Farming fit, farming smart

Clear instructions for complex problems

If you are a cautious sort of person, or have ever found yourself with time to kill, you’ve probably read emergency evacuation instructions.

Only, the instructions on what we need to do to avoid the impending global disaster aren’t framed in a highly visible place. But they are there. They’re called International Standards.

The conundrum for many, even those who are already aware of standards, is where to start. You could view this emergency through many different lenses, but some of the biggest issues have been coherently grouped together under the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (UN SDGs). That’s one reason why the UN SDGs and the associated 2030 agenda form the backbone to ISO’s 2030 strategy.

There are 17 colour-coded SDGs, and there is one important thing to know about them. They can’t really be separated from each other. A bit like trying to complete one face of a Rubik’s cube before moving on to the next colour.

The challenges pointed to by the UN SDGs must be tackled almost simultaneously due to their interdependencies. International Women’s Day campaigns at #IWD22 highlight the inextricable links between climate action and gender equality, whilst the impact of clean water and sanitation on good health and well-being is even more apparent.

Fundamentally, none of us is going to achieve a single one of the goals until we’ve fixed zero hunger. You just can’t fight for peace, justice and strong institutions or take care of life below water on an empty stomach.

Agriculture touches multiple SDGs, directly addressing zero hunger and contributing to no poverty. But like most human activity, it also uses resources and carries negative impacts. The role for standards is to help farms of all sizes become more productive at the same time as reducing the impacts of farming on SDGs such as clean water and sanitation, climate action, or life on land. ISO standards can help all farmers with these goals, from smallholders farming to feed their families to highly mechanized operations on tens of thousands of hectares.

It’s now or never for networked food production

After a drawn out (and still ongoing) health crisis, you might expect the global economy to be in worse shape than it currently is. Some of that may be down to our resilience, adapting to new ways of behaving and rapidly developing vaccines. But a large part of it is the rate of digitalization, which took on a massive gut-wrenching burst of acceleration, enabling both business continuity and the development of new services. Even back in 2020, when many companies and institutions were still in fire-fighting mode, consulting gurus were telling us that COVID has pushed us over a technology tipping point and ushered in seven to ten years of digital growth in as many months.

With connectivity at an all-time high, there has never been a better time to develop smart farming technology, which is essentially the “networking of food production”.

The main opportunities identified by the SAG are in the standardization of interfaces, and the ways in which data will be collected, formatted, stored and exchanged across the entire food supply chain, as well as the optimization of production methods that build on precision agriculture and new techniques in cultivation.

Precision agriculture is probably the most widely understood of the ways in which smart farming will take shape. It’s existed for decades in one form or another, such as auto-steer capabilities that enable making much better use of time and labour in the field. But it’s only now, thanks to technologies like artificial intelligence (AI), that we have the ability to capture, process and interpret data with sufficient speed to give farmers valuable insights and consistently help them grow crops profitably, sustainably and in compliance with regulations.

Precision agriculture includes applying inputs in the most efficient way possible, taking account of tiny variations in the rate of growth, or soil conditions, or levels of pests and disease within a single crop. In this way, fertilisers, for example, are only applied where they’re needed. Bearing in mind that it takes a huge amount of energy to make synthetic fertilisers, their efficient use is essential to reducing the carbon footprint of the food that ends up on our plates. The same can be said of any technique that reduces waste, such as mechanical weeding robots that use AI to recognize and single out unwanted plants, before blasting them with lasers.

Farm management information systems (FMIS) provide an overview of all operations that take place across the farm, or even multiple farms. Again, the concept isn’t new, but the degree of connectivity and the capacity to safely store and access information about operations has opened the way for new levels of management, supported by external consultants like agronomists who can develop insights and strategies without spending so much time travelling between sites.

By comparing levels of stock and looking at historical consumption and current levels of production, suppliers can work with farmers to produce more accurate forecasts. That means the sowing and harvesting, especially of quick-growing crops (such as salads and herbs), can be carried out in response to demand, dramatically reducing waste and post-harvest losses. To make that a reality, remote farms will require reliable high-speed connectivity as well as a standardized way of safely exchanging, storing, processing and interpreting information from the field.

Robotics and automation go hand in hand with precision agriculture. Not only are machines more accurate in applying variable rates of inputs in the pursuit of precision, but they can make a real contribution to the working conditions of farmers and farm workers. Because agriculture is a tough business, often requiring long days and hard work. That work can also be hazardous. And while precautions can be taken to minimize the greatest risks (working at height, or with substantial loads, or using chemical products), my experience on farms shows me that these are too often ignored, particularly when operations need to be carried out in a limited time frame to coincide with weather, market demands or crop maturity.