Technology's Power Builds a Big Future for Agricultural Development
The world's population is growing continuously. By 2050, the global population is expected to rise from the current 7 billion to 9.6 billion. Yet we have already cultivated 40% of the Earth's land. How can we feed so many people? Data from the UN Food and Agriculture Organization shows that to avoid widespread malnutrition, food production needs to increase by 70%. Unfortunately, we have little land left to develop, which means we can only change the way food is grown on a large scale.
A feasible starting point is to first improve the cultivation of fruits and vegetables. The Tabernas Desert in southern Spain is the driest place in Europe, yet it produces more than half of Europe's fresh fruits and vegetables, contributing 1.5 billion US dollars to the local economy and being regarded as an economic miracle. Its success is mainly due to the use of greenhouse cultivation, because the environment inside a greenhouse is controllable, which is beneficial for cultivating fruits and vegetables. The Tabernas model can be promoted in other parts of the world. From the perspective of the environment and land use, controlled-environment agriculture is a great idea. The yield of vegetables and fruits in greenhouses is far greater than that of open-field cultivation, because problems that affect the growth of fruits and vegetables, such as weeds, pests and severe weather, all disappear inside the greenhouse.
⟦NL> Not only greenhouse cultivation, but also multi-layer cultivation should be promoted; a combined set of hydroponic molds can achieve multi-layer cultivation on the same plot of land. As arable land becomes increasingly scarce while the global population continues to rise, developing “vertical farms” becomes our only option. In the future, most agricultural products may be produced in skyscrapers made of steel and concrete and illuminated by LED lights. However, current greenhouse technology is limited to fruits and vegetables, while grains cannot profit substantially from greenhouse cultivation. Grain cultivation cannot receive strong support from this kind of controlled-environment cultivation.
Therefore we need to take action to modernize agriculture worldwide, so as to feed more than 9 billion people. Agricultural modernization is simple and feasible. At present, many farmers in less developed regions still use backward farming methods, with no crop rotation, almost no irrigation, and even animal power for plowing. Promoting agricultural modernization globally can feed more people. At the same time, expanding the varieties of staple crops and planting more beans, potatoes and sweet potatoes can increase food production while also providing very high nutritional value. Farms that operate with data at their core are rising. As data is collected, farms will become more efficient. In the future, the contradiction between increasing demand for meat and shrinking arable land will become even more prominent. To solve this problem, future meat may come from the laboratory. Therefore, the idea that future farmland will become high-tech laboratories is not very crazy.
An optimistic idea is that if humanity can use technology and infrastructure to solve the food problem, it may be possible to save a large amount of land in the future. Arable land would be released and returned to nature, which would also make an indispensable contribution to improving the environment and reversing climate change.