To support a projected global population of 10 billion people, by 2050 the world will need to produce about 60% more food than it does right now.
If we are to meet this goal – and, importantly, meet it in a sustainable way – we need to rethink the ‘what’ and the ‘how’ of the food that we produce and consume. In addition to having more mouths to feed, global agriculture faces pressure from the effects of climate change, shifting demographics, and an increased stress on natural resources. With many of the world’s current agricultural ecosystems ill-equipped to respond to these challenges, there is an urgent need to shift towards the implementation of new methods and emergent technologies that deliver improved oversight, evidence-based decision making, enhanced productivity, reduced wastage, and greater ecological and environmental responsibility, across all stages of the farming cycle.
The seeds of this change, the Fourth Agricultural Revolution – or Agriculture 4.0 – are already being sown, and reductions in the cost of technologies such as remote sensing and robotics, combined with improvements in flexibility of implementation, mean that targeted innovations can be integrated into cross-scale operations relatively easily, and without breaking the bank.
It is also clear that the need to realise rapidly the benefits of these new technologies must be carefully balanced with the need to navigate the specific economic, social, and cultural barriers facing those farmers who stand to gain the most from their use. From family-run smallholdings, to large-scale commercial farming operations, the way in which innovations are deployed, and traditional practices optimised, is a key challenge.
For both larger and smaller operations, multispectral satellite imaging has emerged as a precise and reliable method to track crop health from sowing to harvest, isolate and tackle disease and infestation, forecast and maximise yields, and improve productivity and profitability. Continuous access to high frequency, high resolution imaging data offers a time- and cost-saving alternative to field inspections, allowing farmers to adjust inputs, establish benchmarks and detect problems early, supporting sustainable agriculture going forward. Hexsor’s Agrolight™ Crop Monitoring App offers these benefits and more, delivering up-to-date Normalized Difference Vegetation Index (NDVI) images to our client’s smartphone or tablet via an intuitive, user-friendly interface, for plots as small as 1ha. Free access to 6 months of archival data enables tracking over the crop lifecycle, while a built-in crop database provides key information on a variety of crop types that can help current farmers diversify according to local conditions, or support new farmers taking their first steps in the industry.
