Agriculture: Our wisest pursuit

In August 1787, Thomas Jefferson — then the American ambassador to France — wrote to President George Washington, warning that a brewing war between France, Holland and England could distract America from agriculture, which he called, “our wisest pursuit.” 

“It will, in the end,” he wrote, “contribute most to real wealth, good morals and happiness.” Jefferson compared the “moderate but sure income” of husbandry favorably to the fleeting wealth that could be acquired by speculation.

On National Ag Day, Jefferson’s concern still strikes a chord. We can equally recognize both the hard work, resilience and creative problem solving by members of the ag community around the globe, as well as the fact that agriculture has become one of the least digitized sectors in the economy. Have we become technologically complacent in our wisest pursuit?

Running the numbers

The challenges facing farmers are stark, and sobering. The world’s population will grow to nearly 10 billion by 2050, requiring an increase in global food production volume of 50 percent. But global agriculture already consumes 70 percent of the world’s freshwater, and the fossil-fuel-based fertilizers — of which 40 percent are wasted through imprecise application – that power the world’s farms, add 1.2 billion tons of CO2e to the atmosphere. Farmland productivity needs to increase by 70 percent to avoid an additional 22 gigatons of CO2e being emitted, but climate change threatens to reduce productivity of farmland in many places, through more frequent droughts, higher temperatures and pest and disease pressure. 

Agriculture is part of an ecosystem, and needs that ecosystem to function. But biodiversity as a crucial underpinning of that ecosystem has collapsed due to land use change for agriculture — from deforestation in particular.  Farming relies on a few precious inches of topsoil — which will be compacted, poisoned, neutralized, washed away or blown away, if not carefully managed. And while the challenges are clear, the solutions are not.

There is no single, silver bullet solution to these challenges. Agriculture takes place within a living, evolving system, and simplistic, rigid solutions cannot succeed in the long run in a complex system that evolves. Fortunately,  technologies have reached a level of maturity that can now handle complexity, can learn and adapt — and can help the farming community and agribusinesses across the value chain catch up.

Two key technology trends are at work. The first is our ability to gather data. As mechanization surged in farming and people left the farm, the capacity to closely observe plants, soil, pests and diseases dropped. As a result, farmers had no practical way to monitor every plant, every day. But now the cost of data collection has dropped precipitously.  Satellites, drones, smart farm equipment, IoT devices and cameras generate a firehose of data. Thanks to Moore’s Law, the cost of collecting, processing, transmitting and storing this data will keep dropping too.

The second technology trend is artificial intelligence (AI).  Recent breakthroughs in machine learning (ML) — such as Transformer models and pathway models — are unlocking the ability to draw meaning from agriculture’s complex, multimodal data (multimodal means different types of data, such as numbers, text, images, tabular data, videos and sounds). 

Importantly, AI solutions are not static. They learn and adapt. That’s because software differs in an obvious way from hardware: it can be changed instantly, over the air. The automotive industry is already being reshaped by ‘software defined vehicles’ that can be customized and updated. AI systems can collect feedback on their decisions and learn, continuously improving their accuracy.  A great example is today’s announcement that Google is opening access to Bard, an early experiment that lets you collaborate with generative AI.  Similarly, agriculture will change from relatively long, hardware-driven product cycles to rapid, highly-customized algorithm-driven iterations. Crop trials will be scaled to thousands — or millions — of experiments. Equipment will be optimized for a specific field’s agroecology. The emergence of new pests, diseases or resistant weeds will be quickly detected.

Agriculture got off to a slow start in the digital revolution - partly because the challenges were too complex for the available tools.  But now we have AI technologies better suited to the job, and it’s time to catch up.  While Jefferson’s assertion that agriculture will contribute to “improved morals” may be too lofty a goal, it is indeed a wise pursuit to nourish humanity and regenerate the planet. If agriculture can achieve those - then it will undoubtedly also contribute to the pursuit of happiness.