Each year researchers at IBM list “5 in 5” – five ways in which technology will change the world in the next five years. This year, the overarching theme is on feeding the world by using technology to reduce hunger and waste.
Within the next five years, the world’s population will hit the 8 billion mark, with one billion of them not having adequate access to the food supplies necessary for a healthy life.
At the same time, some 45% of the world’s food supply is currently lost to waste. So, does technology hold the key to solving the planet’s food crisis?
Here are five technological solutions being proposed, which will be discussed at IBM Think conference in San Francisco, which starts today.
From tiny seeds, digital twins can grow
The concept of building digital twins to enable us to learn from simulations has taken hold in industry, and in agriculture too, it holds a great deal of promise.
Highly accurate sensors and data-gathering technology allow increasingly detailed and close-to-reality simulations to be constructed digitally, to experiment with new methods of food production and increase efficiency and crop yields.
At the same time, the ecological impact of farming can be monitored and minimized, by allowing us to achieve a better understanding of the interactions between agriculture and the natural environment.
Governments, growers, agricultural equipment providers and food distributors such as supermarkets will all be involved in this process and will be able to gather and share data with each other through their own digital twin simulations.
The seeds of this revolution can already be seen in action thanks to initiatives such as John Deere’s FarmSightsystem which allows farmers to generate and share data-driven insights to improve crop yields.
A bountiful blockchain harvest…
