Agriculture leaders speaking at the Forbes AgTech Summit in July said technology is one of the only solutions they see to help food production meet population growth.
Technology Needed to Meet Population Growth
Speaking at the recent Forbes AgTech Summit, Dan Hodgson of Farm Quality Assurance discussed the importance of technology in agriculture. He says the future depends on it. “The most critical premise is that food production has to grow with not a lot of additional available land in order to feed people at the rate the population is growing. Just understanding how much is needed is something we don’t all clearly even understand yet,” Hodgson says. “The premise of the population growing at the rate it is and farmland needing to increase productivity, which is the total amount of food produced on an acre, needs to grow at a very large percentage in order to match what the population needs.”
Hodgson says though production does need to grow, that doesn’t mean it will need to, or be able to, take up more land. “Most of the available production lands globally, I believe, can’t increase much more because the few places where it’s available have sociological challenges that are going to take a long time in order to create a sustainable network and there are people working on that,” Hodgson says. “It’s also the case that a great deal of production land is consumed every year by urbanization. Cities are usually located in areas in which there is productive farmland and they consume it as they develop.”
Hodgson says there’s a need to make sure producers get the latest information on a timely basis, and that investors see the importance of investing in agriculture.