The FAO has set sustainable development goals to eliminate world hunger by 2030. To achieve these goals, agritech must overcome food production plateaus in areas that are being farmed to their maximum capacity. New technologies must address the ways industrial agriculture currently uses land, water, fertilizers, pesticides, and energy resources. 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 are able to operate at the efficiency levels demonstrated by these technological trends, agriculture in 2050 will look very different.
Precision farming has already been shown to increase crop yields while reducing fertilizer and pesticide use. Dutch farmers are able to more than double the amount of potato yield per acre compared to the global average and reduce dependence on water by 90%. 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.
The C4 gene-editing technology is being used to make crops more efficient. The technology can be used to grow crops without the need to use pesticides. It can also be used as a way to reduce the need for fertilizer. The C4 technology has been used in the U.S. since the 1970s. It is now being used in other countries as well, including Australia and New Zealand. It’s being used for the first time in the UK, where it’s been used since the 1980s. The U.K. has been using the technology since the 1990s.
Iron Ox, a hydroponic farm in California, has developed a 1,000-lb robot arm that harvests 26,000 plants. The robot, nicknamed Angus, also has an array of Lidar sensors that allow it to identify diseases, pests, and abnormalities plant by plant. Hydroponic systems are soil-less, isolated from environmental stress, pests, and diseases. They avoid a lot of the problems faced by outdoor farms in conserving resources. Running LED lights for indoor farms 24 hours per day is not sustainable, even for Iron Ox.
Another solution, pioneered by the Sky Greens vertical farming system in Singapore, uses a hydraulic system that consumes the equivalent of one lightbulb’s energy to rotate troughs of produce. Vertical farms can integrate many of technological innovations developed for traditional farms to produce as much food as possible.
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Future Farms: Agritech innovations to feed a changing planet