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There was an earlier post on this topic. This Economist article provide some more detail, not on the tech but on the applications. For example watering for almond crops has been reduced by 20% in one documented case by monitoring soil moisture across orchards. Sensors in soil and on tractors can monitor need for additional fertilizer, nitrogen and pesticides. GPS in tractors has been around for 15+ years to minimize covering over- and under-coverage in ploughing, planting and harvesting. It's not all IoT though. Monitoring DNA can give early-warning of potential problems in plants leading to a concept of "liveware" in addition to hardware and software. And there are bio-ag firms which develop bacteria and fungi to help promote healthy plant growth.
Having read on agriculture for years and being a subscriber to the Economist for years it surprised me they totally missed microbial agriculture that promises by far the largest gains of all in food production efficiency. Currently a one acre tank can produces as much as forty acres of farmland using a small fraction of the water and resources. In the future it's felt this ratio may climb to one acre providing the food of several hundred acres. Even if we didn't eat this food, it would provide animal feed and animals eat most of the food production. The article also didn't mention permaculture that produces a whole range of animal and plant foods with no fertilizer, much less water, no herbicides or insecticides, with a fraction of the labor and almost no equipment.
I think the future of agriculture could be in vertical farms/high tech greenhouses, where inputs and climate can be precisely controlled and with plants genetically engineered to grow under optimal conditions. Abundant, cheap energy will make this possible.
Having read on agriculture for years and being a subscriber to the Economist for years it surprised me they totally missed microbial agriculture that promises by far the largest gains of all in food production efficiency. Currently a one acre tank can produces as much as forty acres of farmland using a small fraction of the water and resources. In the future it's felt this ratio may climb to one acre providing the food of several hundred acres. Even if we didn't eat this food, it would provide animal feed and animals eat most of the food production. The article also didn't mention permaculture that produces a whole range of animal and plant foods with no fertilizer, much less water, no herbicides or insecticides, with a fraction of the labor and almost no equipment.
Perhaps constrained by a word-count limit. Always a challenge when covering a story with many facets. I imagine there are a lot of things also that could be written on advances in fertilizers and genetic modification.
Count, Permaculture produces fish, fowl, berries, grains, nuts, eggs, greens, fruits all mixed on the same plot. I it also can produce wood as a bonus. You must have studied some very erroneous information. It has been adapted for a very wide range of environments also. Different environments will produce different mixes of products. It has been done in everything from desert to rain forest and jungle environments. Many crops are already produced using variants of permaculture including large amounts of coffee. It also stabilizes the soil physically and fertility wise for plants. Although it looks simple, it's a complex science that is constantly advancing.
Bernard, I feel the Economist really missed it on this one for it missed obvious solutions to the problem completely, especially when the solutions have been out there for years. Everyone, especially including me, makes mistakes.
Anyone interested in growing food in different, unconventional methods should find the following links interesting. These fields present significant opportunities for many technologies and companies.
My point was that the reason permaculture doesn't work is that it produces the food it produces, not the food that people want. Demanding people change their food choices is a requirement of the system, which makes it less likely to be successful in the context of our economic system. However more of the permies I've met are people who think permaculture is somehow going to revolutionize our economic system, or preppers who think it's going to collapse entirely.
The other criticism of permaculture is it's simply low input = low output, but I haven't studied it in enough depth to make that argument but I think it's probably true. When I look at permaculture set ups I see a lot of shrubs and leafy greens, but not a lot of stuff that has a lot of calories in it like a corn field.
On the other hand, I see industrial greenhouses being a much better use of land because you can design them to optimize output of whatever food you are trying to produce, and you are decoupling location from sunlight/rain. So you can set up an industrial greenhouse somewhere with a lot of water, and wire in electricity from a solar farm in the desert, or you can build it somewhere with a lot of cheap electricity and pump in the water from somewhere else, whatever makes more economic sense. Pesticide and fertilizer intensity is greatly reduced because you are in a controlled environment and you aren't losing anything to run off. You can automate everything because everything is in a fixed, controlled environment - robots to plant seeds and harvest built into the greenhouse. You could have GMO plants engineered to thrive in greenhouse environments. Now that's the way to maximize productivity with a limited amount of land.
