Farming our future

Who will be the farmer of the future? The globally renowned agricultural and food expert Prof. Louise Fresco raised this question in her talk on the ‘future of farming’ at the recent biennial Global Entrepreneurship Summit held in the Hague. Louise, who has previously held the position of Assistant Director-General of the UN’s FAO, laid out many possibilities.

She said the farmer of the future will be a little robot that cuts the bell peppers, with a very intricate 3-D system and knows exactly what the bell peppers are. The farmer of the future will also be a person who manages a vertical farm in a city inside a building with LED lights or alongside city’s sewerage system; he will probably have no farming background but will know how to make use of digital technologies and artificial intelligence (AI). Yet the farmer of the future will also be someone who still has to bend over and plant seeds and harvest manually without fancy technologies of drone, self-driven tractors, AI-based pesticide control and what not.

Her reasoning: “Farming by definition is location specific; it’s the art of diversity; it’s the art of managing exact resources of land or climate or animal.” And while there are some scientific principles and some values to be followed, “there is no blue-print to farming”. Farming of the future is not just about producing or extracting more from the land or using fancy technology instead of manual labour. It’s really about a balanced way in which we will deal with the environment.

There are some classical challenges to farming, such as climate change, water shortages, crop adaptation, food quality, animal welfare. In addition to these, there are a host of new challenges of which we as humans are only starting to see the contours of. How to bring farming in balance with the carrying capacity of the planet and biodiversity? How can we move away from a fossil-based energy system to a bio-based energy system – a kind of a bio-based circular economy? And how to detox earth’s bio-mass once fossil fuel addiction comes to an end?

“The most important sector of the future will be farming, because farming, forestry and aquatic environment are going to be the only way in which we can manage the biological resources of this earth. It’s through managing the bio-mass that we will have to meet all our needs,” says Louise. Others in the field, to whom BR Research spoke to at GES-2019, agree - adding that the management of earth’s biomass may not necessarily be through mobile apps, something touched upon yesterday. (See BR Research’s Want entrepreneurship? Change mindset! Jun 26, 2019)

Elsewhere in Europe as well as in the US and in Australia, strategic thinkers at government and private sector think tanks are trying to come up with ways to arrest urbanization. Some are curating countryside museums or otherwise organising educational field trips to youth to involve them with farming. Others are creating incentive systems to keep rural or countryside youth from migration, whereas some are retraining urban youth to kickstart a wave of crop and dairy farming in the cities. The argument being that while two out of five people in the world will live in cities, food that is natural and sustainable will still come from the farms.

These are some of the fundamental questions and ideas that the developed west is thinking about. It is up to Pakistanis whether they want the developed world to think about these questions, and be fed by them in terms of the products, policy and solutions they develop; or do they want to join them on this intellectual journey to ensure that they also have their say in the future.

Pakistan is not a complete stranger to private sector’s investments in affordable quality education. There were a lot of them prior to 70s’ nationalisation, which burned that field. But green shoots have begun to emerge. LUMS by Babar Ali, and Habib University by Habib group; these are some good examples of private sector’s initiative to set up good quality relatively affordable educational institutes; the former started off as top business management school, and the latter as liberal arts school.

It’s about time that someone from Pakistan’s private sector invests in a state-of-the-art agriculture university focusing both on crop and livestock; but one that has a futuristic mindset instead of training young minds for ways of the yester centuries. Meanwhile, the country’s start-up and incubator community would do well to retune their focus to include modern notions of farming while keeping in mind that innovation is not just doing things through a chip; it’s a state of mind and in the case of farming it will have to be problem and location specific.