agricultural technology

An estimated 33 percent — some 78 million tons — of the U.S. food supply is wasted every year, including nearly a pound of food per day in every household. This in a country with some 44 million food insecure people. It’s also a climate problem; all the waste generates methane, a greenhouse gas more potent than carbon dioxide. Can’t we just send would-be-wasted food to hungry mouths? Unfortunately, our food system is notoriously inefficient, with waste found on farms, in grocery stores, schools, and our refrigerators.This special six-part series, produced in partnership with Inverse, looks at how data, technology, ingenuity, and common sense can be used to fight this waste. With all these ingredients, and a handful of worms, the solution may be within reach.

Farmers in the top corn, wheat, soybean, and hog states are twice as likely as farmers in smaller-volume states to use precision agriculture practices, such as GPS guidance, said the USDA’s farm computer report on Thursday. Usage often topped 50 percent in the top row-crop states, while the U.S. average was just 27 percent.

Agricultural automation, ranging from tractors to sensors, drones, and artificial intelligence, can play an important role in making food production more efficient and environmentally friendly, said the annual State of Food and Agriculture report on Wednesday.

Over a 10-year period, conservation tillage became the most popular tillage practice on U.S. cropland, said a USDA agency on Thursday. The Natural Resources Conservation Service said the practice, which leaves crop residue on at least 30 percent of the soil surface to reduce erosion, had been adopted on 53.4 million acres by the mid-2010s.

President Biden will issue an executive order to expand competition in the agricultural sector and assure farmers of the right to repair increasingly complex tractors and other equipment, said the White House on Tuesday. The "right-to-repair" rules were expected to include smartphones and other widely used devices.

Syngenta yesterday announced its acquisition of FarmShots, a North Carolina-based data company that assesses plant health and other farm conditions. The acquisition marks the latest move by seed and ag-chemical companies to grow their presence in the farm data sector.

The research firm CB Insights says investors put more than $700 million into agricultural-technology companies in 2017, far more than the combined $565 million of the two preceding years, said the Financial Times.

EU regulators are looking "very carefully" at competition issues in Bayer's proposed purchase of Monsanto to make sure farmers will have a choice of products at affordable prices, said Bloomberg. The wire service said Bayer, based in Germany, was to receive a so-called statement of objections as soon as this week, which could lead the companies to offer a package of concessions.

A three-member team of engineers in Britain, working as the Hands-Free Hectare initiative, are "the first people in the world to grow, tend and harvest a crop without direct human intervention," says The New Yorker. The engineers say their underfunded experiment with a plot of barley shows the potential of autonomous agriculture, in which machines work the field without farmers at the steering wheel.

John Deere’s $305 million purchase of Blue River Technology, “a startup that makes robots capable of identifying unwanted plants, and shooting them with deadly, high-precision squirts of herbicide,” is yet another indication of the “growing appetite for high tech in agriculture,” says Wired.

A large-scale hog operation in Iowa will use positive pressure filtration, the same technology used by hospitals and manufacturers to avoid contamination, “to help prevent the spread of deadly viruses,” says Successful Farming.

Farmers are calling for free access to the software that runs their tractors and other farm equipment. "You're paying for the metal but the electronic parts technically you don't own it. They do," says Kyle Schwarting, a farmer in southeast Nebraska.

The owners of a one-acre greenhouse in London, New Hampshire rely on automation to reduce the risk of contaminating the greens that go into its packages of lettuce blends, says Produce Retailer. "From seeding to harvest to packaging, no one touches anything" at lef Farms, which sold its first order in January.

In a letter to Attorney General Loretta Lynch, Montana Sen. Jon Tester says the government should deny on antitrust grounds Bayer's proposed $66 billion purchase of Monsanto, given that it would result in a company controlling nearly 30 percent of the world's seed market and a quarter of pesticide sales.