AgriTech innovations to sustain the demands of a changing planet.
Key stats:
690 Million: the number of people on the planet who suffer from hunger, 1 in 3 from malnourishment.
60%: the amount of global food production must increase to meet population growth demands by 2030
$1 trillion: of food is lost or wasted every year according to the U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization.
The future of agriculture will be directly impacted by two of humanity’s biggest menaces on the horizon: population growth and climate change. With more mouths to feed and less planet to feed them on, and increasingly alarming predictions of environmental shifts, innovators working in crop agriculture have to figure out how to grow more food, faster, with fewer resources, by developing new technologies to scale up the planet’s food production mechanisms sustainably.
With 815 million people on the planet suffering from hunger and 1 in 3 malnourished already, the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations have set sustainable development goals to eliminate world hunger by 2030. Adding at least 2 billion more people to feed by 2050, the FAO has estimated food production will have to increase by 70%.
To achieve these goals, agritech must overcome food production plateaus in areas that are being farmed to their maximum capacity, and ensure that these areas will continue to yield more food year over year with direct access to non-renewable resources. Balancing the need for technological innovation to increase food production at all costs to stop hunger in the next 12 years, while managing the conservation of the natural resources essential to modern agriculture is no small task: sustainable agriculture is already at odds with the status quo. New technologies must address the ways industrial agriculture currently uses land, water, fertilizers, pesticides, and energy resources.
On top of this challenge, the future is not yet evenly distributed. As high-tech innovations sweep Europe and North America, projects in China, India, and Africa are supporting the 500 million family farms that feed 80% of the planet. If all 570 million farms on the planet can operate at the efficiency levels demonstrated by these technological trends, agriculture in 2050 will look very different from today.
Growing trend: Precision Farming
Precision farming combines information science with agricultural engineering, harvesting massive amounts of data from the farming process. Utilizing technological advances like advanced sensors, machine learning, and artificial intelligence for data processing, precision farming helps monitor big picture environmental factors like weather patterns, water distribution, and soil chemistry, as well as tiny measurements like nutrient deficiencies in individual plants. Called the next “digital revolution” for agriculture, precision farming has already been shown to increase crop yields while reducing fertilizer and pesticide use, which decreases the pollution of groundwater and depletion of non-renewable resources like phosphorus.
For this trend to sweep the globe and be available to the 144 million farmers in Asia, basic digital literacy is the first step. While many of these populations now have access to smartphones, very few are using them for farming. Once these farmers are connected to digital infrastructures and can use these technologies to enable data-driven decision making, they too will be able to join the digital green revolution.
Growing trend: Hacking biology to feed the planet
Biotechnology that modifies the genetic code of crops to make them more nutritious, grow more quickly, and resist diseases and pests are the backbone of modern multinational industrial agriculture. Many anti-GMO lobbyists and farmers believe that tampering with the genetic code of food products is too risky to try at scale, but to grow food under the conditions that global warming will bring, scientists are hastening on mutations that will help make crops more resistant to drought, heat, cold, and salt.
CRISPR, the gene-editing bacteria that has been making headlines for its potential use in the human genome, is one of the biotechnologies that scientists are using to make crops grow more plentifully by allowing more efficient photosynthesis, as in the C4 Rice Project, or to encourage nitrogen-fixing in crops that don’t naturally pull nitrogen from the air, which would mean less fertilizer used, and less fertilizer runoff polluting groundwater.
Agritech is also turning to nature to find solutions to problems that are currently being solved synthetically with fertilizers and pesticides.
Biotechnologies have reached the developing world in the form of innovations like Golden Rice, a genetically modified strain of rice that contains vitamin A.
According to a paper by Dr R. B. Singh, the Assistant Director-General and Regional Representative for the UN’s Food and Agriculture Organization in the Asia-Pacific region, 180 million children in developing countries suffer from a deficiency in vitamin A, resulting in 2 million deaths annually. With the FAO behind the development and distribution of Golden Rice and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation supporting similar biotechnology projects like breeding bananas that provide higher levels of iron in sub-Saharan Africa, genetically modified crops will be a major technological trend in ending world hunger and providing for the population of 2050.
Growing trend: Farms in the city
Today, 54% of the world’s population lives in urban areas, and this number is predicted to rise to 66% by 2050. With the potential effects that global warming will have on the efforts of traditional agriculture, it’s a safe bet for vertical farms to develop in urban areas alongside advances in agritech for outdoor farms. Vertical farms can integrate many technological innovations developed for traditional farms to produce as much food as possible, while isolating crops from pests and diseases, conserving non-renewable resources by closely controlling inputs and outputs, and minimizing transportation costs to put food on the table for booming urban populations.
If the predictions of experts on the climate and population for the next 10–25 years are correct, technological innovators in industrial agriculture have their work cut out for them. These future trends of farms moving into cities, biotechnology making food more nutritious and faster-growing, and precision farming incorporating big data with agricultural science will help tackle one of humanity’s greatest challenges yet, eliminating hunger while conserving the natural resources of the planet for future generations.
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This post was written by Darshita.
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