Digital Agriculture: Feeding the Future

Technology has been applied in various fields and new concepts are emerging in some areas to accommodate this infusion. The concept of digital agriculture is a fairly new one; what does this mean?

According to the Project Breakthrough, Digital Agriculture is defined as “the use of new and advanced technologies, integrated into one system, to enable farmers and other stakeholders within the agriculture value chain to improve food production”

In their discussion of this concept, they noted that with a digital agriculture system is one that gathers data periodically and accurately which is combined by external sources. The resultant combined data is analyzed and interpreted so that farmers can make informed decisions.

There are three elements of discussion with regards to digital agriculture:-

1. The Technology - These include sensors, communication networks, Unmanned Aviation Systems (UAS), Artificial Intelligence (AI), robotics and the recently the Internet of Things (IoT).
2. The Potential - Digital agriculture seeks to improve efficiency and the potential is to make agriculture productive and allows for better usee of time and resources in an efficient way.
3. The Barriers - Adoption of this technology is still new and the costs are very high. The other challenge is that for these technologies to be adopted there is a need for collaboration with other stakeholders and across the value chain.

This news item is based on the information published by the unglobalcompact's Project Breakthrough report on disruptive technologies. Read the full report here