What is AgTech?

Having more than 7.9 billion mouths to feed daily on less arable lands, enabling farmers to work smarter, not harder, is the call of time. AgTech has made incredible strides over the last few decades by introducing digitisation and automation in farming to make agriculture more sustainable. The result is, emerging AgTech trends mark a transition towards smart agribusiness and efficient utilisation of limited resources and time while lowering crop losses. 

But what is Ag Tech, and how can it help us achieve the ultimate goal of a sustainable future? To learn more about AgTech and recent AgTech trends, read on. 

What is AgTech

AgTech/Agricultural Technology is the implementation of modern technology, specialised software, and hardware systems in horticulture, farming, aquaculture, and food production process to boost gross yield, minimise crop waste and bolster agricultural productivity and efficiency. 

Agriculture Technology Types

Though new, AgTech is the most talked-about topic today and can be categorised into three subsections:

• Technology-Assisted Farming: Tech-assisted farming means utilising sophisticated technologies across the entire agricultural supply chain to optimise various farming operations. It focuses on utilising different emerging technologies like water management systems, data analytics, and more to help farmers produce more food using the optimum amount of resources like water, seeds, chemicals, fertilisers, and more. 
• New Farming: It is a specialised branch of modern AgTech that focuses on developing new farming technologies and techniques using the current scientific processes. An outstanding example is vertical farming – creating a well-controlled indoor environment using sensors, automation, and LED bulbs to stack plant growing plots on top of one another. So you can grow more crops using little to no soil, water, or sunlight. 
• Revolutionary Farming: It is the process of using sophisticated technologies to produce new farming products containing traits of interest. For instance, employing CRISPR-Cas9 genome editing technology to produce genetically modified crops that require less water to grow

Why Does AgTech Matter Now More Than Ever?

While the world could successfully boost crop production by 50% in the last decade, we still have around 663 million undernourished people worldwide. More alarmingly, more than 697 million people, who cover 9% of the world population, are still severely food insecure. Having more than 10 billion people by 2050 to feed, switching to modern technology now to grow more crops is inevitable. 

The tremendous benefits of agriculture technology include:

• Cultivators now can track, gauge, and continually enhance their environmental footprint.
• AgTech aims to keep agribusiness feasible for the coming generations by supporting on-farm profitability.
• Replacing traditional farming with AgTech can help the world, especially the developing countries, attain self-sufficiency in food, making the most of the limited natural resources.  

Recent AgTech Trends to Watch

Technology has been inching its way into the agriculture industry for quite a few years now, and the emerging AgTech trends are only getting started. 

Some of the recent hottest AgTech trends include:

Internet of Things

The use of IoT in smart agriculture is skyrocketing and revolutionising the way farmers monitor crops in traditional processes. The concept is to connect agriculture-specific devices embedded with sensors to each other and the internet as well. 

And thanks to ever-evolving technologies, like drones, computer imaging, remote sensors, and robotics, that, by intermingling with data analytics, Artificial Intelligence, and Machine Learning, enable cultivators to access real-time data about soil quality, humidity, and more via mobile applications across the value chain and ensure efficient crop monitoring, field surveying, and mapping. Thus farmers can devise strategies to more efficiently manage their farms, ensure real-time livestock traceability, maximise crop yields by limiting crop wastage, and better understand the recent market trends in less effort, time, and investment.

 Regenerative Ag

It’s an open secret – especially in agribusiness – that we no longer can carry on with the traditional farming processes. It is an unsustainable process that depletes the soil significantly and increases GHG emissions in the environment. 

Thanks to regenerative ranching and cultivation process, the recent Agri-tech trend, which is thriving now more than ever, and focusing on regenerating topsoil to improve water cycle and plant uptake, and drawdown carbon. The ultimate goal is to help cultivators boost crop yield, bolster profitability and contribute to biosequestration. 

Technologies that fuel regenerative agriculture to replenish soil organic matters, increase crop resilience, sequester carbon emissions substantially include:

• genetic engineering
• biotechnological tools
• soil carbon monitoring systems
• no-till-farming
• composting
• waste recycling and more

Robotics and Automation

With endless repetitive chores involved in agriculture, it’s no wonder that automation and robots, backed by AI, ML, locomotion, and data, are a good fit for modern agricultural technology. 

Though the delicate nature of so many essential plants makes employing robotics in agriculture a bit challenging, agribusinesses frequently take up this challenge to limit the dependence on manual effort and let devices execute some back-breaking labour-intensive farming jobs. 

Thanks to modern drone technology that enables aerobatics to gain higher spatial resolution for better real-time aerial imaging – today, cultivators can more efficiently figure out crop issues on a granular basis. Plus, there have been incredible advancements in in-field sensing space (for instance, air-ground multi-sensor monitoring systems) – thanks to the ongoing developments in-field measurement and sampling technologies.

Automation industries and AgTech companies are focusing on manufacturing agricultural robots mainly for:

• Picking and harvesting
• Weed control and seeding
• Autonomous pruning, thinning, mowing
• Manipulation via target treatment, for example, variable-rate spraying
• Sorting and packing
• High throughput plant phenotyping
• Crop monitoring

The concept behind this most talked-about AgriTech is simple – manipulating the massive amount of crop-monitoring data taken as input and completing the precision Ag loop to sprint towards smart farming. 

Biotechnology in Agriculture

Biotechnology has been a part of human civilisation for decades, and various agri-biotech processes are innovating at a breathtaking pace now more than ever. 

Biotechnologies like selective breeding, tissue culture, cross-breeding, and more have already enabled scientists to produce high-quality crop breeds with desired traits. The result is, boosted farm output, development of nutrient-rich disease-resistant crops, and reduced crop loss, causing no/minimal long-term damage to the environment.

Recent agri-biotech trends include developing crop hybrids tolerant to harmful pests and herbicides, enabling gene stacking, using microbes in biodegradation, producing bio-based plastics, fertilisers, vaccines, and antibiotics, reducing crop vulnerability to environmental stresses, and more to accelerate towards economic and environmental sustainability.

Indoor Farming

Agricultural companies are now focusing on utilising techniques like vertical farming, hydroponics, and aquaponics to grow crops and beneficial beetles on a large scale in well-regulated, entirely indoor environments. 

The benefits are many- 

• Improved crop yields in a per-square-foot farming plot compared to traditional farming processes
• Shorter growing times
• Limited water use
• Indoor food production helps farms lower their carbon footprint significantly by reducing the use of fossil fuels required in seeding, weeding, and harvesting crops in the traditional farming process.