World Majlis
Farms of the Future: Feeding the Planet with Technology
As the human population continues to expand at unprecedented rates, we will need to find innovative solutions to ensure the future availability of food for all within the limits of our planet’s resources.
In order to feed the two billion more people expected to join Planet Earth by 2050, it is estimated that global food production will need to increase by up to 70% in the next 30 years. Since most land suitable for agriculture is already farmed, this growth must come from higher yields.
Intensive agriculture may have been successful at feeding most of the Earth’s inhabitants, but it is also degrading the land and contributing a quarter of the planet’s rising temperatures. Farms of the future will hence need to be radically different from those of today as they adapt to climate change and a scarcity of natural resources to be more productive, profitable and sustainable. Spraying entire fields with water, fertilisers, and pesticides, or maintaining today’s levels of meat production, will no longer
be an option in the future.
Will technology provide the solutions or are other low-tech innovations part of the answer in ensuring we are all able to eat enough and well?
