In decades to come, African farmers may pool their money to buy small robot vehicles to weed their fields or drones that can hover to squirt a few drops of pesticide only where needed.
Smartphones already allow farmers in remote areas to snap photos of sick plants, upload them and get a quick diagnosis, plus advice on treatment.
Researchers also are trying to train crops like maize and wheat to produce their own nitrogen fertilizer from the air — a trick soybeans and other legumes use — and exploring how to make wheat and rice better at photosynthesis in very hot conditions.
Photo: Reuters
As warmer, wilder weather linked to climate change brings growing challenges for farmers across the globe — and as they try to curb their own heat-trapping emissions — a rush of innovation aimed at helping both rich and poor farmers is now converging in ways that could benefit them all, scientists say.
In a hotter world, farmers share “the same problems, the same issues”, said Svend Christensen, head of plant and environmental sciences at the University of Copenhagen.
Agricultural researchers, who have teamed up to boost harvests and fight the major blight of wheat rust are now forming an international consortium in a bid to make wheat stand up to worsening heat and drought.
“There was a real shift in terms of the intensity of what we do together when we became aware of climate change,” said Hans-Joachim Braun, who heads the global wheat program for the International Maize and Wheat Improvement Center (CIMMYT), based in Mexico.
For each 1 degree Celsius global temperatures rise above pre-industrial times, wheat harvests drop 5-8 percent, he said.
That means the world will likely see a 10 percent drop in harvests even if governments hold global warming to “well below” 2 degrees Celsius, as they have agreed, he said — and that drop would come even as the world’s population grows and demand for food rises.
Finding ways to breed wheat that can cope better with heat could help farmers from Australia to India and China, as well as the people who depend on their grain, he said.
“It doesn’t matter where you use this trait — it will have an impact,” Braun said.
DARE TO DREAM
One idea scientists are working on is to fundamentally reshape how crops such as wheat and rice carry out photosynthesis, to make them better able to continue producing in hot weather, especially if less water is available.
The process — like efforts to help wheat and maize start making their own fertilizer — is hugely complex and will likely require decades of work, scientists say.
“It would be a mega-breakthrough. Many people think it’s dreaming a little bit because it’s so difficult,” said Bruce Campbell, director of the CGIAR Research Program on Climate Change, Agriculture and Food Security (CCAFS).
But early tests to improve photosynthesis in tobacco have shown a 40 percent boost in production — and the technique is now being tested with crops from cassava to maize, said Kathy Kahn, a crop research expert with the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.
Nick Austin, who directs agricultural development for the foundation, said such changes “are going to benefit the poor and rich worlds together” — and could play a key role in keeping food prices affordable.
“These technologies... are going to be globally relevant,” he predicted.
Other efforts to help farmers — including the poorest — adapt to climate pressures have already taken root, Khan said.
Flood-tolerant rice that can withstand being submerged under water, for instance, is now being used by 6 million farmers in Asia to cope with more extreme weather, she said.
But Christensen, of the University of Copenhagen, thinks even more high-tech innovations — from weeding robots to drones — are likely to reach poorer farmers too.
With Africa expected to see rapid population growth and movement to cities in coming decades, its farmers will need to become more efficient at producing larger amounts of food, he said.
“If you want to increase efficiency, you need to use machinery to do some of the hard work,” he added.
He believes prices for drones and robots will fall rapidly in years to come, just as they once did for mobile phones.
“Maybe you will share this machinery with your neighbor,” Christensen said. “A village of smallholder farmers could think of buying one for all their fields.”
TWO-WAY FLOW
As consumers and companies demand to know more about the origin of what they buy, farmers in poorer nations could also adopt systems from blockchain to microchips tucked into cauliflower to help with tracking, said CCAFS principal scientist Philip Thornton.
Thornton is working on a “Wild Futures” report, due out later this year, that will dig into potential high-tech advances and predict how the food system might look in 15 to 20 years’ time, given the pace of technological change, he said.
There is still “quite a lot of uncertainty” about how much high-tech innovation will reach poorer small-scale farmers and especially around how quickly that could happen, he added.
But CCAFS director Campbell predicted there would be “many innovations, and the innovations are highly likely to be picked up elsewhere” beyond their source.
Christensen said ideas also are increasingly flowing from poorer countries to richer ones, not just in the other direction, particularly because the poorest are in some cases dealing with the strongest climate impacts first.
“There’s a lot of inspiration from the people in developing countries,” he said.
In late October of 1873 the government of Japan decided against sending a military expedition to Korea to force that nation to open trade relations. Across the government supporters of the expedition resigned immediately. The spectacle of revolt by disaffected samurai began to loom over Japanese politics. In January of 1874 disaffected samurai attacked a senior minister in Tokyo. A month later, a group of pro-Korea expedition and anti-foreign elements from Saga prefecture in Kyushu revolted, driven in part by high food prices stemming from poor harvests. Their leader, according to Edward Drea’s classic Japan’s Imperial Army, was a samurai
The following three paragraphs are just some of what the local Chinese-language press is reporting on breathlessly and following every twist and turn with the eagerness of a soap opera fan. For many English-language readers, it probably comes across as incomprehensibly opaque, so bear with me briefly dear reader: To the surprise of many, former pop singer and Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) ex-lawmaker Yu Tien (余天) of the Taiwan Normal Country Promotion Association (TNCPA) at the last minute dropped out of the running for committee chair of the DPP’s New Taipei City chapter, paving the way for DPP legislator Su
It’s hard to know where to begin with Mark Tovell’s Taiwan: Roads Above the Clouds. Having published a travelogue myself, as well as having contributed to several guidebooks, at first glance Tovell’s book appears to inhabit a middle ground — the kind of hard-to-sell nowheresville publishers detest. Leaf through the pages and you’ll find them suffuse with the purple prose best associated with travel literature: “When the sun is low on a warm, clear morning, and with the heat already rising, we stand at the riverside bike path leading south from Sanxia’s old cobble streets.” Hardly the stuff of your
April 22 to April 28 The true identity of the mastermind behind the Demon Gang (魔鬼黨) was undoubtedly on the minds of countless schoolchildren in late 1958. In the days leading up to the big reveal, more than 10,000 guesses were sent to Ta Hwa Publishing Co (大華文化社) for a chance to win prizes. The smash success of the comic series Great Battle Against the Demon Gang (大戰魔鬼黨) came as a surprise to author Yeh Hung-chia (葉宏甲), who had long given up on his dream after being jailed for 10 months in 1947 over political cartoons. Protagonist