Following is a summary
of my remarks in an “Agri Panel” at the Global Entrepreneurship Summit earlier
today, in response to the question, “What do you think will be game-changing
about how we think about agriculture, twenty years from now?”
Soon after the panel moderator sent me this very interesting
question a couple of days ago, the first thing I did was to post this question
on Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn to crowdsource thoughts from my friends. There
were nearly two hundred unique responses! They added up to twenty pages of
text, without counting the number of pages in the links I received.
Overwhelming, isn’t it?
All I am doing now is to simply synthesize those inputs and
share with you J
The future of any system is shaped the current aspirations
of the key stakeholders. Let’s take a look at the aspirations of the consumers,
producers and the society at large…
Consumers want
sufficient quantity of food (because
we would be nearly nine billion by then, and on average richer than today),
that is tasty (although, a friend
did say in lighter vein, “since we will have nano-bots in our blood streams, and
since our memories could be uploaded on to cloud, maybe we don’t need food and
therefore no agriculture; we probably just need some electricity, or batteries,
or just a few hours of exposure to sun ;-), is safe (you are all consumers here, don’t you agree that harmful
chemicals in food is your topmost concern?), nutritious (scientists say that most of the world is suffering from
invisible hunger), and all of these at reasonable prices!
Farmers want higher incomes (as you know, per capita
income of farmers around the world, especially in emerging economies, is far
lower than the general per capita) with lower
risk (weather and disease related production risks, price volatility).
Their labour deserves more dignity
(as it is, hardly any youth from the next generation wants to be a farmer) and
they deserve better quality life (as
in, the conveniences and comforts that are common in urban settings).
Society at large
would like agriculture to conserve
natural resources (water and top soil, for example) and where possible,
actually renew them. Agriculture needs to be resilient to climate change (the summer rains and warm winters,
extreme climate episodes like heavy downpours on one hand and droughts on the
other, etc), and again, where possible, positively
impact climate change (sequester carbon, minimize greenhouse gas emissions
etc).
An interplay of these different - at times conflicting -
aspirations gives rise to three distinct scenarios, all of which will co-exist
in twenty years. Let me label them: Farms as Factories, Homes as Farms, and
Back to Basics!
Farms as Factories:
By using the metaphor of factories, all I am saying is that the consistent
quality of output will be produced, crop after crop, by leveraging the evolving
technologies – both farming (like seed, nutrients, farm-equipment,
agronomy practices etc) and digital
(IoT, block chain, hyper-spectral imaging, GPS / GIS etc). A friend called
them, “hardware, software, and liveware”).
Another friend went to the extent of visualising a self-managing seed! These seeds will analyse the experienced
conditions like soil, weather, water etc and invoke the necessary embedded
features that would maximize the yield and quality. This may sound like fantasy
today, but those of you who are familiar with experiments on seeds with
multiple layers of coating in the past may very well say this could be a
reality in twenty years!
Homes as Farms: I
am sure, you have heard of vertical farming, balcony farming, kitchen gardens
and such other names. Once supply chains are established to supply DIY-type
mini production units, seeds, nutrients etc to the households, this phenomenon
will expand more rapidly. This food is safe without any doubt in the consumer
mind, and zero carbon miles! Business Models are also in the works for another
kind of service. If you are not adventurous enough to grow crops in your backyard
yourself, you can simply let out the space to Service Providers who can grow crops
on a BOO model. Besides experts growing the crops in this model, a colony-level
kitchen garden is more optimal than a household level garden. And a third
model, which is not a ‘home-as-farm’ strictly speaking, is a partnership
between a group of, say, five thousand, consumers and a community of, say, five
hundred farmers. I know of several such partnerships across cities, built as
WhatsApp Groups integrating even the e-commerce functionality.
Back to Basics: Much
of today’s ills of agriculture are due to chemical-intensive mono-cropping
paradigm. A more sustainable future scenario would be an integrated farming
system consisting of polyculture, permaculture, organic compost, bee-keeping,
animal husbandry, renewable energy. In fact, I already see some farms where
solar energy brings larger revenue than the conventional crops.
As the panel went forward, there were other questions, but
for now I am wrapping up this post without covering them.
As always, comments are most welcome J This is a live and lively
topic!
