9.5 billion humankind by 2050. Yes, that’s the sheer number of people on this planet who need to be taken care of, where the “taking care of” rightly begins with adequate food and nutrition. In the adversary of global warming and climate change, release of human and industrial hazardous contamination’s in the soil and sea, adoption of various debatable GMO’s, ruthless finishing on high seas etc. have caused irreplaceable damage to the eco system in which we exist today. Contrastingly, we also live in a technologically advancing society which is upgrading and advancing itself every minute across the globe, but even then, there are over a billion people who currently suffer from extreme malnutrition, poverty and hunger.
Hence, with all the technological advancements, it does make some sense to take a leaf out of it and apply the same to our current global agricultural practices in good faith of making our farms more profitable, by creating more and better quality yield, by changing the current business models and making them more evolving and above all ensuring that our current practices of farming (and available farm lands) are sufficient for the generations ahead.
This is where the Ag Tech (Agriculture Technology) takes birth, enhancing our food chain and the eco system we live in (land, air and sea) towards a sustainable future and profitable business models, for the good of society.
The evolution of mankind take its own time and so does his adoption to adverse changes. Likewise, look at our practices of farming i.e. from various nomadic practices to use of tractors today, use of hybrid seeds, greenhouse farming, biotechnology and now satellite technology adoptions to name a few.
Today, the constant changes in technology has brought us to the door step of GSI (geographic information system), Remote sensing, Cloud and Data Analytics, without which, meeting the demand and large economies of scale for agricultural produces is not sustainable. All these technology aid us to see, analyze, understand, generate insights and make predictions which are preventive and decisive concerning the food chain – soil, sea, ground water level, surrounding atmosphere, future production of crops and existing impacts caused by man due to over fishing, oil spillage, contamination of farm lands due to industrial hazards and toxicity of nuclear waste.
So how can the algorithms of ‘AgTech’, Cloud Computing and mining of farm data add benefit in simplifying the complexity of current practices?
These technological changes will shift the paradigm once again in current agriculture practices, the evolution mankind has been witnessing and has been advancing in ages. Though there always will be challenges such as adoption – psychological acceptance of change, financial – investment on farming techniques (R&D by food & beverage conglomerates, seed – fertilizer production companies), implementation challenges – Literacy & wireless communication in the rural spaces of developing and under developed third world countries, geo political – coming together of International Organizations under the UN and under AID from various developed nations (by understanding various long term and sustainable humanitarian solutions) and importantly, agriculturalist and agronomists understanding the potential and future predictions contribute in the power of harnessing insights based in big farm data analytics.