and i'm back because you know how often do you get a backdrop like this uh we're going to talk
about agriculture today some of the questions that have been coming in or what sort of technologies
do i see on the horizon that can actually move the needle considering some of the more dire
predictions i've made and really the only big ones i see are in ag and it's the marriage of
digital technologies to agriculture so when we were new before the industrial revolution most
agriculture was really more like gardening with people tending to each individual plant
and it's not that that's a bad system that's a great system it generates massive amounts of
agricultural surplus when plants get individual attention but it does mean you need a lot of
labor so the only places that still do that sort of agriculture today are in china with some of
the rice fields and in some parts of sub-saharan africa and papua new guinea pretty much everyone
else has moved to industrialized agriculture tractors combines fertilizers pesticides
that generates slightly larger yields per acre but with like one percent two percent of the labor
input so it's a different cost structure but it also requires global supply chains
the combines the tractors are only made in three or four places brazil germany france
united states china um i guess that's five uh but the real problem is all the other inputs uh
fertilizer is derived from natural gas pesticides fungicides and herbicides are largely derived from
oil these are things that have to cross international boundaries and about 80 percent of
the calories that we generate as a species have at least one imported input usually that fertilizer
pesticide set if you remove those things from modern industrialized agriculture yields drop
by over half almost overnight and that assumes you can still get the equipment and the fuel to run it
so if you de-industrialize an industrialized agricultural system output drops by 90 percent
in a very short period of time because there isn't the labor in place to do gardening in the world i
see the number of calories that we're able to generate as a species is going to drop by at
least half minimum because you're going to break down those systems and allow it all to happen
that brings us to digital technology there are two changes in digitization that are now being
married to agriculture that will allow at least some places to counteract this
trend of general collapse the first is genomics and that's everything from gmos to gene editing
it's gotten so good that we're probably going to see yields in the places that can apply it
double in just the next 10 years the big difference between the two is gmos you
take like a gene from a unrelated species and you put it in so it like generates natural pesticide
whereas gene editing you're messing with the genome of the plant itself and doing something
that theoretically could evolve on its own even if it takes like 100 or 200 generations as a rule
uh the folks that are opposed to gmos think that gene editing is just cool honestly i don't see the
difference really between the two but hey i'm not a protester anyway so that's number one uh number
two is facial recognition it's gotten so good that you can put a camera on a tractor
and drag a unit behind it that will take a photo of each individual plant and just i hide if it is
uh if it needs a little bit of fertilizer gets a squirt of that if it needs pesticide it gets the
squirt of that herbicide squirt of that is it a weed you know really hit it with a herbicide and
you can reduce the inputs by like 80 while doubling the yield it's digital gardening
individual attention to each individual plant but on an industrial scale and that is going to
be able to double output in the next 10 years the problem with both of these technologies is they're
not cheap a lot of equipment a lot of upfront work a lot of maintenance and so it can only be
applied in places that have deep financial access that's primarily the first world and very very
very large fields so you can spread out the cost of the equipment over a lot of a production zone
that's australia that might be parts of france that's the united states and canada
maybe argentina maybe a little bit in brazil and that's about it so you're looking at 15
maybe 20 percent of the world's agricultural land being able to explode and what they can
do and everything else looking a lot more like that all right that's it for me until next time
over the next two decades a technological wave will revolutionize the efficiency of farms
all over the world it can't come soon enough by the year 2050 the human population will be nearly
10 billion which means we'll need to have doubled the amount of food we now produce this is an
examination of the agricultural innovations coming down the pipeline that will help get us there
the industry has undergone major developments over the last century 100 years ago farming
looked like this today it looks like this and tomorrow it'll look something like this
these changes have allowed many of us to do other things with our lives in 1900 about 11 million
agricultural workers produced the food for 76 million people today just 6.5 million workers
feed 321.4 million americans two factors were most responsible for the surge in productivity
engines and the widespread availability of electricity today the innovations on our
immediate horizon include autonomous pickers uk researchers have already created one that
gathers strawberries twice as fast as humans the challenge will be creating robotic pickers that
can switch between all kinds of crops robots or drones that can precisely remove weeds or shoot
them with the targeted sprits of pesticide using 90 less chemicals than a conventional
blanket sprayer for the organic farmer they could zap the weeds with a laser instead
this could have a big impact the un estimates that each year between 20 and 40 percent of global crop
yields are destroyed by pests and disease tiny sensors and cameras will monitor crop growth and
alert farmers on their smartphones if there's a problem or when it's the best time to harvest
the bonnie rob can take a soil sample liquidize it then analyze its ph and phosphorus levels
all in real time as a proof of concept for all this autonomous farming technology researchers
at harper adams in the uk plan to grow and harvest an entire hectare of barley without humans ever
entering the field companies like egg robotics have already commercialized software that analyzes
drone captured infrared images to spot unhealthy vegetation then like a real life game of sim
farmer the grower is alerted on their device when a troubled area is identified machine learning
is regularly improving the system's ability to differentiate between varieties of crops
and the weeds that threaten them not to be left out a company called mavericks contracts 100
pilots to fly light aircraft that are outfitted with multi-spectral cameras on data gathering
missions over large farms throughout the country for an even wider view planet labs operates a
fleet of cubesats that take weekly images of entire farms from space to help monitor crops
other companies are creating analytics software to act as farm management systems allowing growers of
all sizes to deal with this new tsunami of data and the farmer's business network combines data
from many farms into one giant pool to give its members the power of macro level insights
that have traditionally only been available to corporate mega-farms
vertical farms are essentially warehouses with stacks of hydroponic systems to grow leafy greens
they're sprouting up in cities all over the world where fresh produce and land is scarce
the key obstacle here is the cost of energy and the toll using a lot of it takes on the
environment the upside is that artificial lights and climate-controlled buildings allow crops to
grow day and night year-round producing a significantly higher yield per square foot
than an outdoor farm for now though only expensive leafy greens like lettuce or herbs like basil
have proven profitable in the vertical system and the jury is definitely still
out on whether this is truly an environmentally friendly technique one possible solution is to
use blue and red light wavelengths to optimize photosynthesis and turbo boost growth a technique
tested by researchers at project growing underground an experimental farm operating
in old world war ii bomb shelters underneath london another advancement in indoor farming
is the open agriculture initiative which aims to create a catalog of climates so temperature
and humidity can be set to recreate the perfect conditions for growing crops that would normally
come from all over the world locally instead this is an attempt to tackle the food miles issue when
produce is shipped around the world it creates unnecessary co2 emissions just look at where a
few of the items you'll eat today were cultivated to understand how big of a problem this is
you