We use cookies to personalise and enhance your experience on this site. By clicking Accept or continuing to use the site, you agree to our use of marketing and social media cookies as described in our Privacy Policy.
Accept and close
Agriculture is currently experiencing the most challenging period of history due to climate change, globalisation, career expectation, social instability, and consumer patterns. This creates a death burden for farmers and growers who need to keep the food and plant production running while seeing a narrow margin profit, low business resilience, and a challenging production target. The UK government has stated the need to produce a healthy, nutritious, affordable, and resilient food system by 2032 and net zero emissions by 2050.
It is not just the labour shortage that developed countries are currently experiencing, but also the increment in crop waste due to pests and diseases; and the need to increase crop yield with technology. There is a critical need to work as a country and globally to deliver an aligned technology roadmap, investment strategy, novel food supply chain architecture, and policy roadmap to help accelerate the technology readiness level and increase productivity in the sector.
Currently, there is still a need to increase cross-collaboration across universities, associations, industrial sectors, etc. to maximise the visibility of state-of-the-art developments and increase knowledge transfer, technical skills, data sharing, and traceability. A holistic vision based on engineering, business & economics, and plant science is needed to create a solid long-term foundation for a sustainable future in the sector. But how can the current agritech ecosystem help accelerate this journey? And what would be the role of humans and robots in an autonomous future of farming?
Warwick AgriTech is following this holistic view. This joint entity combines two departments in the University of Warwick: Warwick Manufacturing Group (WMG) and the School of Life Science (SLS) with a main vision “To drive the planet towards a sustainable, healthy and secure global food system and contribute to planet stability by advancing Agri-Technologies for industry”. With a clear value proposition of transferring capabilities, technology, and knowledge acquired in other industries such as manufacturing, aerospace, etc. to the agricultural sector. Warwick Agritech seeks to add value and thus build a sustainable ecosystem for People, Planet, and Profit.
A strong ecosystem should involve Industry, Academia, and Government to support de-risk investment and innovation of businesses and help them cross the valley of death at its different stages from fundamental research to technology deployment. A key factor is contributing to translating research from agricultural needs into commercial benefits or advantages where the substantial benefits will come from a collaborative partnership based on trust, evidence, and transparency.
Through four main research programs: Greenhouse of the Future, Agriculture as Living Factory, Post Chemical Era and One Seed Health Warwick Agritech aims to drive future changes in agriculture by integrating capabilities such as robotics, artificial Intelligence, automation, agronomy, plant genetics, entomology, crop protection, etc. The future of farming seems to be promising, however, despite the important technological progress made by universities, companies, government, etc. there is still a long way to go to continue contributing to the mass adoption of the technology and the integration of the new human roles in the future of agriculture.
Approximately 900M of people (~27% of the global workforce) work in agriculture, where the majority of the workforce belongs to more vulnerable or poor countries with less access to technologies (EU <4%). Although the technology is advancing at a strong pace, the level of opportunities in non-developed countries is not progressing at the same speed. It is necessary to carry out a critical analysis to understand the role of human beings in the future of agriculture and what the level of labour adaptability will be in this new agricultural evolution.
Technology such as automation and AI should ultimately collaborate to up-skill people’s capabilities and unlock larger-scale economic benefits along with increasing wellbeing and opportunities for humanity. Could the Fourth Agricultural Revolution be able to integrate humans and technology to maximise social, economic and sustainable benefits around the world in the next 5 to 7 years?
.jpg)
Emilio Loo-Monardez
