Even today, IT specialists are a farmer’s best friend, and the use of digital technology in agriculture is ubiquitous. The tractor that revolutionized nineteenth-century farms has become a computerized workstation, now a combination of sensors and instruments, the interface between the driver and the land it handles. Chicken houses and barns have evolved into high-tech conveyors controlled remotely. Internet-connected environmental sensors have given farms real brains and access to big data. One of the leaders in this market is the Dutch company Lely. In its catalog you can find a working concept of an automated dairy farm with more than 500 head, where the functions of milking, feeding and harvesting have been fully transferred to robots.
Efficiency also plays an important role in modern farming. For example, the Danish Pig City farm uses pig waste as a complete internal energy source for growing tomatoes. Urban Organics’ aquaponics systems allow them to grow fish and vegetables using only 2% of the water used in conventional farming. The production cycle consists of two main parts: an aquaponics farm whose water and waste are used as instant fertilizer for a vegetable plantation under artificial light. The Carrot City Agrocultural Research Project explores the impact of design on agriculture by assembling a database of solutions, prototypes, and unrealized ideas that improve production with non-obvious solutions.
However, neither computer technology nor design savvy can support the necessary future growth of agriculture without the help of genetics. The term GMO, demonized by the mass media around the world, did not appear today. The transfer of genes from one plant to another has been practiced by man since the earliest days of agriculture, when breeding began. Direct penetration into the structure of the genome occurred in the early 1970s. The first genetically modified organism was a bacterium that received an antibiotic resistance gene from another strain. Commercial GMO products began to appear in the 1990s. One of the first was the shelf-life tomato, in which the genes responsible for rapid rotting were removed from the tomato DNA.
By the turn of the century, tomatoes were joined by corn, soybeans, rape, potatoes, cotton, rice, beets, and others. The superpowers of GMO foods today are astounding in their breadth: they are resistant to adverse environmental conditions, resist pests, grow faster, and have a more pronounced taste and nutritional value. In the last few years, animal products have been added to plant-based products: cows and goats, whose milk is now healthier and can even cure blood diseases, salmon, which is able to grow for a lifetime. Meanwhile, the GMO industry is only at the very beginning of its journey, promising even more fantastic achievements in the next decade.
GMO plants are growing in 30 countries and occupy about 25% of all agricultural land. It is the fastest growing tool of farming in the world. In the U.S., about 95% of farmers growing corn, soybeans, cotton and sugar beets use biotechnology because it helps them produce a better product and reduce the effort involved. GMO developments have been sold for more than 20 years, and in that time there has not been a single case involving consumer health and safety. New genetic modification tools are increasingly editing the DNA to create new and more interesting combinations of traits. Biology is the main key to solving the problems of increased food demand that lie ahead.
We are also seeing explosive development of tools related to data collection. Orbiting satellites allow us to observe fields on a daily basis, giving farmers previously unavailable valuable information. We can take a teaspoon of dirt, extract DNA from it to truly assess soil health and the types of microorganisms living in it. We have sensors built into farm machinery that can localize every plant in a field and build a meter-by-meter map of the fields. All these tools help farmers optimize their farms like never before.