peru, slice more than 10% off the time it takes a farmer to reap a paddy using traditional equipment. Yanmar's prototype Electro X combine (top) is fully automated and even more efficient, making U-turns by itself and regulating its own speed. For steering, it uses infrared light beams to measure and adjust the distance between the combine and the stalks. When its hopper fills with rice -- or the machine malfunctions -- the combine stops and signals the farmer that it's time for him to do a little work too.