Humans in the stone age had challenging obstacles to overcome when it came to eating a meal. They had to walk for miles in search of food and educate themselves on hunting and fishing skills. Then, they finally had to figure out how to cook food for them. There were no corporate food delivery services to make their work easy.
The field of farming has developed in leaps and bounds from those ages. However, with the world population reaching 8 billion in number, a more significant problem arises. Thomas Malthus, an 18th-century economist, stated that the human population increases geometrically, whereas food production increases only arithmetically. Hence, the more the civilization grows, the likelihood we would lag behind in meeting world food demands.
Several advances in food technology have helped us to prevent from living with Malthus’s forecasts, but it is still a growing concern as the population rises each day. As per the National Geographic report, there will be 2 billion additional mouths to feed by the year 2050 while the Earth’s irrigable land remains essentially the same.
Bringing an optimistic ray of hope, a San Francisco agricultural technical start-up, “Plenty,” brings a way that may reinvent farming. As a massive development in the market of Vertical agriculture, the start-up has constructed climate-controlled vertical farms. These vertical farms can produce food worth 720 acres while only using 2 acres of land. It is to point out that the crops grown are entirely GMO-free, which means they do not use pesticides, fertilizers, etc. This new development will ensure future stability in the food chain as it would not get easily affected by natural calamities like hurricanes, pandemics, etc. It would also reduce the stress on traditional farming for producing more and more food as the population grows.
In the new farms, lightning, watering, and temperature in the fields are controlled by AI-controlled robots. Sunlight is imitated with the help of LED panels so that food can grow in optimal conditions 24/7. They also capture evaporated water and recycle the water leading to virtually no wastage at all.
This new technology has high efficiency as it uses 95% less water and 99% less land than what is needed while naturally producing a crop. The rows in the field produce 400 times more food per acre in comparison to a traditional farm.
Growth patterns are continuously controlled and monitored by AI, which continually adjusts all environmental factors to ensure that the output obtained is efficient and economical. The start-up already shows signs of success and has received $400 million in funding from big conglomerates such as Eric Schmidt (Google Chairman), Jeff Bezos (Amazon CEO), and SoftBank, etc.