Working on a farm is always challenging. Having the added pressure of needing to meet a worldwide quota to avoid global food shortages certainly doesn’t help. A 2009 report published by the United Nations’ Food and Agriculture Organization suggested that agricultural production would have to rise by 70% to meet the world’s projected demand by 2050. Annual cereal production would need to increase by 43% to about 3 billion tons. Complicating this production demand is the unfortunate fact that most of the land suitable for farming is already being farmed. That means that the increases in production have to come almost entirely from increases in yields. Maybe because of these challenges, farm tech investment soared by 41% in 2021. For people up to the challenge, this is also an exciting time to work in ag tech. Meeting the demand for agricultural production will be challenging, and these emerging technologies will certainly play an important role.

The Future of Wheat Genetics

Hybrid crops like corn have been around for nearly 100 years. However, a hybrid wheat has never been commercially developed and mass produced in the United States. The answer to why is pretty easy — wheat is extremely complicated at the genetic level. A human being has 20,000 to 25,000 individual genes. Wheat has an estimated 164,000 to 334,000 genes. All that information makes it difficult to know exactly what genes can turn on and off certain self-pollination cycles in the wheat plant to make hybridization possible.

But even as development in hybridization of wheat continues, there’s another genetic development quickly approaching. In 2012, Jennifer Doudna and Emmanuelle Charpentier published their findings that CRISPR-Cas9 could be used to program DNA. Their Nobel Prize-winning research is one of the most significant discoveries in the history of biology.

Unlike the creation of a hybrid crop which utilizes genetic modification to combine the DNA of two varieties into a single organism, CRISPR technology edits a single plant’s genes and does not introduce another variety. In effect, genetic editing can shortcut the process of selective breeding for a particular trait by directly editing a plant’s genetics. Bob Reiter, Ph.D., the head of research and development at Bayer Crop Science, believes the process of gene editing opens exciting new possibilities in agriculture. “In crop science, we believe gene-editing tools like CRISPR will allow researchers to make precise improvements within a plant’s DNA,” he said.

Those improvements could include changes to make a plant more drought tolerant, to improve its nutrition or even to deactivate characteristics which would make it more susceptible to diseases. The science of gene editing is only beginning, and innovations in this sector could provide invaluable advancements to crop yields.

Working the Fields in the 21st Century

For most of recorded history, farming has relied on manual labor by humans and livestock to work the fields. The Industrial Revolution and mechanization rapidly changed the industry. Innovations like the combine condensed hours of backbreaking labor into seconds, and helped to remove the human workforce from the field. New breakthroughs in self-driving capabilities and autonomous vehicles are further reducing the number of people needed to work in the field.

Raven Applied Technology showcased their system at this year’s Farm Progress Show. The OMNiDRIVE can monitor and operate a tractor pulling a grain cart from the seat of a combine. This eliminates the need for a driver in the tractor, meaning one less person out in the field. Not only can the OMNiDRIVE work in tandem to collect grain, but it can unload on the go, allowing for the combine driver to keep moving through the field.

Also showcased at Farm Progress was , an autonomous platform that could swap farm implements like a spreader or sprayer, all without the need for a driver. The OMNiPOWER platform could be controlled by a tablet and a remote controller, allowing the operator to stand at the edge of the field and potentially beyond while the OMNiPOWER platform handled all the work.

While those technologies stay on the ground, breakthroughs in drone technology are allowing growers to collect important data points from the sky at an increasingly more affordable price point. A new precision agriculture platform from and SlantRange offers growers an incredible amount of information from the air using on-board multispectral sensors. Darryl Anunciado, CEO of Action Drone, lines out how the drone moves over a field and relays data back to a controller: “On a tablet, we draw the area of the farm that needs to be inspected. The software itself will calculate the flight requirement it needs so that we cover the area and collect the data. Once the drone lands, it’s automatically uploaded via software to process the data. Within 30 minutes, you now have multispectral information on your tablet about the health of your fields.”

Applying Data, Mathematical Precision and Neural Networks to Agriculture

The application of mass data gathering from tools like multispectral analysis on field and crop health is just starting to be utilized at a commercial scale. By detecting areas of need or concern, growers are better able to control the inputs that their crops need, furthering monetary and sustainability goals.

In the not-too-distant future, the application of this data with improved drone systems can offer growers an extremely precise method to look after their fields. “We can have a drone airplane ‘mother ship’ collect multispectral data. It will send that data to a drone swarm system, and it’s telling the drones, ‘Hey, you need to apply more nitrogen here, in this specific spot’ or ‘Apply a herbicide directly here to take care of a focused problem area,’” Anunciado said. By being able to directly address problem areas, mass chemical sprays into the soil can be greatly reduced, with input only happening at the areas and sites that need treatment.

Breakthroughs in the application of neural networks could offer another major breakthrough for how fields are managed. A neural network is a type of machine learning meant to mimic how the human brain works. The network is trained to recognize certain types of inputs and deliver a specific output. Researchers at the Institute of Wastewater Management and Water Protection in Hamburg University of Technology developed a neural network which could identify weeds in the rows between crops with up to 95% accuracy. They suggest that a land-based drone platform could use that data and treat problematic areas, without human input.

Precision technology and the myriad of technological innovations entering the market could offer a transformational change to the agriculture sector and how growers manage their fields. For Mark Young, the CTO of The Climate Corporation (a subsidiary of Bayer), application of transformational technology can help all growers, no matter where they live. Speaking to Disruptor Daily, Young said, “My vision for the future of agriculture is a digitized world where all farmers are able to use data to make better-informed decisions and precision technology to flawlessly execute every decision on their farm.”

Are you using any of these technologies in the field? What innovations in agriculture are you most excited about? How do you think the industry will change in the next 20 years? Connect with us on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram to be part of the discussion!