The Future of Agri-Food In The Post COVID-19 Era — Part V-Digital Agriculture

New Era for Digital Agriculture

by Yekta Kuseyrioğlu

The Unprecedented Crisis

2020 could go down in history as one of the most “tumultuous” years that our generation has ever experienced, as we are still in the grip of a global health crisis. The COVID-19 Pandemic has not only caused a health and economic crisis all around the globe but highlighted the fragility of our food and agriculture system.

Though still being investigated, COVID -19 is most probably a zoonotic illness, meaning that it was transmitted between animals and humans.

Through this pandemic, it’s been proven that we should create a more sustainable and resilient agri-food system across the globe if we want to live within healthy and food-secure societies.

Time to Move the Needle on Agriculture

In Pre-COVID-19 times, most of us were not thinking much about our food and agriculture system. We were too busy in our fast, dizzying urban lives.

Now, we are in the middle of a global health crisis, living socially distant lives, and with that, comes the opportunity to think about our food; how it is been produced, where it comes from, and how it is being distributed.

We know that the agriculture sector has faced difficulties in this period, just like other sectors. At the beginning of this pandemic journey, as a part of lockdown, restaurants, schools, hotels, and many of the food providers were closed down, and their dropping demand negatively affected farmers. Some producers had to dump their fresh milk, and some farmers destroyed fresh vegetables that they can no longer sell. In the meantime, in some European countries, panic-buying caused empty shelves, and producers couldn’t answer the demand.

Moreover, we saw field labor shortfall news. Travel restrictions prevent migrant workers to go to countries where they were needed.

We’ve also seen several solutions taking place as in Spain, and Italy allowed their illegal immigrants to take farm jobs alongside the unemployed. At the same time, France and Germany launched job-matching schemes for people who lost their situation during the pandemic and can harvest crops.

Those were just a few examples of the challenges that the agriculture sector has faced. The pandemic has shown us the strategic importance of agriculture and how our food system is interdependent and vulnerable.

Now, in the New Normal Era of our lives, there is light down the tunnel; with the raising awareness and will that’s can be observed throughout the globe, we’ll work on building more sustainable agriculture systems globally, with the power of digitalization and technology.

Digital Agriculture: A Silver Bullet?

Today we are experiencing the Age of 4th Industrial Revolution. The agricultural part of this revolution, Agriculture 4.0, has several names. Smart Agriculture, also is known as Digital Agriculture and E-Agriculture creates not only an economic potential but also ecological benefits. Smart Agriculture supports farmers and other stakeholders in the agri-food value chain to make decisions based on accurate data.

According to European Union: «Smart farming is the application of modern information and communication technologies (ICT) in agriculture.»

Since the pandemic, online platforms enabled farmers to supply food directly to consumers. This was an excellent relief for farmers who have been left with tonnes of products because of foodservice closures.

In the Post-COVID-19 Era, sustainability will be the main concern of agriculture and Smart Agriculture could help to achieve it.

Digitalization can help the producer’s workflows to be more flexible, enable harvesting to be monitored. Precision Agriculture can help to optimize pesticide use, and robotics can be used for harvesting and reduce labor shortages. We know that digital agriculture may not be the “Silver Bullet” yet, it could help to reshape the global food systems into a sustainable one.

Here’s Your Latest News

We have summarised some Digital Agriculture news for the last couple of weeks from all around the world.

· The global digital agriculture market is estimated to reach USD 6.2 billion in 2021.

· Root AI raises USD 7.2 Million for its harvesting robots amid global pandemic fuelled demand.

· Sensei Ag uses its AI platform and hydroponic technology to produce food.

· Greenfield Robotics works with robots to tackle weeds.

If you want to learn more about smart agriculture, you can also check out our report on the subject.

For any of your questions or feedback, you can shoot us an email to:

info@kokprojekt.com