According to the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations, the world population will reach 9.1 billion by 2050, and to feed that number of people, global food production will need to grow by 70%. For Africa, which is projected to be home to about 2 billion people by then, farm productivity must accelerate at a faster rate than the global average to avoid continued mass hunger.

From the invention of hoes, scythes and ploughs to the introduction of tractors, innovation is at the heart of agriculture. Today, a number of digital technologies — from autonomous robots that pick fruit to subterranean farms — are helping transform the industry.

Minette Batters, a beef farmer from Wiltshire in southern England, is becoming the public face of farming in much of Britain.

Agriculture and climate change are deeply intertwined. The effects of global warming on food supply are dire, whilst world population is increasing. It's time to change the way agriculture affects the environment, and vice versa.

The agriculture sector survived a year of rising uncertainty in 2018, but with the national elections and the threat of drought looming, 2019 will be every bit as challenging. 

A point that we South Africans always overlook is that South Africa, like the rest of Africa, is a neocolonial society. We like to think of ourselves, if not as a developed country, at least as very close to being one.

So much more goes into feeding the planet than the assembly of ingredients on our plates. Whether it’s soil quality, availability of clean water or climate change, the global farming community is constantly having to overcome challenges to grow fresh produce in a sustainable manner. From autonomous robots to satellites and cutting-edge science, farmers around the world are deploying new technologies to help them work in smart and cost-effective ways.

Precision Agriculture Company Aerobotics and major farming co-operative based in Humansdorp, The Co-op (also known as “Die Koöperasie”), have formed a partnership that will make Aerobotics’ leading tree crop analytics technology and software available to 1,300 farms in the Eastern Cape. This partnership is the first of its kind in South Africa and is set to serve as a template for others like it in the future.

When policymakers talk about “green jobs,” they tend to default to examples in solar power, wind and other sources of renewable energy—or perhaps manufacturing and supply chain management. They’re less likely to talk about agriculture.

The decrease in the total gross producer value (GPV) of maize for 2019 will be limited by increased maize prices. Due to the severe drought in 2016 the increased price levels maintained the gross producer value of production. It is thus expected to be the case in 2019 as well.

So much more goes into feeding the planet than the assembly of ingredients on our plates. Whether it’s soil quality, availability of clean water or climate change, the global farming community is constantly having to overcome challenges to grow fresh produce in a sustainable manner.

In 2017, there were nearly 40 million more people living in hunger than there were in 2015, according to the UN Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO)—a number that sets global progress against undernutrition back nearly a decade, despite a global, UN-led commitment to eradicate extreme poverty by 2030.

The United Nations reports that about 1/3 of the food produced globally each year is lost or wasted, and I’d reckon that number is not too surprising.

By now there is little doubt that the younger generation is rapidly changing the look and feel of the agricultural industry. Although inevitable, it still may be tough to swallow the fact that millennials now outnumber the baby boomers in this country. We’ve often talked about what this all means for the farmer and for food production in general. For this generation of up-and-comers food is personal. How, where and by whom food is produced matters a lot to them.

Agriculture has become a carbon-intensive endeavour. Crop, livestock and fossil fuel use in agriculture account for about 25 per cent of global greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions.

Although I use peanut butter almost daily, for some reason I had not looked at its production pipeline in the past couple of months until today when I received a call from a Zambian trader looking to export peanuts (groundnuts) to South Africa. This prompted me to do some back of the envelope calculations on the South African supplies for the 2019/20 marketing year, which starts on 01 March 2019.

Imagine “carbon emissions”, and what springs to mind? Most people tend to think of power stations belching out clouds of carbon dioxide or queues of vehicles burning up fossil fuels as they crawl, bumper-to-bumper, along congested urban roads.

The Department of Agriculture in the Western Cape is at the forefront of using technology to enhance sustainable farming, and as part of its initiative to embrace the fourth industrial revolution, has introduced Sentinel-2 earth observation technology.

The numbers released on February 27 by SA’s crop estimates committee underscores the message of optimism about agricultural conditions carried in my column on February 20.