#Precision farming Gains Global Foothold (Op-Ed) Lloyd Treinish leads the environmental science team in the Industry Solutions Department at the IBM Thomas J. Watson Research center.
A co-developer of IBM's Deep Thunder precision agriculture system he contributed this article to Livescience's Expert Voices:
Op-Ed & Insights. Our world is getting larger and hungrier with every tick of the clock.
Indeed each second the world's population grows by two more people and by 2050 food production must increase by at least 70 percent to keep pace.
Unfortunately about half of the world's food is consumed never due to inefficiencies in the harvesting storage and delivery of crops.
Even in developed nations about 30 percent of purchased food ends up going to waste and supply-chain inefficiencies only exacerbate the problem.
Certainly weather-related events like the current and long-lasting drought in portions of the U s. add further complexity to the science of farming as resultant crop damage food supply shortages
which uses extensive data from a farmer's field and the surrounding region to help predict weather conditions
While collecting real-time data on weather soil health of crops and air quality is important as is the availability of equipment
Precision agriculture can help farmers from Brunei to Brazil pinpoint the best time for harvesting to mitigate crop damage and loss;
and show how and when to deploy delivery trucks to ensure immediate shipment an especially important factor in farmlands where the lack of paved roads can paralyze distribution.
Those and other smarter farming methods including techniques used early in the growing cycle are reducing weather-related crop damage by as much as 25 percent in some areas ensuring that fewer crops are wasted
According to the U s. Department of agriculture weather-related incidents cause 90 percent of all crop losses. Precision agriculture helps address that problem by improving weather forecasting
In practical terms a farmer armed with precise weather forecasting information may choose to hold off on fertilizing an area of a farm expecting heavy rains;
With 70 percent of the world's freshwater supply already going to agriculture every drop counts.
and predicting of weather effects on transportation networks can help farmers make better decisions about which routes and methods will be fastest to transport harvested food.
Coupling predictive analytics and modeling techniques with other sophisticated farming methods can prove to be quite beneficial
For instance many farmers are now using methods like flow-through irrigation drip irrigation micro-sprinklers and more efficient use of groundwater to increase yields.
Getting more crop per drop not only improves farm productivity but provides enough return on investment to fund additional high-tech solutions.
While the days of farmers using the divining rod to find water are passed long since many farmers especially in developing countries still rely too much on guesswork in making planting irrigation and harvesting decisions.
By combining supercomputing and Big data analytics with other technological innovations even farmers with modest means can bolster production and profits.
And all of us who eat will be grateful. The views expressed are those of the author
According to the Food and agriculture organization of the united nations global animal agriculture produces vast amounts of crops to feed billions of farm animals long before they are consumed themselves.
The scope of animal agriculture s impact on climate change has for decades been underestimated. The raising and slaughtering of farm animals is just one component.
Raising animals for food also includes feed-crop production which requires extensive water energy and chemical use as well as energy for transporting that feed live animals and animal products.
As a result of animal agriculture's impact on climate change organizations like the Natural resources Defense Council and the Sierra Club support eating more plant-based meals.
About a half-billion fewer animals are now being raised for food than just several years ago reducing animal agriculture's global impact.
#Could bacteria from honeybees replace antibiotics? Bacteria are increasingly outsmarting our most overused antibiotics creating a boom of drug-resistant diseases.
Could honey's secret weapon against bacteria be other bacteria? Researchers in Sweden recently discovered a unique group of lactic acid bacteria living inside honeybees'honey stomachs an enlarged section of esophagus where the insects store nectar while foraging.
According to a newly published study those 13 bacteria are experts at stifling other bacterial infections including dangerous superbug strains such as methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA) Pseudomonas aeruginosa and vancomycin-resistant Enterococcus (VRE.
These bacteria represent one of the greatest symbiotic flora ever found in a single organism the researchers write protecting all honeybee species
It seems to have worked well for millions of years of protecting bees'health and honey against other harmful microorganisms.
However since store-bought honey doesn't contain the living lactic acid bacteria many of its unique properties have been lost in recent times.
Each of the 13 lactic acid bacteria (LAB) plays a role in turning nectar into honey according to the study
and microbial threats that varies with season and honeybee health. This study bodes well for developing countries given the availability of fresh honey
but also for many developed nations where antibiotic resistance is on the rise. The researchers say their next step is to investigate wider use of these bacteria against topical infections in more animals including humans n
but sterile ash that can be used to fertilize crops. Referring to the Omniprocessor as a lean repository for human waste,
and by cooling the sample quickly after the reaction the researchers could produce up to ten single-atom layers of carbon in graphene's signature honeycomb pattern.
and properties of the soil, helping farmers and policymakers to improve degraded soils and increase crop production.
The map will be made from satellite measurements of soil nutrients, moisture and organic matter. These data will be combined with samples taken over the next four years at 60 randomly chosen sites across Sub-saharan africa,
where researchers on the ground will measure the soil's chemical and physical properties and its organic content.
A farmer in Malawi, for instance, could use the map which will be freely available online to find out how much fertilizer,
"This project will benefit farming families in Africa by showing how they can reverse declining soil fertility,
a major reason for slow growth in the region's agricultural productivity during recent decades,"says Namanga Ngongi,
The institute is part of the International Centre for Tropical agriculture, a nonprofit research body funded by international organizations and private foundations.
On the Tibetan plateau, for instance, the fungus harvest per unit area has dropped by 10-30%compared with three decades ago.
and management plans for sustainable harvest of the fungus. The harvest season, for instance, should be shortened to allow enough fungi to mature
and spread their spores. A rotational system for the harvest should also be implemented, so that the meadow has the chance to recover from human impact,
he says. Without such regulations,"we will soon see the end of the fungus boom,
but the Institute of Coffee of Costa rica estimates that the latest outbreak may halve the 2013-14 harvest in the worst affected areas of the nation.
the Nicaraguan government reportedly declared that it would include coffee rust on a list of special research projects designed to safeguard the country s agriculture.
and more than 90%of coffee crops were wiped out in those regions. Faced with an economic catastrophe
They have developed a catalyst that harvests the gas from methanol, a liquid fuel that#unlike hydrogen itself#can be transported easily
It will be 6-8 years before the vaccine is available to farmers, they estimate. But if the method used to create the vaccine proves successful when scaled to commercial production,
which still blights the lives of millions of people in the developing world.""Viruses are all very different from each other,
Jalas and the way he works represent a new and mostly untapped market for a new crop of genetics interpretation and analysis firms,
) Craig Smith, a deep-sea biologist at the University of Hawaii at Manoa, will lead an initial assessment of seafloor life for Lockheed s project, gathering baseline data for the potential harvest zone
They want everyone to have the chance to use space imagery to settle legal disputes from homeowners disputing garden boundaries to businesses fighting vehicle theft.
As honey is poured from a jar, it can resemble rope or thread, drizzling onto a surface in wavelike patterns.
Today, hundreds of companies worldwide are making drones for infrastructure inspection, crop-and livestock-monitoring,
If a company decides to use a surveillance drone for crop management, for instance, it can easily add software that stitches together different images to determine which areas of a field are overwatered
viewing companies that monitor crops and infrastructure with drones that require specific cameras and sensors as potential early customers.
and creating awareness about sustainable farming and improved water systems. Besides encouraging the development of locally useful technologies the program aims to improve the teaching of math and science.
and other crop problems mean income can be quite irregular for millions of Kenyans; as a result, they don know how much money they will make,
#Products of progress Back in 2009, alumna Jodie Wu 9 launched Global Cycle Solutions (GCS) in Tanzania to bring small-scale farmers an innovative product she designed in MIT D-Lab:
a bike-mounted maize sheller. Easily attached to a bike and powered by pedaling, the low-cost,
cast-iron sheller allowed farmers to process their corn 10 times faster in one day, as opposed to weeks when done by hand.
By 2011, GCS had sold shellers to more than 1, 000 farmers. But its products still weren moving fast enough to fund product development, marketing, and sales.
The startup still sells maize shellers upon request, but doesn advertise them.)The solar lamps, Wu says,
As most are farmers, she adds, the $6 in margin they earn from selling a single lamp during non-harvest months is feed enough to their family for a few days. t really about creating a win-win-win situation,
Wu says. e win in terms of bringing in profits, consumers win because they have products that help them save costs,
when she learned about the plight of 500 million small-scale farmers around the world still using only their hands and hoes for farming.
To shell corn, these farmers traditionally fill bags with cobs and beat them to loosen the kernels,
As part of the class, Wu traveled to Tanzania to introduce farmers to a pedal-powered sheller developed by a Guatemalan organization called Mayapedal.
and use the new maize sheller: Farmers need only change a sprocket on the wheel
and gears on the upper part of the bike to attach and detach devices. Now not only could farmers process all their maize in one day,
but they also retained their bikes for other uses. In 2009, Wu continued developing the device
The current iteration of the 6-horsepower thresher which has evolved extensively after years of field-testing is wheeled a cylinder thresher that can both be adjusted to handle a variety of crops.
With a majority of farmers still threshing by hand Wu says, his could potentially transform the industry.
Sometimes maize wasn ejecting properly, and the machine would jam, coming to a sudden halt and putting stress on the threads,
and used longer bolts with springs to secure the sheller so when the maize jammed,
Last week, at the Symposia on VLSI Technology And circuits, MIT researchers presented a new power converter chip that can harvest more than 80 percent of the energy trickling into it
and harvest hydrogen is one of the most intriguing ways to achieve clean energy. Automakers have started introducing hydrogen fuel cell vehicles
By nurturing watermelon seeds to maturity inside cube-shaped glass boxes Japanese farmers create cube-shaped mature melons that allow for densely-packed shipping and storage of the fruit.
Graphene a single layer of carbon atoms in a honeycomb lattice is increasingly being used in new electronic and mechanical applications such as transistors switches
because when light is absorbed by the electrons suspended in the honeycomb lattice of the graphene they do not lose their heat to the lattice
Collaborators from the electron microscopy center at the University of Warwick in England found that all the atoms in both materials formed a single honeycomb lattice structure, without any distortions or discontinuities.
which is a single-layer sheet of carbon atoms in a honeycomb lattice that was made first in 2004 by Andre Geim
graphene is a 2d sheet of carbon just one atom Thick with a'honeycomb'structure the'wonder material'is 100 times stronger than steel, highly conductive and flexible.
Within the honeycomb-like lattices of monolayers like graphene boron nitride and graphane the atoms rapidly vibrate in place.
that could harvest energy from light much more efficiently than traditional thin-film solar cells s
#So to give them a leg up the group Open Tech Forever has developed a beehive that can track the health of#bees
The Open source Beehives project is a collaborative response to the threat faced by bee populations in industrialised nations around the world.
The project proposes to design hives that can support bee colonies in a sustainable way to monitor
If you're a professional beekeeper or hobbyist and handy with electronics you get a double-whammy:
a free design for a high-tech beehive that can monitor your bees'environment and#a chance to contribute to citizen science.#
The flies are a major pest to olive crops. The idea is that the flies all male will mate with wild olive fruit flies.
#Device Could Harvest Wasted Energy From Wi-fi, Satellite Signals A wireless device developed by researchers at Duke university that converts microwaves into electricity could eventually harvest Wi-fi or satellite signals for power according to its creators.
but#it will also require existing farmland to be far more productive. If current trends continue to 2050#farmland will grow by only 20 percent
but fertilizer and pesticide use will more than double. To feed a hungry growing world agricultural ecologists need to know who will be eating more meat and where.#
An associate professor of food safety and plant biosecurity at Virgina Tech Schmale sends drones armed with petri dishes into the atmosphere to capture airborne crop pathogens.
He's planning to adapt his model to predict the movement of plant pathogens which could help farmers preemptively protect their crops by describing where to strategically deploy pesticides.
#Something Is Killing Up to Half Of America's Bees There's some kind of environmental issue/plague/apocalypse killing America's honeybees
Before about 2005 beekeepers might lose 5 to 10 percent of their hives when winter rolled around.
Now some beekeepers are losing more than 50 percent to what's called colony collapse disorder. New pesticides called neonicotinoids which are implanted directly into plants might be to blame but nothing's definitive the New york times reports.
That means a poor yield for beekeepers and ultimately problems for consumers. Bees don't just make honey remember
but pollinate a ton of what we eat--as much as a fourth of it. That could lead to less food and higher food prices.
Capitalism is a failure Marxism is the outcome capitalism has lead to this democracy becoming a corptocracy. telegraph Mobile phones responsible for disappearance of honey bee and many others just google ithailey.
when the farmer selects his seeds. On the long term this will lead to worsen relation between the bees and the plants.
Bee (mythology) en. wikipedia. org/wiki/Bee %28mythology%29bee-keeping www. reshafim. org. il/ad/egypt/timelines/topics/beekeeping. htmthe
First Beekeepers ferrebeekeeper. wordpress. com/2012/05/18/the-first-beekeepers/Scientists? Huh the scientists debate on popsci forum that is how you reason?
and mapping their frequencies and power outputs one is able to see a correlation within a set radius of bee populations affected by theses sources of non-iodizing radiation.
or none RF radiation would be places of high bee population. I wonder if this has been looked at to give validity to the above theory.
Like building giant greenhouses to grow food on to help take some strain off earth's resources.
Like building giant greenhouses to grow food on to help take some strain off earth's resources...
Since the lunar environment has none of the resources needed for agriculture (except for sunlight) just how would this take some of the strain off earth's resources?
We would have to launch water CO2 soil chemical fertilizers the materials to construct the greenhouses
and Indonesia as growers clear land for palm oil plantations. Major palm oil consumers Asian Agri Cargill Golden Agri-Resources Wilmar along with the Indonesian Chamber of commerce and Industry say they'll work with the government of Indonesia the world's largest palm oil producer to plant new palms
They have pledged also to stop buying palm oil from suppliers that destroy forests for the creation of plantations.
#Google Already Testing Delivery Robots In Australia In rural Australia a drone delivers dog treats to a farmer.
, farmers. Anaerobic digestion is considered also a less favored way of dealing with excess food. From an environmental standpoint, it's better to chop food up into deli salad,
That's the case for crops, which are plentifully regrown. On the other hand fossil fuel-produced carbon dioxide is considered different
Covering manufacturing agriculture health transport civil security and households the initiative#calledâ SPARCÂ#is the EU#s industrial policy effort to strengthen Europe#s position in the global
It could be used for small package delivery or vertical takeoff and landing, long endurance surveillance for agriculture, mapping and other applications."
and corral more user activity into the social network's streamlined walled garden rather than directing users off into the messy outside web.
But in Vietnam, thousands of farmers have turned to weaver ants to help them grow their cashews.
or deterring pests that the farmers'net income jumped 71%.%Curious whether weaver ants might be effective alternatives to pesticides in other situations
When ants came, crop yields often improved, the team concludes online today in the Journal of Applied Ecology.
Calling this"the best documented case of efficient biocontrol in open agricultural systems, "the researchers think more farmers should make use of ant control.
The idea of using weaver ants is not new they point out. About 1700 years ago, Chinese farmers could buy ants on the market to release in citrus groves,
a practice long forgotten with the invention of chemical pesticides. But now, two European companies are considering how to provide weaver ant nests to farmers,
and a Danish aid project is helping to establish ant nurseries in Africa so as to provide mature colonies to farmers interested in trying out these six-legged pest controllers.
Given that there are 13,000 ant species in the world, the potential may be limitless, the researchers note o
which could have applications such as spraying on crops or disinfecting food, as well as treating human disease.
the tobacco industry and companies that are found guilty of violating human rights, causing serious environmental damage, or corruption.
#Bacterial raincoat discovery paves way to better crop protection Researchers have discovered how communities of beneficial bacteria form a waterproof coating on the roots of plants,
which could help curb the risk of unwanted infections in agricultural or garden plants, the team says.
#Tablet for 2 waiting at an Olive Garden near you soon Olive Garden, owned by Florida's Darden Restaurants Inc,
Olive Garden president, said in a statement. Tablets have made appearances in airports, where travelers can have delivered food to where they sit,
""The rule of the garden isf you sow a single seed you should get a single plant.
""A few different designs for image sensors that can harvest energy have been proposed in the past. However, our prototype is the first demonstration of a fully self-powered video camera,
With a rising global population leading to increased pressure on food resources, it is becoming ever more essential that crop breeding programmes work to enhance the security of global food sources.
Crop breeding programmes can make use of this genetic information to ensure that the preferred trait is inherited by future crop yields,
and perform poorly when applied to polyploid species such as bread wheat (Triticum aestivum L) . which has multiple sets of chromosomes.
As an open access tool, researchers and crop breeders can submit their own data to Polymarker
and the online tool will return suggested design primers to identify genetic variations that tag vital traits in their crop samples,
This disease is responsible for devastating bread wheat crops and has developed'Warrior'strains capable of infecting individuals previously believed to have tolerance."
unless we make oilseeds remunerative for farmers by increasing import duty, "he added. Massive imports have driven down Indian soybean prices by 20 per cent in four months, discouraging farmers from expanding oilseed area.
But despite this, local soyoil is still 50 per cent costlier than imported palm oil.""Oilseed cultivation is not profitable.
who cultivates soybeans in Dewas, a district in the central Indian state of Madhya Pradesh."
"said Davish Jain, chairman of the Soybean Processors Association of India.""Our oilseed and edible oil production will not rise
India has said it plans to spend $1. 5 billion over three years to help farmers grow oil palm trees.
It has already been considering directly buying oilseeds from farmers and boosting state support for rapeseed, soybeans and peanuts.
But as of now, it is a Catch-22 for farmers and millers.""We can't sell edible oils at higher prices due to cheaper imports
and oilseed farmers are not ready to accept lower prices, "said the miller Agrawal l
#E-commerce Players Betting Big on Offline Presence Many e-commerce players have started foraying into physical retail space
a layered form of carbon atoms constructed to resemble honeycomb, called graphene. Graphene was heralded globally as a wonder-material thanks to the work of two British scientists who won the Nobel prize for Physics for their research on it.
Instead, silicon nanopillars are arranged precisely into a honeycomb pattern to create a etasurfacethat can control the paths and properties of passing light waves.
few investors gave much thought to technological innovation in our agriculture system. What a difference a year can make.
In what can be described as the Netscape moment for agriculture technology, the sector had a breakout year in 2014,
receiving over $2. 36 billion of investment across 264 deals spanning the agriculture value chain,
Most tech innovation in agriculture was concentrated narrowly in biotechnology and seed genetics, and both investment and innovation was limited to players with close ties to the ag sector.
Outside of seed genetics and crop inputs, most other Agtech was bundled typically with Cleantech. Then, in 2013, there was a shift.
and demand in agriculture shifting consumer tastes, and a confluence of new hardware technologies that freed computation from the desktop and automated multivariate collection of big data.
Rates of yield increases for major crops have been trending negatively on a 10-year curve at the very time that global forces of population growth, prosperity,
-and-demand pressure on our agriculture system. The population is growing at approximately 77.6 million per year
experts predict that we will need to double global crop production over the next 35 years. With demand outstripping supply since the emergence of China starting in the mid 1990s,
the agriculture sector has outperformed quietly all other sectors except for tech since 1999. It taken a while,
In addition to secular trends driving the agriculture sector, the public at large is informed now better about the state of our food system
and more concerned about the impact that agriculture has on the environment. Agriculture now accounts for about 30 percent of greenhouse gas emissions
a 75 percent increase since 1990, which makes agriculture a huge target for disruption. In addition, informed consumers are demanding locally grown, sustainable food with fewer chemicals,
and the agriculture supply chain must evolve to deliver such products. This has created opportunities for a new generation of startups to gain a toehold into new markets that are too small for larger agriculture players.
Finally, a confluence of hardware and software technology advances are creating opportunities to address this market.
Inexpensive and infinitely configurable mobile devices (enabled by advances in wireless and energy storage) have liberated technology from the office desktop.
and the Internet of things, have realized quickly that the agriculture value chain provides fertile first market opportunities for many technologies that are advanced not enough or have not yet found solutions in the consumer space.
Many investors looking at these technologies are going to need to get smart on agriculture if theye going to make informed investment decisions.
Growth potential Agriculture has a long value chain and the sector is described often as being more horizontal than vertical (we tracked 16 subcategoriess diverse as biotech,
Already this year, wee seen a $50m investment into drone maker 3d Robotics and a $95m investment into microsatellite company Planet Labs, both of which count agriculture as key early market opportunities.
a company called Flowhive has emerged as the highest grossing campaign on Indiegogo, raising over $6. 8 million for its honey-on tap technology,
as precision ag company Farmers Edge, fresh off a Series B from Kleiner Perkins, announced the acquisition of Granduke Geomatics.
Farmers Edge seems to be taking a page out of Climate Corporation playbook, which made several acquisitions in 2014,
Agriculture accounts for 70%of freshwater withdrawals, and under Byzantine water rights laws that date back to the 1820s there has been little incentive for farmers to manage this resource more sustainably.
In response to the massive multi-year drought, Agtech companies are developing new solutions to use water more sustainably.
It hardware/software solution enables farmers to analyze every drop of water on their property,
and has been on an acquisition spree itself with other Silicon valley startups like Farmers Edge following suit.
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