Dive Brief:
- Rapid changes in the agriculture industry point the way to new, technologically enhanced “precision farming” that could lead to major gains in food yields — possibly enhancing current capabilities to feed an additional one billion people within the next 10 years, according to a new report by AT Kearney.
- Digital technologies applied to agriculture — ranging from camera drones to GPS-enabled combines — are opening up a new wave of automation and could generate dramatic improvements in crop yields that may spark another agricultural revolution.
- Opportunities are there to bundle technologies to provide end-to-end services for growers, ranging from selecting crops to optimizing planting times, seeding rates, and fertilizer applications.
Dive Insight:
New technologically enhanced “precision farming” can lead to major gains in food yields, according to the study.
“This approach taps into extensive data to determine correct crops and optimal crop sizes while analyzing shifting patterns in climate and migration,” the report’s co-author Dave Donnan, a partner at global strategy and management consulting firm A.T. Kearney, told Food Dive. “The first step is to gather the right information via sensors that can measure soil moisture and the amount of crop nutrition (fertilizers) and crop protection (pesticides) are applied across small subsections of the farmland. Combining this data with crop growth yields, weather patterns and harvest timing, the farmer can build a database on his/her crops.”
Combining one farmer with hundreds of others, farming a total of thousands of acres of land, patterns become clear in the data to show correlations of inputs to crop yield.
This could reduce food waste by allowing farmers to better time their harvest to reduce crop waste. In the food supply chain, better data can be used to predict when products could be past their code date, and help redirect them to other destinations.
“It will provide more opportunity for farmers to share information peer-to-peer, rather than having to always go through distributors or others for the information,” Donnan said. “It will make the access to information more transparent.”
Consumers could also be able to access information on what crop protection and nutrition products were used. Currently, all that is available is organic or not. In the future, there may be better nuanced information on organic, light organic and standard.