The future of agriculture

http://www.economist.com/technology-quarterly/2016-06-09/factory-fresh

by ehudla • 10 years ago

130 44 10 years ago

akiselev4• 10 years ago

Agriculture is set for the next big revolution in the next few decades. Many thousands of years ago, developments like horticulture, domestication, the wheel, roads, and non-nomadic life styles collided together and built upon each other exponentially, ushering the first agricultural revolution. Then we had breakthroughs in trains, synthetic fertilizer, refrigerated cars, and all of the other industrialization technologies in the 19th century, which again changed the face of food and how it was grown and distributed. I'm sure I missed a few eras but these are the two big ones.

Now we've got globalization resulting in much cheaper technology and expanded markets, artificial intelligence and machine learning, ultra cheap wireless communication, ubiquitous software, and last but not least, biotechnology. As the latter advances, it will kick everything into high gear, as it already has with companies like Monsanto and Climate Corporation. Even something as simple as eliminating nitrogen from fertilizer through genetic engineering or directed evolution would have a tremendous impact on the sustainability and ecological impact of industrialized farming.

This is a good time for farmers who are always at the mercy of so many variables which they are finally starting to dig into, quantify, and control. Farms, especially smaller ones, are almost always in debt that they have to borrow before every planting and a single underperforming harvest can wipe out the business so all this added certainty is going to do everyone a world of good.

justaaron4• 10 years ago

we could stand studying how ecosystem components interact a bit more. These "variables" and "externalities" you describe are the real world outside our bubble of infantile understandings and knowledge.

akiselev4• 10 years ago

Our understanding is infantile because our technology is infantile and there is no way to escape that. How would you propose we study an ecosystem where we can't even isolate and analyze the majority of bacterial, fungal, and viral species let alone study or simulate their interactions with each other and crops at the scale of even a square meter plot?

I agree that we should be studying this area more (a LOT more), but there will always be existential risks with everything we do, regardless of how much time and care we put into our work. I for one refuse to let hundreds of millions or billions suffer and die when we have the technology to save them just because the unknowable risks offend someone's sensibilities. You and I will likely be dead by the time the consequences are felt, but we can't let all those hungry people die in the mean time just because of FUD.

fanquake4• 10 years ago

"..have to borrow before every planting" This is not limited to just small farms. In Western Australia, farm debt has been growing 8% per annum since 2000. The average farm size here is ~3500ha (8650acres).

akiselev4• 10 years ago

I'm curious if Australia is a special case because of the drought [1]. It began in earnest in 1995 and was named record setting by 2003 so I can imagine the farms had to do a lot more borrowing and refinancing at unfavorable terms in order to make it through more than a decade and a half of very low rainfall. According to [2] the Australian government provided $4.5 billion in exceptional circumstance assistance which included monetary payments and interest rate subsidies. Even with that assistance I would imagine that the drought hit Australian farmers really hard. I tried looking at the agriculture.gov.au site for import statistics but couldn't easily figure out if agricultural imports grew during that time period, and whether that hurt the domestic farms as well.

It'll be interesting to see if California farms' debt balloons like this too as they have to borrow more and more to pay for water rights and infrastructure like wells. California is basically the US's fertile crescent so maybe there will be a lot more subsidies and federal assistance just to maintain food security as a national strategic goal.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2000s_Australian_drought

[2] http://www.theage.com.au//breaking-news-national/minister-de...

justaaron4• 10 years ago

Stopped at second sentence: "fortunately" Authors bias. Is this another techno-utopian rant extolling the virtues of everything unsustainable in modern society in prescriptive format for agriculture by urban white collar workers who never touched soil in their life but take gadget buying advice from Wired.com?

orf• 10 years ago

Is this another...

Maybe you should read it and find out, rather than be perturbed by a single word.

justaaron4• 10 years ago

true. I did. I enjoyed the panel entitled "bugs in the system" as it aknowledges the complexity I'm hinting at.

I'd like to see more study of natural ecosystems in such a way that we adapted the human behavior around the already-occuring processes, and less modelling of the planet around 20th century suburban design ideals etc.

one of the largest factors that I contend will emerge will be the rebirth of local food production, perhaps technologically assisted in some regions as needed, largely due to our passing of the "negligible shipping costs" tipping point as well as improved understandings of locality, microbial cultures, and multi-celled organism interactions etc.

seizethecheese• 10 years ago

The Economist is a publication that has always taken an editorial stance.

dredmorbius3• 10 years ago

And conceals the identity of that editor.

dredmorbius3• 10 years ago

Your first impression is highly accurate.

curun1r• 10 years ago

Also missing from the article was any discussion of all the wasteful practices we have after crops are farmed. If we're to discuss how we are to feed an extra 2B+ new humans, that discussion should include things like how we can reduce the amount of food that's wasted and how we can vary diet to, for example, rely more on vegetables rather than meats since meat production is incredibly wasteful.

This article feels like a a discussion of weight loss that focuses solely on new trends in exercise while completely ignoring the role of diet. And, worse still, by ignoring that important facet of the problem, it seeks to create a moral justification for practices like GMO that many consider to be an unnecessary risk.

I can understand why the Economist would be biased towards increased production, since that increases GDP and fits into the capitalist notions of constant expansion, but optimization on the other side of the equation will be much better at helping us meet our needs for food in the upcoming century.

repliculture4• 10 years ago

While accurate on many of the recent developments, this article missed (as many precision ag/genetics editorials do) some of the key drawbacks to industrialized agriculture:

1. Herbicide resistance. We now have weeds that are simultaneously resistant to many different modes of action. Even if one were able to eliminate the impact of pesticides on the environment, it is impossible to develop new chemicals and stacked herbicides faster than evolution can find ways to work around them.

2. There are other drawbacks to monoculture ag, namely soil loss, lower quality of soil structure/microbiota, loss of ecosystem services such as habitat, etc. Increasing our yields per acre is great but we need to factor in all of the externalities. I was glad to see mention of finding new ways to associate rhizobia with cereals, but that's a long way off and for the time being no one has figured out how to have agriculture avoid massive imports (even in organic ag) of nutrients into the system.

3. Exclusive focus on the biggest staple crops, with far more emphasis on quantity than quality and producing food that is necessary for a well-rounded diet.

4. Nearly all of these solutions ignore the possibility of using ecological interactions, unique spatial designs, intercropping, perennials and other agroecological strategies to reduce weed pressure, increase nitrogen fixation etc. These other techniques are far harder and are more difficult to commercialize, but if one wants to tackle "hard" problems in agriculture, those would be the ones to address.

Just to be clear, much good will come out of the technological developments, but for the moment they're primarily tinkering around the edges when really we need a whole-systems redesign for agriculture. I recently finished a PhD focused on optimizing decisions given all of the uncertainty/variability in precision ag systems, and what I ultimately concluded (at least for row crops) is we still have a long way to go.

dredmorbius3• 10 years ago

The story of soil is a tremendously powerful one.

Ken Burns The Dust Bowl is re-airing currently (it was originally broadcast in 2012). It tells the story of the combined impacts of: 1) massive immigration onto the high western prarie, 2) mechanised agriculture, 3) hitting a period of higher rainfall, initially, 4) a false belief that "rain follows the plow", 5) intensive crop development, 6) deep plowing of virgin prarie, 7) economic cycles and patterns, affecting lending, loan conditions, ag market conditions, 8) the response of farmers -- as crop prices fell, they planted more -- because this was their only source of income, and their pattern (or antipattern) was to try what hadn't worked, but harder.

The results were staggering. From 1934-40 depending on the area, but most especially over the Oklahoma Panhandle and surrounding regions, crops were lost, families bankrupted, farms reposessed, banks failed, telephone companies failed. And up to 75% of topsoil, a one-time bounty that accumulates at the rate of a few inches per century, was lost. Only 25% of the lost land productivity was recovered.

Human hubris in the face of humble dirt is a category error.

JoeAltmaier2• 10 years ago

That said, in modern farming the topsoil is just a medium. Its nutritional properties are largely irrelevant with the advent of ammonia fertilizer. As my old Dad said, his best crop came from an eroded clay hillside.

nikdaheratik• 10 years ago

All good points, but I believe the goal of the article was to try and survey all the tech changes that have been happening in Ag the past 10-15 years and it was already pushing the word cap for a single magazine article. I suppose if they had skipped genetics, aquaculture, and maybe underground gardening they would have had more room to focus on soil and plants. But that may have been a different kind of article at that point.

repliculture4• 10 years ago

I agree that they were going for more of a survey of recent developments approach, but my perception is that they consistently overemphasize the tech as a panacea. Unfortunately that occurs quite often when tech solutions are presented - proponents address one component of the greater agricultural sustainability question but ignore all other factors. In the case of agroecosystems, those factors are incredibly relevant. that said, I definitely acknowledge your point about the word count.

Jedd2• 10 years ago

Yes, the article is very much about agriculture, and all its attendant woes.

But we're not likely to see any story about a permaculture robot soon. Several years ago I started to (on paper) design a system to merely plan and track a permaculture-style farm/environment - and then abandoned it due to complexity beyond my capacity to model.

Monocultures in comparison are painfully simple things to manage - part of why they're so successful (commercially, at least).

repliculture4• 10 years ago

I agree completely. That said, even in row-crop systems there's an incredible amount that could be done to build in more functional ecological complexity. For example, see Matt liebman's work at Iowa State.

TaylorAlexander2• 10 years ago

All I want to do is design robots for sustainable small and medium scale agriculture. I've been working on robotics my whole life, and am very interested in 3D printed robotics. I've designed a proof of concept 3D printed remote control car [1] and I think it could be possible to design a good robot for agricultural applications that people can build and repair themselves. I design open source electronics for robotics and think we'd all be better off if we owned shares in a community farm, and I want to make that kind of thing possible.

3.5 billion people on this Earth are poor farmers. If we can design functional open source agricultural robots that can be built by anyone with access to a $300 3D printer (and I think we can) we could have a bigger impact on the world than every new Silicon Valley startup from 2016.

There is a serious issue with the fact that capitalists don't make things for poor people, because they can't afford to buy the solutions. [2] I don't want that to stop me though, so I'm working hard to figure out ways of funding this project that are functional even in our capitalist world. I think I spend more time thinking about economics and social systems than I do about robotics, since the technical solutions are trivial compared to the problem of getting people to fund valuable non-profitable work. But I think that is possible too.

Right now I am working at a robotics startup and solving problems like 3D perception, behavior, team management, handling my own bullshit, etc. My 10 year plan is to have a functioning system for homesteading with robots.

I'm really trying to make this happen.

[1] http://makezine.com/projects/3d-print-badass-rc-race-car/ [2] http://tlalexander.com/restless/

eru• 10 years ago

Does permaculture actually work? So far I've only seen some hippies take it seriously..

fanquake4• 10 years ago

Could you expand a bit more on what you'd like to see in a whole-systems redesign? I'm currently trying to work out what is going to be the next "evolution" in our farms operation (~10000acres in Western Australia).

In regards to your 4th point, our cropping systems in Australia are a bit different to the states. We already grow crops in a rotation, Wheat, Lupins (Nitrogen fixing) and Canola. Depending on where your farming your might also be growing cover/summer crops.

repliculture4• 10 years ago

Great to see some folks from WA on here. I know that a university consortium (possibly spearheaded by CSIRO) advertised recently for a new precision ag initiative there. I know one person who applied, who, if he is awarded the project, will undoubtedly implement some interesting projects in your region.

For a whole-systems re-design, I think that beyond just tailoring genetics, nutrition, and herbicides to site-specific conditions, we need to be thinking about all of the interspecific interactions, spatial designs, and other natural processes that we can be harnessing. For example, we're currently constrained to operate farm machinery in a grid, or perhaps on contours. One way to improve that would be to start adding complexity to the grid. On a simple level, you could have one row of grains and one row of pulses as a means of breaking up pest migration. Slightly more complex would be to use intercropping or to perhaps co-locate crops that provide pollination services, moisture storage, or other benefits to each other. More complex would be to start using trap crops more frequently or taking advantage of natural seed predators with interspersed natural vegetation. Even more would be to incorporate trees (agroforestry) not only on the edges of the field but also within the field. Finally, once machinery is sufficiently sophisticated and the logistical hurdles are surmounted, you could break away from the grid pattern and start experimenting with other configurations such as concencentric circles or other shapes - the possibilities are endless.

We do grow crops in rotation in the states, although more in some locations than in others (about 15% of farmers where I'm from in Montana use pulses rotated with grains). Cover crops are a great option, though of course in dryland semi-arid regions early termination to prevent moisture losses is always an issue.

JulianMorrison2• 10 years ago

Vertical farms don't need to worry about pests, weeds or blights and they put the crops right by the users, in the city outskirts. So that seems like a major part of the answer.

JoeAltmaier2• 10 years ago

Don't follow. Pests, weeds and blight don't care where you put the crops. They can happen anywhere.

tspike• 10 years ago

Let me outline briefly as I can what seem to me the characteristics of these opposite kinds of mind. I conceive a strip-miner to be a model exploiter, and as a model nurturer I take the old-fashioned idea or ideal of a farmer. The exploiter is a specialist, an expert; the nurturer is not. The standard of the exploiter is efficiency; the standard of the nurturer is care. The exploiter's goal is money, profit; the nurturer's goal is health -- his land's health, his own, his family's, his community's, his country's. Whereas the exploiter asks of a piece of land only how much and how quickly it can be made to produce, the nurturer asks a question that is much more complex and difficult: What is its carrying capacity? (That is: How much can be taken from it without diminishing it? What can it produce dependably for an indefinite time?) The exploiter wishes to earn as much as possible by as little work as possible; the nurturer expects, certainly, to have a decent living from his work, but his characteristic wish is to work as well as possible. The competence of the exploiter is in organization; that of the nurturer is in order -- a human order, that is, that accommodates itself both to other order and to mystery. The exploiter typically serves an institution or organization; the nurturer serves land, household, community, place. The exploiter thinks in terms of numbers, quantities, "hard facts"; the nurturer in terms of character, condition, quality, kind.

This is a passage from Wendell Berry's The Unsettling of America. His premise is that viewing agriculture as an equation to be solved is fundamentally incompatible with maintaining the land's carrying capacity.

akiselev said in another comment, "How would you propose we study an ecosystem where we can't even isolate and analyze the majority of bacterial, fungal, and viral species let alone study or simulate their interactions with each other and crops at the scale of even a square meter plot?"

We already have the knowledge of how to sustainably farm land without irreparably damaging the ecosystem (although it is dying fast); we are simply unwilling to work as hard as it would take to do it and are hoping for a technological breakthrough from an expert to solve problems we can't even verbalize.

akiselev4• 10 years ago

We can verbalize the problem: our population growth has outpaced our investment in agricultural technology and infrastructure such that in order to even try to feed everyone, we have to turn to ever more drastic measures that are unsustainable or carry worrying existential risks. It is only in the last decade or so that farmers are finally going full force in with tech that was standard factory equipment thirty or even fifty years ago except now designed for farmers. There is no technological breakthrough coming, we already have all of the technology and the rate at which its costs are dropping is monumental. Finally the low margin businesses that feed the human race are able to afford it.

As the article talks about, this is largely because the old equipment and seed manufacturers, the ones the farmers trust for their farm, are finally starting to provide "smart" machinery and even cloud services with mesh sensor networks. Combine this with genetic engineering of nitrogen fixating bacteria, breeding guided by genetic screening, and all of the hard work that people like Norman Borlaug have done and will do and we will be able to sustainably feed our civilization without a high chance of running face first into an ecological catastrophe.

ciconia• 10 years ago

No, automating stuff and using technology to protect crop from "the vagaries of nature" (what a ridiculous idea!) will not solve the main problems of modern non sustainable agriculture, namely soil erosion, contamination and monoculture vulnerability.

Despite constant technological progress, agriculture sadly remains one of the top contributors to global warming. Unless the whole concept changes I really don't see how we can avoid a global catastrophe.

fanquake4• 10 years ago

In Australia, there's a far greater yield benefit to be gained from farmers buying a deep-ripper/mulboard plough(break the hard pan and allow root growth), switching to CTF(prevent a hard pan from happening again), switch to a no/minimum till system, spreading lime(correct soil pH) and maybe spreading clay (mitigate soil erosion).

All of these practises are also "low-tech". You'd want to use VR maps to spread your lime[0], and possibly clay (although it's fair easier to pick out soil erosion by eye as opposed to varying pH), so it's probably not needed.

Once you've sorted out the fundamentals, then it makes sense to start more precision ag. There's no point trying to grow a 5t crop when your roots can't even get down to the soil moisture.

[0] Example VR lime maps, pick Lime from the available layers - https://hectare.ag/nooka

keithnz2• 10 years ago

I work for a company where we sell lots of Ag monitoring stuff. We are based in NZ, but sell into Australia and are now also moving into the Central Valley. Many get a lot of benefit from managing their water.

Thupli2• 10 years ago

Anyway you can point me towards more information about your company and its instrumentation?

I moved to the Central Valley recently and have been searching in vain for some technician type work in ag/soil moisture monitoring.

tridentlead• 10 years ago

A lot of interesting work has been done by the Israeli hydroponics industry around water conservation like some of the stuff in this article (as they grow their food in very high temperatures).

ehudla• 10 years ago

As well as high-tech/data science techniques in the quest for greater milk production.

epicaricacy• 10 years ago

FTA:

RTDS has already created one commercial product, a form of rape

Whoa whoa whoa. Phrasing.

The future of agriculture

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