One popular alternative to the current political-economic landscape of food lies in bringing agriculture to the modern, technologically advanced age though big data. For agriculture, big data is just what it sounds like, collecting vast amounts of data from crop and weed locations, soil and weather conditions, and pesticide and herbicide use. There are several […]
Clean Tech Rises Again, Retooling Nature for Industrial Use – The New York Times
Source: Clean Tech Rises Again, Retooling Nature for Industrial Use – The New York Times BERKELEY, Calif. — A decade ago, a group of biologists, venture capitalists and computer whizzes gathered under the name “clean tech.” They hoped to overturn polluting industries with microorganisms cheerily excreting industrial chemicals through the miracle of reprogramming nature’s genetic […]
Updated Concentration Questions
Old Questions: Descriptive: How do past trends in agriculture inform future innovations? What does successful implementation of AgTech look like? How are specific, successful AgTech innovations currently being implemented and what key characteristics do they share? What are the best ways to market AgTech innovations? What are the social and political drawbacks to many current […]
In praise of artificial food — Aeon Opinions
Artificial food. That’s what humans eat. I say this to anyone who will listen. ‘Oh yes,’ comes the reply. ‘The more’s the pity. Cheap, nasty, imitation food-like substances. It’s high time to return to natural food.’ But, no, I mean artificial in its original sense of man-made, produced by humans, artfully created. Our distant ancestors […]
Five Recently Funded AgTech Startups
Phytech – A leading, Israeli-based precision farming company. Specializes in sensors that attach directly to crops that work with soil moisture and microclimate sensors to provide the most accurate condition of a certain crop. It pairs these stats with yield improving suggestions for farmers directly provided through an easy-to-use app. The company recently closed Series A […]
Technology and Environmentalism – An Overview
Reading five different articles on the role of technology in environmental movements, I have seen just how divisive an issue technology is. With BBC headlines such as “Nature and technology: friends or enemies?”, it is easy to boil down the issue into a simple dichotomy to take sides with, but there exists many, many opinions. […]
We Need a New Green Revolution – The New York Times
DESPITE the four-year drought that has parched California and led to mandatory restrictions on water use, farmers there have kept feeding the country. California produces more of 66 different food crops than any other state, $54 billion of food annually. Maintaining this level of productivity has been quite a challenge in recent years and is […]
Chinese Drone Maker Plows Into Agriculture – WSJ
NEWLEY PURNELL in Singapore and JACK NICAS in San Francisco November 26, 2015 China’s SZ DJI Technology Co., the world’s top consumer-drone maker, is setting its sights on the agriculture industry with the launch of a crop sprayer that will test whether farming is fertile ground for drone technology. DJI, which helped kick-start the global […]
Hi-tech agriculture is freeing the farmer from his fields | The Guardian
by John Vidal The big, blue 18-tonne New Holland T8.435 tractor is not the heaviest or the tallest in the world but its £3,000 tyres and tank-style tracks stand two metres high, it bristles with antenna and at, about £250,000, it must be one of the most expensive. For that, the farmer gets a monster […]
Refining My Concentration
As with the whole concentration process so far, editing my concentration has been more difficult than planned. I mean just editing a rough draft couldn’t be that hard, right? Well according to all the time I put into it this past week, not quite. I had felt pretty good about my concentration draft when that […]