Agribusiness: New ways to feed the world

Steven Carden, CEO of Landcorp Farming.

Can agriculture save the world before destroying it, asks Steven Carden.

At a recent agriculture technology conference I attended in San Francisco, Tom Vilsack, US Secretary of Agriculture, dropped a bombshell: to meet the needs of a much bigger population, without harming the environment, world agriculture will need to see more change in the next 20 years than has occurred in the past 10,000.

How can we produce much more food with less land and fewer inputs? Or, to put it another way, how can agriculture save the world before destroying it? Well, unless the Western world is prepared to move to an almost exclusively plant-based diet, our only hope is AgTech.

AgTech is a new class of companies focused on innovations and technologies designed to solve particular agricultural problems. This emerging asset class is attracting lots of Silicon Valley interest from companies like Google and IBM because of two phenomenon.

The first is a growing awareness that humanity faces an impossible dilemma: it can only feed 10 billion mouths in 2050 by putting the environment at severe risk in the process. For this reason, agriculture's future is being able to do dramatically more on the farm, but adding dramatically less. Less fertiliser. Fewer pesticides and herbicides. Less water. Fewer people.

The second is an emerging sense that the solution to the dilemma could be found in AgTech. AgTech could supercharge what has been happening in agriculture globally for the past 50 years, introducing science and technologies thatwill help farmers produce much more with a lot less.

Based on what I saw at the conference, the array of AgTech coming down the pipeline is staggering.

The AgTech phenomenon is driven by a convergence of technology trends that will upend farming.

The first trend is the growing application of Big Data, fuelled by the internet of Things, which is taking farming from gut-instinct to data-driven insight. It's what we at Landcorp describe as "DecisionAg". This is bridging the gap between an animal or plant's genetic potential and its actual performance.

A leading company in this space at the conference was FarmLink, which analyses weather, soil, topography and crop data from 500 million "microfields" across the US. This creates 600 billion data elements used to benchmark the performance of corn, soy and wheat fields across the country. It allows farmers to compare the performance of their land at the microfield level, then apply specific solutions tailored to the requirements of that specific patch of dirt. DecisionAg is delivering predictive insights on when best to plant and graze pasture.

This technology and data processing capability is ensuring farmers apply the exact amount of nutrients or water to land, and the precise amount and type of feed to animals, to optimise their performance, and, more importantly, to dramatically cut the amount of waste from the farm.

In the resource-scarce, environmentally-fragile world of the future, this is an exciting field called 'PrecisionAg'.

An example is mOasis, which has developed a polymer that helps soil store water, releasing the moisture only when the plant needs it.

Finally, the arrival of artificial intelligence and advanced robotics is creating new waves of automation technologies. From self-driving harvesting and mustering equipment to advanced robotic milking, the repetitive tasks in our farming system today will be automated. Just as they have been in many other industries over the past 20 years, the type of jobs farming offers, and the sorts of people we employ, will change dramatically over the next two decades.

Farming is in for a technological revolution. If New Zealand can lead the development and use of these technologies, we stand to prosper.

Steven Carden

Naturally these big changes create a range of exciting opportunities for New Zealand. Already we can see that "how we farm" is as important now as "what we farm". We can simultaneously improve our productivity while reducing our environmental impact and our high accident rate.

Even more exciting is the opportunity for New Zealand to build another leg to our economy. Given our global reputation as agriculturalists, and the strong agriculture science base, New Zealand is well positioned to build a leading AgTech sector helping tackle the world's unique farming challenges. High tech, lots of IP, high value. All the things we've been asked to produce in farming.

But we also risk missing the boat. Because there are other countries getting a leap on us. And the most significant threat is coming from a very unlikely place -- Israel. With 50 per cent of its land mass desert, and with only 20 per cent capable of arable farming, Israel doesn't immediately spring to mind as an agriculture powerhouse. But having already solved how to produce 95 per cent of its food needs, it is now the leading AgTech country in the world.

Describing itself as the "Start-up Nation", Israel operates on the premise that necessity is the mother of invention. It doesn't have the luxury of New Zealand's gentle temperate climate. So it commercialises science and new technologies (from places like New Zealand) designed to address the challenges of a world with much less water and land available for food production.

For example, Israeli companies like CropX are using New Zealand-developed technology to commercialise water-monitoring sensors in the large US market, currently reeling from California's worst drought in recorded history.

The lesson from the AgTech conference in San Francisco is that farming is in for a technological revolution. If New Zealand can lead the development and use of these technologies, we stand to prosper. However, we also could be left well behind.

Steven Carden is CEO of Landcorp Farming, NZ's largest farming company.