Reinventing Food & Agriculture
Section 9 of “Reinventing Societal Infrastructure with Technology” which will be released end of January. I will be posting a new section daily. Please share your feedback as this is a work in progress.
Key drivers: Robotics, machine vision and AI, plant by plant care eliminating much of herbicides and insecticides, meat alternatives, sensory technologies to pack sensation with nutrition, better land use, drone and satellite imaging, better seed and chemical technologies, microorganisms, precision agriculture.
Whether any of the current “meat equivalent” food production companies changes the world or not, in order to get past the ills of animal husbandry and return our planet and land to its healthy, diverse ecosystem, something like Impossible Foods is necessary to match the taste of red meat. Whether it becomes a huge googlesque impact, a role model, or a footnote in history, it proved the possibility of food reinvention. Multiple entities working on reducing the impact of meat production, consuming a very large part of the planet’s usable land mass and a humongous percentage of freshwater use on the planet. It takes 1,800 gallons of water to produce a pound of beef. Growing the amount of feed grains necessary for just raising livestock accounts for 56 percent of the U.S water consumption. Similar efforts are underway in dairy alternatives. It is possible to reduce the land required for animal husbandry by 50 percent or more, despite the increasing demand.
Traditional agriculture companies developing robotics technologies are dramatically reducing the need for herbicides and eventually other chemicals. Even plant by plant care, dosing of fertilizer or herbicide or insecticide in a million plant field is entirely feasible with robotic technologies. This can lead to higher yield, lower inputs, and lower environmental damage. Why spray herbicides on the whole field when one can weed mechanically, and, perchance, eliminate herbicides all together? Perhaps we can using robotic mechanical weeding to mostly eliminate herbicides in agriculture and get rid of the hated Roundup and dramatically reduce insecticide use? Maybe we can even allow GMO plants that are generally good for society but much maligned because of the negative impact that glycophosphates (Roundup) has on environments and GMO plants are most closely associated with Roundup Ready plants, can be freed from it. Eventually, these technologies will allow for plant by plant care even in a field of millions of plants. They will allow for far less nitrogen use, more yield per plant, less chemicals, and far less land use. Any technology that can reduce land use is very valuable given the amount of land is fixed on this planet, and we need to reforest millions of acres to find the easiest path to pulling carbon out of the air; over a hundred out of the 116 models in the IPCC carbon reduction scenarios involve using some technology like reforestation to pull carbon out of the air). It is encouraging that area under farmland worldwide is finally declining and I suspect the decline will accelerate.
Precision agriculture also implies the use of such technologies as data science, aerial imaging, early disease detection. Further development of AI for imaging and data analysis, more easily and frequently accessed satellites, bio techniques like increased microbial communities, all aided by the use of fewer chemicals that would traditionally sterilize the soil because of new roboticized weeding and insect targeting will dramatically reduce the impact of and land use for agriculture. And it might even be that for specialized crops, vertical farms and data science led yield maximization coupled with robotic labor make a real change in the yield or resource or acres used. Of course, our sidewalk delivery robots take care of the deliveries.
Another dimension of innovation is the creation of new foods, such as beef without cows, milk from plants, eggs without chickens, all far less environmentally harmful at that.
**This is a section from “Reinventing Societal Infrastructure with Technology”. To read the previous section, click here.
