The tech that will feed the world

Twenty years from now, the most important tool for putting food on your table won’t be a harvester, combine or a plow. It will be a piece of software.  Agriculture is in the process of transitioning into a fully high-tech enterprise. This is a long-overdue revolution in the way things have been done for centuries. To put it in perspective, if we keep doing farming the old-fashioned way, two billion more people will go hungry by the year 2050.  World population growth is driving the urgent need for a radical boost in farm productivity. Incremental advances in output simply won’t cut it. The challenge in 2050 will be unprecedented — equivalent to growing enough food to feed everyone who is alive today, plus everyone who was alive in 1920. Simply put, the techniques that got us through the 20th century won’t get us very far into the 21st. And whatever solutions we come up with will to solve this dilemma will also have to take into account that land and water continue to be scarce resources, and environmental sustainability remains paramount.