March 2, 2020

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By Adrian Percy, CTO, UPL

Fifty years ago, the inaugural Earth Day gave voice to an emerging public consciousness about the state of our planet and launched the modern environmental movement. Today, Earth Day is widely recognized as the largest secular observance in the world, marked by more than a billion people every year as a day of action to change human behavior and provoke policy changes.[1]

This year’s theme centers on climate change, arguably the greatest challenge of our time. The 2019 UN Emissions Gap Report paints a bleak picture of our current state: Greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions – the predominant cause of global warming and climate change – have risen at a rate of 1.5 percent per year in the last decade, and there is no sign of GHG emissions peaking in the next few years.[2] A corroborating American Meteorological Society study reveals that GHG has reached new levels not seen for 800,000 years.[3]

As both political and consumer focus on climate change grows, there is renewed attention on another gargantuan, and intrinsically linked, issue. Before the close of this century, 11 billion people on our planet will need to eat 33 billion meals per day. And yet, the International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI) expects global food production to continue to decrease every decade until 2050[4]. How will we feed the world as the population gets bigger and our resources become scarcer? And how can we do so while protecting our planet by dramatically curbing the carbon output and emissions linked to food production?

Agtech Innovation Is the Answer

With climate change and a fast-growing population as a backdrop, farmers are also facing a series of additional challenges: declining per capita farmland, volatile markets, evolving pest pressures, shifting consumer preferences and increasing regulatory restrictions – to name just a few. It’s clear our current agricultural and food production systems need a massive overhaul, not just incremental change. This shakeup will come in part from new, innovative technologies that can support global food security while conserving the environment. There are several key areas of innovation that show particular promise:

— Crop resiliency. Finding ways to ensure crops are fit for the future will be absolutely essential to sustain our food supply. Crop breeding techniques like CRISPR and new seed varieties that improve resiliency – whether to dramatic temperature fluctuations or other changes in the environment such as salinity and drought stress – can help crops better protect themselves in the decades to come.

— Digitalization. Cost-efficient drones equipped with hi-res imaging capabilities can identify plant diseases over large swaths of land quickly and much more cost-effectively – enabling farmers to take swift, preventative action and maximize outputs. With one-third of viable crops left unharvested and wasted on the field today, new digitized harvesting and supply chain technologies harnessing AI can help to curb waste.[5]

— Soil health. Advanced fertilizer formulations, deep-soil sensors, and improved pest and pathogen detection systems can dramatically reduce nitrogen and nutrient loss, while breaking down potentially harmful residues from the soil environment. Healthy soil is the foundation for more vigorous crops, and a wide range of soil enhancement technologies – from microbial to soil regeneration technologies – now offer ways to both manage water usage and improve soil health. Residue-free, nature-based options can help reduce erosion, maximize water infiltration, improve nutrient cycling, maximize aeration, and greatly improve the resiliency of farmland.

— Water waste protections. Eutrophication, or water pollution, due to farming creates significant GHG. Working in concert with the soil health technologies noted above providing a way to use water more efficiency, soil-based and aerial sensors can substantially reduce watering inefficiencies while improving the quality and safety of water runoff. Tapping the value of new artificial intelligence advances and smart water monitoring techniques, we can better understand what is in our water at any given moment to mitigate any possible health concerns on the farm and beyond. 

— Controlled environment agriculture. Historically, high-value crops such as leafy greens and fruiting vegetables required significant resources. Advancements in controlled environment agriculture (CEA), together with machine learning and automation, are powering smarter and more sustainable land and water usage.

— Sustainable meat Precision pastoral systems for dairy and beef cattle are surging in adoption, due in part to dramatically lower GHG emissions in comparison to typical feedlot systems. In the future, elective breeding, accelerated progeny dissemination and gene-edited forages will help to further reduce emissions without compromising quality.

A Need for Industry Collaboration and Open R&D

Despite these encouraging advancements, technology alone will not solve the many issues facing modern agriculture – nor can it ensure food security for the planet in the years ahead. The rate of innovation and on-farm deployment is still too slow to drive truly transformational and sustainable food system progress.

There’s a critical need for speed that can only be reached through collaboration and open, honest communication. Technologies in agriculture require ample testing in the field and thorough evaluation. They also often need to be registered within robust regulatory environments. This can become an incredibly time-consuming effort, especially when you do not have the networks and platform in place to push through the needed trials.

Agtech development must become more agnostic. Rather than trying to force a technology or idea to fit into an existing paradigm (and, therefore, within its intrinsic restrictions), innovation must be driven by market and crop needs. If we truly want to transform our food system, scientists and entrepreneurs must actively come together instead of working in siloes or on massive, veiled internal research platforms. It is time to break through the limitations of the antiquated large-scale research model and embrace smaller, more agile research groups that work together to solve specific problems and/or perfect a particular technology. Only then will we speed up the process and get game-changing ag innovations through the testing and validation process in a way that is both comprehensive and time effective.

Fostering stronger relationships across our industry, collaboration with others can also create new ideas and opportunities. Sharing ideas and challenging assumptions is not only important for scientific research, but it can also help to bridge the differences that can be so divisive. At UPL, we are putting those collaboration principles into action by teaming our core competencies with an expanded ag universe. Our goal is to offer the IP, testing, field development, and registration expertise needed to help accelerate the market introduction of new, young technologies from around the globe. Supporting new, agile technologies by driving faster project decisions, we want to get important technology advances to market faster.

It is time that we take an open approach to ag innovation. This Earth Day, let’s commit to collaboration. By working together, we can break down traditional barriers and significantly speed the process of getting new agriculture technologies tested, approved, out in the field, and into the hands of farmers. Together, we can drive the transformational changes we need to ensure a safe, sustainable agriculture footprint to keep growers in business and feed generations to come.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Adrian Percy is UPL’s Chief Technology Officer (CTO) for the Crop Protection business. Previously, Percy served as the head of R&D for the Crop Science division of Bayer and served on its executive committee. He also has held numerous positions in the human and environmental safety departments of Rhone Poulenc, Aventis Crop Science, and Bayer in France, Germany, and the U.S. Percy acts as a board member and/or advisor to several early stage agtech companies. He also has served as CTO of Finistere Ventures, an investment firm in the agri-food sector. Percy holds a Ph.D from the University of Birmingham.

SOURCES:

¹ The History of Earth Day. Earth Day website. https://www.earthday.org/history/

² Emissions Gap Report 2019. UN Environment Programme website. https://www.unenvironment.org/resources/emissions-gap-report-2019

³ State of the Climate. American Meteorological Society. https://www.ametsoc.org/index.cfm/ams/publications/bulletin-of-the-american-meteorological-society-bams/state-of-the-climate/

⁴ Choufani, Jowel; Davis, Claire; Fanzo, Jessica; McLauren, Rebecca. “Climate Change and Variability: What are the Risks for Nutrition, Diets, and Food Systems?” International Food Policy Research Institute. May 2017. http://ebrary.ifpri.org/cdm/ref/collection/p15738coll2/id/131228

 ⁵ Baker, Gregory et al. “On-farm Food Loss in Northern and Central California: Results of Field Survey Measurements”. Science Direct Resources, Conservation and Recycling. Volume 149. October 2019. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0921344919301296