Feeding the One Billion Hungry through Business and Technology: a look at developments in agri-tech

In India, one of the most food insecure nations in the world, the typical person spends between 50 and 80 percent of their income on food. When food costs rise, the costs of food rise to 100…200…300% of these people’s disposable incomes. For India, and many other nations facing food insecurity across the world, food costs are the difference between satiation and starvation. By lowering the cost of food, we allow more food to fit into more budgets. In this sense, the hunger problem is in itself a business problem or, more specifically, a cost problem.

Making food cheap depends on our ability to produce more food on less land. The main cost for agriculture—whether industrial or smallholder—is the cost of land. If we can lower the costs farms pay in rent, we are already well on our way toward cheaper food globally. This article could be an agricultural real estate market article, but it is not and doesn’t need to be. The key to keeping farms’ rent costs low is something external to the housing market – it is agricultural technology. Unproductive farms equipped with insufficient technology are required to pay for more land in order to produce the same food supply. Productive farms sell cheaper food because the low land intensiveness of their production generates lower overall costs.

New technologies aimed at increasing the rates of productivity of croplands may be the silver bullet in the fight to feed the one billion stomachs which will be empty in 2050. Several new technologies, innovated in the past few years, look to accomplish higher crop yields for farms.

Crop transplanting is one process seeing major technological innovation. Transplanting is the movement of mature plants during growing seasons. Transplantation is designed to extend flowering and fruit-bearing processes, in particular for fruit and vegetable crops. PlantTape, a startup selling an automated transplanting system, improves the transplantation process by making it faster and less labor-intensive. It also allows greater areas of cropland to be transplanted. PlantTape, if adopted en masse, would allow farmers to plant more acres of vegetable crops in less time, increasing yields and in turn the food supply.

Another new innovation is the advent of precision agriculture. Precision agriculture uses big data to maximize agricultural outputs through more effective management of agricultural inputs. Precision agriculture systems help farmers track live farm data, and represent yet another essential application of digital and big data. Precision agriculture has the potential to play a very important role in the fight to reduce farming costs. Not only are the systems themselves fairly cheap, but precision agriculture also helps farms optimize their fertilizer and pesticide costs by offering pivotal data about which agri-chemicals are effective vs. ineffective. The transparent data afforded by precision agriculture can protect farms against high-cost, ineffective fertilizers, and therefore lead to less cost overall.

Indoor vertical farming offers a different model for industrial agriculture. Indoor vertical farming uses vertical shelving to grow larger amounts of crops in tighter areas. This sort of infrastructure is exactly what farms need in order to lower their rent costs. Whereas high-acreage, fertile land areas have agricultural potential priced into their rent, indoor areas are yet to catch up. Farmers can therefore buy cheap indoor real estate, such as an industrial warehouse, without the rent premium associated with outdoor farming. This means lower food production costs and therefore cheaper food.

There are many more examples of agricultural innovations shepherding cheaper food for the future. Laser scarecrows minimize crop damage and raise yields through crop protection. Beneficial insects protect crops from dangerous pests and offer a healthy alternative to pesticides. Drones, robotics, and AI make farms more productive across the board.

Together, these new innovations offer the opportunity to feed the world. Businesses today will play a major role in hunger tomorrow.