Modern agriculture is an ancestral practice: it has been done, developed and slowly improved through the centuries. Since the Middle Ages, the fields and the crops have remained nearly identical. As such, it is hard to imagine radically changing it over a few years. The only evolution was the colonial period, when we saw the increased production and transport of tropical crops over the oceans and continents, a practice that still exists today: the sugar, cocoa, coffee, rice and exotic fruits that we all have on our tables are shipped with modern cargo ships from America or Asia.
As per right now, about 25% of the global greenhouse gasses (GHG) in our atmosphere are a result of modern agricultural activities. These emissions come from various sources, such as the land use, the crop production or the supply chain… However, the technologies that are employed are not revolutionary.
Modern farming is inefficient: crops get sick, water is wasted, the soils are degraded over time and left unusable, and most importantly, it is an activity that produces more CO2 than it absorbs, an additional cause of atmospheric pollution.
Now the question is, can this activity be improved with Artificial Intelligence?
New ideas have reshaped the way we produce our food: there are already drones that monitor the field’s state and plant seeds, machines that are now used to detect diseases in the crop plantations, and stations that create predictions based on weather as well as crops data. AI helps this process: it can continuously analyze the plants and make decisions for the well-being of the fields: such as to detect infections and automatically deploy certain chemicals.
Whilst all of these are incredibly useful, how do they contribute to the sustainability of the sector?
First of all, when people talk about sustainability, they think that it is only referring to the green practices or environmentally-friendly actions that are undertaken. While there is some truth in these beliefs, sustainability is so much more than that: it puts together the environment, the population and the economy. When all these elements are put into balance, only then we can suppose there is a fully sustainable practice.
And the truth is modern agriculture is not a sustainable practice, as much as we would want it to be: the population is not satisfied, the economy is sometimes unstable and fluctuating along with natural disasters that impact the crops, and we have seen that it is quite environmentally harmful… Here, AI can again interfere: new production methods have now emerged because of the different computer techniques that make the job easier, one of them being vertical farming.
Vertical farming is simply growing crops in vertically stacked layers, inside a re-thought warehouse, for example.
What this involves is that the production is no longer subject to external factors: the water can be controlled automatically by computers that analyze the optimal factors of growth such as humidity and nutrients levels for each individual plantation. What that means, is that you could grow any food wherever you like! Imagine having a local vertical farm that produces tomatoes and salad but also mangoes and avocados right next to you! This would not only be beneficial for the economy, as you don’t need to buy products that were shipped thousands of kilometers, but also for the local production and the environment in all aspects. As such, (even though the costs of production still need to be improved) only now can we talk about a truly sustainable solution that might be implemented in the years to come.
Bibliography:
Comentários