Agriculture is one of those less popular industries that do not make it to the headlines of news very often. Growing food is labor-intensive, dependent on weather and nature, substantially complex and encompasses too many unpredictable variables. Despite these obstacles, we need to feed the population of the earth and thus agriculture remains important. In recent years, development of agriculture has been facilitated by digitalization and Internet of Things. Considering the broad scope of agriculture industry, let us look specifically into fruit growing as a segment of agriculture and its digital transformation.
The apple, pear or any other fruit you ate yesterday started its journey to your hands in a fruit plantation. Although fruit growers have years of experience with taking care of that plantation, digital innovation increased the efficiency of their job tremendously. Smart irrigation systems equipped with sensors screening weather conditions optimize the watering of trees based on both local on-site and online data. Using the same system and knowledge of fruit plantation life-cycle, even all the necessary nutrients are delivered right to the stem of every tree by water.
The harvest represents the next challenge for fruit growers. How can they track every single apple, ensure the perfect transparency of information, if there are thousands of tons to watch over? An information system comes in handy, based on a single chip on every box. Storing all the information for a box, every single apple is carrying an information about who, where and when picked it, what sort it is, which chemical treatments were used, what needs to be done next and much more.
Another important innovation based on digital technology and smart sensors took place in storage systems. ULO-cells equipped with technology screening the environment provide optimal space for storing the fruit until it can be sent on its way to customer. Without this innovation, there would be a time frame of couple of days, weeks at most, between picking the apple from a tree and eating it, before it gets spoiled. Deployment of this technology, impossible without the internet, stretched that window of time to months. Just another application of IoT and digitalization that changed the fruit growing drastically.
Internet has even changed the way fruit growers sell their products. Think of Porter’s Five Forces for a moment. For many years, fruit growers were able to sell only a small amount of their overall production directly to customer. The usual and the most profitable way was always the wholesale market, trading vast amounts of fruit with merchants around the globe. The internet changed the communication with customers and cut the middleman in many cases. Fruit growers are now able to find their customers directly, benefiting both buyer and seller parties. Furthermore, the combination of Internet and increasing demand for local products suggests a positive future for local fruit growing.
What kind of future can we predict for agriculture, especially fruit growing? Agricultural drones, the hot topic in this industry, will certainly be the next big thing, as Anderson (2014) presents in his recent article. In my opinion, there is one even more important issue to solve in the future – the element of labor-intensity. There is no doubt that we will need more food in the future. Considering the development of job markets in western countries, for how long do you think the fruit growers will still be able to find workers to pick the fruit? The future lies in automation, robotics, faster and more precise decision making based on data processing and digitalization of all processes that can be digitalized. Yes, even in such an “old-school” subindustry as fruit growing.
Agriculture is not cool, but it is more than necessary. Seeing amazing technologies such as self-driving cars, AI and blockchain, we might forget that Internet of Things and Digitalization have a tremendous impact even on the simplest things in our lives, such as the single apple you ate yesterday.
References:
Based on cooperation with a fruit growing company in Central Europe.
Anderson, C. (2014). MIT Technology Review. Accessed online on September 23, 2017: https://www.technologyreview.com/s/526491/agricultural-drones/
Hey. Very interesting article indeed. It is also interesting to see how Blockchain can come in and disrupt the traceability and transparency of the fruit and vegetable markets.
But at the same time it is unfortunate to see that the rate of adoption of all these technologies in the agro field is still very poor. A lot of the food production takes place in the developing countries such as Argentina, India, Russia and many countries in Africa where even the, for us common, concept of Drip Irrigation is seldom implemented. More efforts need to be put on properly sharing the knowledge and technologies with the food growers and transporters. With the growing demand of food, we not necessarily need to grow more, we need to make sure that less is wasted. Over 50% of what is grown never reaches the table. That is where the efforts need to go to make sure that what is grown is being transported and processed in a manner that is less wasteful. Unfortunately, because farming has naturally been in the hands of the less educated and in non-urban territories, the rate of innovation there has always been limited as compared to other industries that are urban and are in control of the more educated mass. Therefore, knowledge sharing with farmers in the developing world is the primary key to the rising value of the food market.
Dear Peter,
The agricultural sector is indeed underdeveloped in terms of digitalization. This is, however, not the root cause nor the solution of food insufficiency. As Rajarshi mentioned, one of the solutions is to move towards a circular economy in which waste is limited or even non-existent. Sharing knowledge with farmers in developing countries sounds great, but proves difficult in practice.
The adoption of technology in these countries is poor as it is simply not economically viable – not because of their education. Simplifying complex technologies with easy-to-use interfaces is not the ultimate challenge, especially when one considers the possibility of training.
The demand for labor that the agricultural sector so desperately needs, can be easily met. The costs of maintaining traditional labor-intensive practices is subsequently a much cheaper alternative to the often expensive digitalization. A focus point nowadays is therefore to reduce the barriers that high investments pose. Sharing is key in attaining this objective. Entrepreneurs from developed countries have started initiatives to share top-notch data with even the poorest farmers. Imagine satellite data that can be easily distributed to farmers for only a fraction of the price as sales volume increases. One example of such initiative is G4AW (in case you’re interested in further information: https://g4aw.spaceoffice.nl/en/).
All in all, I do believe that drastic changes in our current food production are needed. The adoption of the most technological advancements is nonetheless too idealistic. Lets start with what is feasible and take it from there.