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Smarter farming to feed the world sustainably

Food, glorious food! Despite global population growth set to be lower in a post pandemic age, we believe that this factor alone may not be sufficient in alleviating the pressure to feed world sustainably. For example, the negative issues of climate change, environmental and labour factors from agriculture are increasingly at the top of the mind of society, companies and investors.

By 2050, we expect the global population to hit 8.5bn. The UN expects each person to consume 12% more than they did at the turn of the century. We believe this implies that total food consumption may grow by 60% at the midpoint of the century.

In this report, we outline key data point observations, issues and pressure points for feeding the world sustainably. This includes global population growth dynamics, food demand as well as environmental and labour issues. This sets up the thematic motivation for the report and then we move on to look at how various smart farming tools are being used today in making agriculture more sustainable in the longer run.

What is smart farming? Smart farming naturally includes technologies such as robotics and connectivity, often using Internet-of-Things to track and automate activity on farms. But in the modern day, farms are also starting to use big data, artificial intelligence, drones and blockchains to process and make sense of activity in real-time. However, as the farm becomes smarter, allowing the production of crops, feeds and livestock to increase yields, reduce water use, energy and labour, this digitisation also brings issues of cybersecurity and hacking.

We believe there is value in understanding smart farming beyond the traditional definitions of simply pure digitisation. So we look at how innovations such as vertical farming, hydroponics, alternative protein for human consumption, synthetic biology and animal protein/pain killers can help with reducing water use, emissions and improving ethics in the modern agriculture setting. We also look at the regulations landscape globally to support smarter and sustainable farming.