For companies such as Bowery, Blue River Technology and Trace Genomics; advancements in technology, artificial intelligence and machine learning are shaping the solutions that they innovate to advance food security in communities.
For Bowery Farming, their BoweryOS serves as the central nervous system at each Bowery farm, offering plants individualised attention at scale. It works by collecting billions of data points through an extensive network of sensors and cameras that feed into proprietary machine-learning algorithms that are interpreted by the BoweryOS in real time.
Companies like Blue River Technology are enabling farmers in the field to optimise their agriculture processes of planting and herbicide usage thanks to computer vision. Trace Genomics is helping farmers detect early signs of disease in crops.
So how does it all work?
Let’s say you have one concrete room of space that you want to use for farming. The traditional solution would be to demolish this room to create ground clearance for your crops. After this, you would then have to ensure that these crops get the right nutrients, enough sunlight and you’d pretty much be at the mercy of our current weather seasons.
With technology, this changes. For one, you don’t have to demolish your concrete structure and can actually grow your crops vertically in that one room. Vertical farming is the agricultural process in which crops are grown on top of each other, rather than in traditional, horizontal rows. Growing vertically allows for conservation in space, resulting in a higher crop yield per square foot of land used. Vertical farms are mainly located indoors, such as a warehouse, where they have the ability to control the environmental conditions for plants to succeed.
Growing vertically allows for conservation in space, resulting in a higher crop yield per square foot of land used.
What’s even cooler with vertical farming is that you often do not have to rely on the fertility of your soil to grow crops. With methods such as hydroponics , the plants’ roots are suspended in nutrient-rich water. This water is usually packed with a carefully calculated mix of plant-specific nutrients, such as nitrogen, phosphorus, and calcium, and carried throughout the grow system to the plants.
Even better is that with technology such as AI you can also regulate the plants’ exposure to light, how much water they’re getting, catch cases of disease and also know when they’re ready to be harvested.
What are the advantages of vertical farming?
- It saves a chunk of land.
With industrialisation only going up, available land for farming is getting more scarce. Unfortunately some governments have even resulted to cutting down forests in an effort to secure land for agriculture. Vertical farming solves this problem as it allows farmers to grow crops at scale with a limited amount of space.
- It saves a lot of water too
Statistically about 70% of the world is covered by water, but only 2.5% is fresh. Only 1% percent of freshwater is easily accessible — and agriculture consumes 70% of it globally. With the hydroponic method of vertical farming, the nutrient infused water used to grow the plants is often filtered and reused ensuring that not too much of it goes to waste.
Lessons from this
With a mixture of technology and innovative styles of farming, it’s clear that technology has the potential to play a key role in today’s food insecurity problem.
However this does not negate the fact that most small scale farmers do not have access to these technology advancements. This is why it’s crucial that in the process of innovating for the future, we always involve indigenous and local people as they come with knowledge and expertise that will only advance our solutions.
