In 2019, we will continue to witness the negative effects of climate change on global food production. As temperatures rise, droughts will threaten crops and biodiversity loss will decrease yields and erode soil quality. The necessity of sustainable farming practices, that have less negative effects on the environment and that can deal with climate change effects, will thus increase. In the coming years, we will see three shifts in agriculture that will lead to such a transformation: from an overuse of pesticides to precision farming, from traditional to intelligent farming, from high environmental costs to climate-smart solutions. These are the signs of the next Green Revolution.
The Green Revolution of the mid-20th century brought an agricultural transformation which more than tripled the world food production in half a century. Food production per person grew sharply, despite the rapid growth of the global population. This success was most visible with rice growers in Asia and the fact that people across the globe were lifted out of poverty. Generally speaking, this was the result of the global introduction of inorganic pesticides, machinery and high-yield crop varieties that had previously only been used in some Western nations. However, as the effects of climate change and the environmental damage caused by farming take their toll, evidence shows that the productivity gains of the first Green Revolution will begin to plateau amid accumulated environmental problems. Because of this, a second Green Revolution is needed to intensify agricultural production in a sustainable manner. Three signs point to this next shift in agriculture.
First, there is a gradual shift from overuse of pesticides to precision farming. The Green Revolution resulted largely from increased use of inorganic fertilizers and manufactured pesticides. Over time, however, the excessive use of pesticides, herbicides, and fertilizers brought extensive collateral damage to the environment, leading to biodiversity loss, pesticide resistance, pollution of freshwater supplies, soil degradation and erosion, and harm to our health. Precision farming offers a means for farmers to minimize the use of these products. It employs aerial images from satellites or drones, weather forecasts, and soil sensors to manage crop growth in real time. Low-key precision farming solutions begin with satellite imagery. Ubiquitous data from satellites is then turned into agricultural advice, by indicating what is needed per plot of land and sending warnings for drought, flooding and diseases. It leads to higher crop yields and more efficient use of seeds, water and fertilizers. In developing countries, mobile phone-based services to provide this information are highly successful in empowering farmers to make better decisions. On a more high-tech level, farmers use crop sensors that are connected to robots and apply the exact amount of nutrients that individual crops need, while automated systems provide early warnings if there are deviations from normal growth or other factors. Furthermore, military-grade drone surveillance could provide near real-time information to farmers, commodity traders and food producers, while at the same time dramatically increasing crop yields and mitigating damage stemming from climate change.
The second shift ties in with the first shift to precision farming. The data made available through precision farming will be analyzed, managed and shared, making farming intelligent. Aside from pesticides, the Green Revolution was a result of new machinery. It created a shift from human labor to industrial machinery. The machinery of the next Green Revolution will be digital machinery: 5G, IoT, AI, cloud technology and mobile technology. It enables the farmer to further automate processes and reduce the need for manual labor. We can therefore expect more data-as-a-service parties that offer analytics based on agricultural data by using AI and machine learning, such as Microsoft FarmBeats. Cloud technology allows for these massive amounts of data to be stored and managed from anywhere, from the farmer’s office to an external advisor. Networks allowing farmers to share their data and insights, such as Farmers Business Network, a digital platform dubbed “Google for farmers”, gain relevance as the new technologies born of the information age begin to be adopted in farming.
Third, climate-smart solutions will start spreading across the world. In a world of climate change, climate-smart agriculture can de-risk investments in agriculture and help food-insecure regions. During the Green Revolution, new crop varieties and livestock breeds led to sharp increases in food production worldwide. Again, new crops are necessary and readily available, such as plant varieties that are more efficient at converting nutrients to biomass, tolerate drought and/or increases in salinity, or with resistance to specific diseases. Other climate-smart solutions involve adjustments to the changing climate. Whereas the Green Revolution led to the industrialization of agriculture and strained fresh water resources, new saline agriculture techniques use salt water for irrigation, yielding plants that look and taste exactly like their freshwater counterparts. Another example of a climate-smart solution for protection against droughts while improving yield, is to unlock the potential of microbes by coating seeds with microbes, for instance, as is done by the start-up Indigo. Furthermore, 2019 will further show us how CRISPR, the new gene-editing technique, will prove its relevance in creating sustainable crops, as it offers the possibility to alter the genes of crops in a precise way, e.g. to make them more pest- or drought-resistant.
2019 will be a challenging year for food security, but the mentioned transitions point to the possibilities of a next Green Revolution, supporting not just big agriculture corporations but especially small farms in developing countries to increase food production in a sustainable way.
