High Technology in Agriculture

Use of technology in agriculture is normally interpreted as technologies that go into on-farm machinery. However, there are many more high-tech applications, involving various sciences, which have come into regular use in agriculture.

Drones are used in farming for various reasons

For example, India has a program called CHAMAN which uses satellite based remote sensing information or geo-informatics to manage crop forecasting. High tech systems, that use overhead Drones, chemistry labs and spectrograph analytics are part of agriculture and are used to manage crops and diagnose soil health. Spread your gaze wide, and you will find almost every possible form of science being applied in the field of agriculture.

Logistics Connectivity is Key to Reduce Food Loss

Food has one end-use, to be consumed...food loss or waste occurs when food left unconsumed - or, when food perishes before it could reach the market within its normal saleable life cycle.

Food loss can be reduced... only by ensuring that all the harvested produce reaches its logical end use. This means that food delivery mechanisms must also aim to counter the perishable nature of food, to extend its saleable life cycle.

Meeting the Global Food Crisis

There is a Food Crisis in our world - can it truly be met by sowing more crops, increasing farm level yields, to store that food in banks? These are among some topics I mooted when speaking on the subject at UK's House of Lords.

There ought to be no doubt that there exists a global food crisis! Across the world, 795 million people suffer from hunger - Hunger is defined as a painful sensation from want of food! This pain afflicts 525 million people in Asia, 215 million in Africa, 37 million in Latin America & Caribbean and others. Women form 60% of these numbers and a child dies every 10 seconds from hunger related inflictions.

What is notable, is that this food crisis is most prevalent in producing regions, areas that have a food surplus, not food shortage. The question is why? Why is it, the producing areas face more hunger?

The Chain, Interrupted or unInterrupted

Cold-chain value systems and options to be considered by planners. (also see Visions and Value chains)

1. The strategic business interest & capability of any concerned enterprise will define the scope and extent of the value chain of each such enterprise. Frankly, the involved models are easily differentiated and would extend across the following two basic categories-

 

a. Uninterrupted farm-to-fork sourcing and distribution of agricultural produce, especially perishables, wherein the fresh whole food does not undergo any change to its primary and natural characteristics. This value chain system is empowered with the agri-logistics intervention that services an out-reach into multiple markets through connectivity. This market link is key to generate a revenue stream that is volume based, and in turn feeds improved post-harvest handling, resultant growth in produce quality & productivity and also offers scope to stabilise demand-supply fluctuations.

Decisions, decisions...Pack-house play

A modern pack-house is the initiator of the cold-chain for fruits and vegetables, and a cold store the midway platform. A pack-house is effectively the intelligent nerve centre of cold-chain, and it inherently sets off multiple logistics or supply lines catering to various demand centres. At such a pack-house, after the harvest is sorted into marketable or value based lots, they are then directed into different elemental value chains, some to continue within the cold-chain and some without.

©Pawanexh Kohli

Insights into Food Loss and Waste

A High Level Panel of Experts on Food Security and Nutrition (HLPE) was established by FAO (Food and Agriculture Organization) in 2010 as the science-policy interface of the UN Committee on World Food Security (CFS). On 3 July 2014, the HLPE published report #8 titled “Food losses and waste in the context of sustainable food systems”. 

At its onset, the report states that accurate estimates of losses in the food system are unavailable, though it reiterates that best evidence at hand indicates that global food waste stands at 1/3rd of production. It goes on to state that myriad approaches to defining food losses and waste tend to be confounding.

For the referenced report, the following definitions are used. Food Loss and Waste (FLW) is “a decrease, at all stages of the food chain from harvest to consumption, in mass, of food that was originally intended for human consumption, regardless of the cause”. Some key phrases here is “in mass” and “for human consumption”.

Food Loss & Waste (FLW) has two distinct components – food loss occurring before consumption and food waste occurring at consumption level.