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Over the next two decades, a technological wave will
revolutionize the efficiency of
farms all
over the world. It can’t come soon enough. By the year 2050 the human population
will be nearly 10 billion which means we’ll need to have doubled the amount of
food we now produce.
This is an examination of the agricultural innovations coming down the pipeline
that will help get us there.
The industry has undergone major developments over the last century. 100 years
ago, farming looked like this. Today,
it looks like this. And tomorrow, it will look something like
this. These changes have allowed many of us to do other things with our lives.
In 1900,10.9 million agricultural workers
produced the food for 76 million people.
Today, just 6.5
million workers feed 321.4 million Americans.
Two factors were most responsible for this surge in productivity: engines and
the wide spread availability of
electricity. Today, the innovations on
our immediate horizon include autonomous picker UK researchers
have already created one that gathers strawberries twice as fast as humans, the
challenge will be creating robotic
pickers that can switch between all kinds of crops;
Robots or drones that can precisely remove weeds or shoot them with a targeted
spritz of pesticide, using 90% less
chemicals than a conventional blanket sprayer.
For the organic farmer, they could zap the weeds with a laser instead. This
could have a big impact, the UN
estimates that each year, between 20 and 40% of global crop yields are
destroyed by pests and disease. Tiny sensors and cameras will monitor crop
growth and alert farmers on their smartphones if there is a problem, or when it’s
the best time to harvest; The Boni Rob
can take a soil sample, liquidize it,
then analyze its pH and phosphorous levels all in real time;
As a proof-of-concept for all this autonomous farming technology, researchers
at Harper Adams in the UK plan to grow
and harvest an entire hectare of Barley without humans ever
entering the field. Companies like Agribotix have already commercialized
software that analyzes drone-captured infrared images to spot unhealthy
vegetation. Then, like a real life game
of Sim-Farmer, the grower is alerted on their device when
a troubled area is identified.
Machine learning will regularly improve the
system’s ability to differentiate
between varieties of crops and the weeds that threaten them.
Not to be left out, a company called Mavrx contracts 100 pilots to fly
light-aircraft that are outfitted with
multi spectral cameras on data-gathering missions over large farms
throughout the country; For an even wider view, Planet Labs operates
a fleet of Cube Sats that take weekly images of entire farms from space to help
monitor crops; Other companies are
creating analytics software to act as
farm-management systems, allowing growers of all sizes to deal with this new
tsunami of data; And The Farmer’s Business Network combines
data from many farms into one giant pool to give its members the power of
macro-level in sights that have
traditionally only been available to corporate mega-farms;
Vertical farms are essentially warehouses with stacks of hydroponic systems to
grow leafy greens. They’re sprouting up
in cities all over the world where fresh produce — and
land is scarce. The key obstacle here is the cost of energy, and the toll using
a lot of it takes on the environment. The upside is that artificial lights and
climate controlled buildings allow crops
to grow day and night, year-round, producing a significantly
higher yield per square foot than an outdoor farm. For now, though, only
expensive, leafy greens like lettuce —
or herbs like basil — have proven profitable in the vertical
system. And the jury is definitely still out on whether this is truly and environmentally-friendly
technique; One possible solution is to use blue and red
light wavelengths to optimize photosynthesis and turbo-boost growth a technique
tested by researchers at project Growing
Underground, an experimental farm operating in old World
War II bomb shelters underneath London; Another advancement in indoor farming
is the Open Agriculture Initiative,
which aims to create a catalogue of climate so temperature
and humidity can be set to recreate the perfect conditions for growing crops that
would normally come from all over the
world, locally instead. This is an attempt to tackle the food miles issue. When
produce is shipped around the world it creates unnecessary CO2 emissions.
Just look at a where a few of the items you eat today were cultivated to
understand how big of a problem this is.
The millions of people entering the middle class
every year in developing countries are demanding tens of millions of pounds of
additional meat. These ideas aim to get
the most from every animal. Who would’ve
thought Fit bits could be for livestock too? Cows are being fitted with
smart collars that monitor if they’re sick or, if they’re moving around more,
which is a sign of fertility;
Researchers at Scotland’s Rural College are
analyzing cow breath. Exhaled ketones and sulfides reveal potential problems
with an animal’s diet; Thermal imaging
cameras spot inflamed udders to provide
earlier treatment to combat a bacterial infection known as mastitis, one of the
costliest setbacks in the dairy industry;
3-D cameras that quickly measure the weight
and muscle mass of cattle so they’re sold at their beefiest;
Companies have even begun positioning microphones above pig pens to detect coughs,
giving sick animals the treatment they
need a full 12 days earlier than before. Less antibiotics
are used if fewer animals become ill for shorter lengths of time;
And a system of just three cameras, developed by researchers in Belgium, tracks
the movements of thousands of chickens to
analyze their behavior and spot over 90% of possible problems;
Here is a stat that I found eye-opening: consumption of farmed fish has now
surpassed our consumption of beef.
Researchers are working to increase the types of fish that are raised.
Aquaculturists at the Institute of Marine and Environmental Technology in
Baltimore are developing an artificial
ecosystem that mimics ocean conditions so that saltwater
fish farms can be built inland. This would allow millions of landlocked people
to be able to enjoy fresh fish, instead
of consuming frozen fish grown or caught on the coast that
have to be shipped thousands of miles in refrigerated trucks that use a lot of
energy. The most exciting thing about
this experimental fish farm is that it’s actually a closed
system that creatively uses three sets of bacteria in different ways to so it
doesn’t produce any waste and even powers itself. [Dr. Yonathan Zohar]: This is
the world is most sustainably produced
fish. The system is completely and fully contained. There is
zero interaction with the environment. There is no waste. Zero waste goes back
to the environment, which is the big problem
with aquaculture today. This revolutionary technique could be critical for
saving species in the wild, like rapidly
depleting bluefin tuna populations, without curbing the appetites of sushi
lovers like me;
Another ingenious approach from a company in California are proteinaceous fish
food pellets made from the bodies of a
bacteria that grow by consuming a combination of methane,
oxygen, and nitrogen. The UN’s Food and
Agriculture Organization estimates that 2 billion people consume insects
as part of their diet. [Insect eater]:
alI eat insects like this because they provide nutrition. The nourish
the body, they are not too fatty but have lots of good ingredients. If you eat
these all the time, you will get sick
very rarely. Bugs are among the cheapest, most nutritious,
environmentally-friendly sources of protein.
So there’s a growing movement to find new ways to incorporate them into food
products that can be marketed in a way
that doesn’t gross people out. Some
examples are protein powder and insect flour.
But even if insects never make it
onto many of our plates, they can still
help us a lot as animal feed; On the
other end of the alternative protein spectrum is lab grown meat. In 2013 the
first hamburger was made from muscle
cells grown in a lab in the Netherlands, followed by a
meatball grown by a California company called Memphis Meats. These grabbed
headlines, but production costs need
to come way down before we’ll be buying synthetic meats in significant
quantities. [Dr. Mark Post]: So it is better
for the environment. And we need much less resources
to actually produce it so that we can produce much more meat with much less
resources so that we can feed the entire
planet. And we’ll probably look back at this time as sort of
barbaric, that we still killed animals and used animals to such a degree for
our meat consumption. Human survival on
earth has, by necessity, driven us to use--and change--the world around
us. Some of our most powerful innovations are aimed at solving problems we ourselves
create. As climate patterns change and human population rises, the prospect of
a global food shortage becomes
increasingly dire—it’s a threat that even the deployment of millions
of autonomous farmer-bots would be unlikely to solve. But where man-made
machines may fall short, bacterial
machines may very well prevail...bringing me to the technology that
can continue to deliver the biggest increases in crop yield: genetic
modification. Scientific breakthrough
like CRISPR, genomic selection, and SNP’s now allow single letters with in
a gene to be precisely edited. Unlike older methods of genetic manipulation,
like transgenic modifications that made
uncontrolled alterations to large regions of DNA,
CRISPR — a gene editing system repurposed from bacteria more closely mimics
the process of random mutation. This
process is critical for environmental adaptation, Darwinian
natural selection, and — ultimately — evolution. While this fact alone may
not placate the most passionate
anti-GMO advocate, highly precise techniques, like CRISPR should help
ease the legitimate health and environmental concerns that have thus far curbed
significant commercial investments. But
not everyone is sitting on the sidelines.
Two large agricultural companies, DuPont and Syngenta, have used genome
selection to develop two new,
drought-tolerant strains of corn called AQUAmax and Artesian.
Then there’s the NextGen Cassava project led by Cornell University, in
partnership with research institutes all over
Africa, that aims to significantly increase the
rate of genetic improvement in cassava breeding to unlock the full potential of
this staple crop that’s central to food
security and livelihoods across Africa. Genetically improving the cultivation
of other crops that haven’t been modified yet could
additionally lead to huge yield increases for millet and yams, for example;
Rice, one of the world’s most important crops, has seen its yield plateau meaning
that, for years now, the maximum amount that can be grow on, say, an acre of
land has not increased. The C4 Rice
Project — a massive global collaboration
between 18 biology labs spread across four continents — is trying to change
that. Their goal is to genetically
engineer a new strain of rice so that its photosynthetic process
works more like maize, which would — theoretically — turbo boost its yield
by 50%. And, of course, it’s not just
crops, pig lines are being altered to make them immune
to an illness that costs American farmers $600m a year.
While it is hard to predict which of these developments will have the greatest impact
on food production, we should be pursuing all of them. The use of genetic
technologies will, inevitably, prove
essential for tackling what would likely be an insurmountable challenge,
sustainably doubling our global food supply. The good news is that some of the world’s
most creative scientists, engineers, farmers, and innovators are working on
solutions for this problem, even as you
watch this video. This piece was based
on articles that recently appeared in the Economist and the journal
Nature. And our recent video on India’s
highway megaproject led some of you to suggest other
projects for us to look into. Your suggestions for video topics are always appreciated.
Thanks for watching. Until next time, for TDC, I’m Bryce Plank.
