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By 2050 there will be almost 10 billion people on the planet the demand for food will be 60% higher than it is today and due to climate change we’ll have fewer resources to make that food if we don’t change the way we produce our food then we are not able to feed this population and if we do it in the same way we did before then we probably will destroy the
Environment we came to the world’s leading facility for agricultural research to see how scientists here are facing up to these challenges we tend to say we want to produce more in order to feed the world but we want to do it with less inputs so less fertilizers and less pesticides less energy and so on and we want to do it better one method that’s already proven
Successful is vertical farming in these type of systems if there it doesn’t come any pests or disease in you don’t need pesticides the water use is very limited because all the water that we supply through the roots will be reused and we grow many layers above each other we need only maybe 1% or less than 1% of the land area but since lamps provide all of the
Light plants need to grow energy use is still a drawback this is where layers work comes in so here we’re looking at an experiment with different light colors because you can see the different colors the red the blue the purple we want to use as little light as possible but get the best plant out of it and then the question is how much light what moment of the
Day or what color and yeah this is an example of many of the colors that you are investigating elsewhere on campus like vonda’s ada and his team are designing the latest robot technology to help farmers scale up their production if we want to scale up we are convinced that that automation can be a big benefit for farmers to simply produce more with friends we
The same amount of personnel but to be able to harvest as well as a human these robots need the latest artificial intelligence one of the bigger challenges is can you determine the ripeness stage in the location of the pepper in the greenhouse or the broccoli on the field and there is this new deep learning technique that we are now using the software guiding
The arm is able to train itself constantly improving when and how to harvest the pepper this particular artificial intelligence technique is so promising that we can solve all kind of problems in the upcoming years that have before being actually too complicated there are some problems that artificial intelligence alone can’t solve however 400 million people
Around the world rely on bananas for food and a source of income but the most commonly farm variety the cavendish is under threat from a strain of fungus known as tr for we have now tr for causing panama disease in cavendish bananas that is spreading around the world the most important reason for that is that we grow one single variety around the world which is
Super susceptible hurt kaymer is searching for new banana varieties that are naturally resistant to tr for infection he has already had success breeding bananas at the university but he knows that the problem is too big to solve alone i don’t want to breathe the net but new women and varieties in a backyard of iearning i forget it that’s impossible you really
Need a commercial professional breeding program that is targeted on the consumer and it uses the latest technologies to speed it up so what we are trying to achieve and we’re very far on track there is to get private breeding companies involved to make new resistance variety’s the head of wageningen university and research thinks it will be possible to meet the
World’s future food leads but it won’t be easy i’m fully confident that we can do it but it needs government’s to have a policy it needs investment from the private sector it needs to have a new generation of farmers so a lot of things have to happen for us collectively to apply the technology and that cannot be taken for granted many of the tools we’ll need to
Feed 10 billion people are already being developed whether we succeed or not may depend on how quickly we can put them into action
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How to feed 10bn people By Financial Times