Climate Change and Smart Farming

In the coming decades, as we deal with rising global population (projected to be nearly 11 billion by 2100) and are forced to tackle the challenges resulting from climate change (rising seas & temperatures, desertification, increasingly violent storms, mass migration, etc.), we will face, both, unprecedented demand for food and greater uncertainty in its supply. In order to best guarantee our ability to feed everyone possible given the expected challenges, then, we need to be smarter about food production.

Simply put, we need to produce more and waste less. Even more than that, we need to ensure access to food for the world’s growing population, especially including people that will be unequally marginalized by climate change, despite the challenges we are sure to face. Thankfully, though, we face the exigencies of ensuring our species’ survival with recent technological advances in agriculture and the eternally tenacious human spirit. Thus, we must foster the role of technology in agriculture, and increase investment in agricultural technology, so that we can sustainably and equitably meet humanity’s increasing demand for food while mitigating the risks and possible inequality in its present and future production and supply.

Agricultural technology is nothing new — everything from irrigation, farming equipment, fertilizers, and rotational crop cycles to agrichemical companies, like the infamous Monsanto (which was acquired by Bayer in 2018 for $66 billion), that create genetically modified organisms (GMOs) are part of agritech. Today, however, with the inundation of information and internet technologies into all aspects of life coupled with the burgeoning demand & future uncertainty, and possible scarcity, in the supply for food, we stand at the beginning of a new era in agricultural technology and a decision point for the world to come. In this new era of farming, we have the ability to apply modern technology to food production in order to optimize growth, limit crop loss, and reduce water waste while supplying locally-sourced food to a rising population in a way that is tenable and sustainable. Furthermore, it is imperative that we do so, and soon, as our time of tacitly excused wastefulness draws to a long overdue end.

At the beginning of this new age in agriculture technology, we see modern, innovative technology becoming increasingly ubiquitous on the farm — whether rural or urban. In this sector, aka the precision farming market which is expected to be worth $16.35 billion by 2028, agricultural technology applications have already yielded impressive results from myriad interventions like adding GPS/remote monitoring tags to livestock, using unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) drones to monitor crops, and turning robots into farmhands which, some say, is paving the way for fully autonomous farms. Some forward-thinking companies, like Dubai-based Acacia Innovative Technology (AIT), are using machine learning (ML), artificial intelligence (AI), and customized internet of things (IoT) solutions to advance the frontier of precision farming (aka digital agriculture) and energy management by increasing the output and efficiency of food production. They, and the companies like them, work with farmers from around the globe and offer their technological services with aim to optimize water usage, operations, and crop yields so that we may better feed the world’s population today and in the future.

Additionally, if not unsurprising, universities and research institutes are also devoting their resources to tackling the challenges facing the food supply, both presently and in the future. One cool example, coming out the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and their Singapore-MIT Alliance for Research and Technology (SMART), is the engineering of “plant nanosensors” and portable Raman spectroscopy (used in chemistry to provide a structural fingerprint by which molecules can be identified) technology as “new analytical tools that are rapid and non-destructive and provide tissue-, cell- or organelle-specific information on living plants in real time”. As the world is poised to face environmental stress subsequent from climate change, this type of technology could prove to be incredibly useful in ensuring that we are able to produce enough food to feed the increasing population despite the challenges of the years to come.

While these examples are certainly impressive, there is still much more to be done if we are to overcome the challenges we are sure to face regarding food production and consumption caused by climate change and an increasing population. The challenges we will face will require innovation, and these innovations require investment. We must invest money, minds, and manpower into agricultural technology lest we intend to allow food insecurity & inequality to exacerbate the host of other problems that we are sure to face in the coming years. I, for one, am hopeful that we are up to the task and look forward to following, if not joining, this new wave of agricultural technology.