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SmartAg Initiative: Applying technology to food production, preparation, and delivery to feed world

Russ White, John Verboncoeur

By 2050 the global population may exceed 9 billion people with almost three quarters of them living in urban areas. How will the world feed so many? The answer in part, is by connecting the researchers, practitioners and policymakers who are tackling the global food problem of producing more with less. One of the best allies may be technology.

John Verboncoeur is associate dean for research at Michigan State University's College of Engineering and is a national leader on this topic. He joins me on MSU Today to talk about MSU's leadership in the SmartAg Initiative. John chairs this initiative’s executive committee. He's a professor of electrical and computer engineering and computational mathematics, science and engineering.

“So, this is all driven by an enormous challenge, and if you look at the numbers on the challenge, there’s the 9 billion people, but the other pieces of the challenge include water and energy. So, about 80 percent of the fresh water on the planet goes towards agricultural production, somehow in the agricultural sector, whether that's processing food, whether it's cleaning food, and so on. But it goes towards that piece. That's a big element.

“Another big element is about 30 percent of the world’s energy goes into food production. Those are huge numbers. And as you grow the amount of food you need to produce, you need to grow those numbers as well. As many people may be aware, we've had a drop in subtropical precipitation of about 30 percent in the last few decades. So, that poses an equal challenge. So, all of those challenges add up to tell us we need to be a lot smarter about how we produce our food.”

How do engineers intersect with farmers and agribusiness in SmartAg?

“The intersection comes around in using technology to develop food, maybe in a smarter way, maybe in a more efficient way, maybe safer and more secure. So, it isn't just about the quantity of food we produce. It's also about the quality and it's also about the safety and accessibility of that food. You can produce all the great food you want, and if it's in the wrong place it doesn't do the right thing. So, technology is one way to get at that. It's one way to get more out of the resources that you have. I don't want to limit this to land based agriculture. This may also impact aquaculture. So, we want to manage all of those things wisely. We want to have the ability to sense and understand what's going on and manage the system in a way that's sustainable and maybe even growable.

“You can think of this SmartAg Initiative as starting from the soil from sort of the base production and going all the way to the consumer. That may include stages such as production. Whether that's agriculture or aquaculture production or animal production. Harvesting, post-harvest, distribution, collection, aggregation, food processing, and then transportation all play a huge role in this. Even at the consumer level into the consumers' refrigerator, for example, smart packaging tells you when the food is safe and when the quality is degrading. All of those things are now possible with current technologies. So, engineering certainly has a big role to play in integrating with domain specialists because engineers generally won't know that much about the details of plant biology or agriculture production. They may be working on machine vision or something like that, but all of those technologies can certainly play a role in enhancing that food production.

“I think making sure that our food is tracked and safe is important. One of the big problems we have in today's world is when we have a food incident like tainted food, we may see a couple of months of an investigation to figure out what happened. That's because we have a few sporadic data points and we try to trace what happened back. There may be a recall. Remember, SmartAg is not smart agriculture. It's a smart agri-food system. That means that we have in place, for example, sensors that you put on the food as soon as you package it and those sensors can detect a very limited set of chemicals and/or biologicals, but those things can be done very cheaply when it's that limited set and you need limited accuracy. You really want it to be able to tell you whether the quality of the food is degrading. It may still be safe to eat, but the second question we want to know is how safe is the food? Can you still consume it?

“If the quality is degrading you may not sell it at a high end food outlet. You may sell it somewhere else. Sell it through a soup kitchen because it's still safe to consume. So, you want labels to be able to tell you those things. If you ask how do you get people to adopt this? Well the food producers will say, ‘Gee, I don't want to put smart labels on my food because it tells people they can keep it on the shelf longer, therefore they'll buy less food. There'll be less waste but they'll buy less food.’ That means they sell less food.

“Grocery supply operates at very low margins. So, if we can increase the margins by reducing the waste, they're going to pick up any product that allows them to increase their margins and they're going to push back up the food supply chain the desire for smart packaging. So, if you look at the numbers, the food waste in both developed and developing nations is between 30 and 40 percent of the food produced. That's an incredibly large number. About half of that happens at the wholesale retail part of the supply chain. The other half is with the consumer or in transportation.

“So, if we're able to mitigate the half of it that goes into the wholesale and retail, that's 20 percent. You can imagine that's a big dent in a 3 percent margin. That's going to cause them to really purchase those items they can get with that smart packaging. So, that's going to give a big edge to smart packaging.”

MSU is positioned to help lead the Smart Ag Initiative.

“MSU was started in 1855 with essentially two departments. One was a Department of Agriculture and the other was Department of Mechanics. So, you can view the Department of Mechanics in 1855 as the SmartAg of the times. The mission was to develop machines for agriculture. So, we're just circling back to our roots.

“In terms of being a land grant, our mission obviously is to benefit the state. So, a big piece of that mission involves, in the state of Michigan, one of the most diverse sets of specialty crops anywhere in the country. That diverse set of specialty crops typically provides for higher margins and they're more amenable to early adoption of SmartAg practices because that higher margin supports it. Right? If you can increase production by 10 percent it has a much bigger impact on a high margin crop than it does let's say on corn or something like that. So, Michigan has that big diverse set. It has a big diverse set of challenges as a result of that, and is very amenable to SmartAg. I don't want to claim that SmartAg has owned this thing. It's been around for a couple of years under that moniker, but precision agriculture has existed for a decade or more and is a well-developed area. That involves tractors with precision GPS that can lay down rows and space the seeds nicely. All that's an important piece of this, but SmartAg's much bigger than that. A much bigger system.

“So, for Michigan, the benefit is Michigan farmers tend to be small to mid-size farmers as opposed to the huge acreage farmers that you might see in Iowa or Nebraska. So, in terms of being able to deploy SmartAg technologies in that framework, that small to mid-size farmer can't really afford to go big with technology. They have to have sort of bite sized pieces of technology that work for their farming style. They also recognize, because they're typically family farmers, the value of maintaining the sustainability of their farm. So, that means that they have a strong desire to put fewer chemicals into the soil because they know the chemicals build up. They can measure it. They know that the water run off from their farm damages their water supply. So, they want to reduce the impact of that as much as possible.

“If they're able to use let's say robotic platforms like drones or land-based robots, they’re more able to target and recognize deficiencies in their crop. Whether it's soil deficiency, whether it's plant fungal pathogen, microbial pathogen on their plants, they’re able to target the remediation, whether that's a fertilizer or a pesticide, and target it to only the local area so that they use 1 percent as many resources in that area as they would have before. That's 1 percent of the load on their soil and water. That’s in addition to the cost savings obviously of using 1 percent of the chemical. Those are all huge benefits that farmers in Michigan will completely understand about this initiative.”

Is Verboncoeur confident we can meet the challenge of feeding 9 billion people in 2050?

“It's part of our humanity; we better feed all the people. It's crucial. We can't fail. We better find a way, and I think that this is at least a tool in the arsenal to meeting that challenge. In terms of what the typical person can do, certainly they can shop smart, they can buy sustainable foods, they can understand where their foods were produced and how they were produced. We will hopefully ultimately get to the point where every piece of food has a tag on it, and you can scan it with your phone. That tag will tell you where it was produced and processed. You can find out and trace the entire pathway of the food item. Pathogen outbreaks in food will be immediately traceable because you'll be able to scan it. It'll tell you every place that touched it. So you can see where the contamination occurred.

“You'll also see the increasing use of sensors throughout the food supply chain, whether it's at the production level, whether it's at harvest, or whether it's in the food processing plants. They're all going to have sensors that are looking for these pathogens, and so you're going to see a lot better food safety. Hopefully we see a reduction of food waste. You'll see hopefully the elimination of expiration dates on food, which are based on estimates of how that food will be handled. They have to be conservative because if you bought that gallon of milk from that company and that gallon of milk was sour when the expiration date said it was fine, you would conclude that they don't know what they're doing. You probably would find another brand. So, they have to be very conservative.

“If we could have labels that instead detected the build up of lactic acid in that milk, you'd have a very precise measurement of just when that milk was going bad. You'd know when you shouldn't drink it anymore and you wouldn't need to rely on a label. Therefore the milk would actually last longer if it were handled well. You could look for foods that let you reduce your waste by being smart about how you manage it.”

So what’s important for us to remember about the Smart Ag Initiative?

“I think the crucial piece to know about this is that we're really leveraging technology that comes from a lot of other fields. Many of those technologies we talked about have their roots in other areas such as autonomous vehicles. A lot of the technologies in SmartAg come out of sensors, come out of robotics, come out of machine vision, and come out of cloud data analytics that have been developed for a lot of other fields in technology but that certainly have great application in this food field.

“I think the thing to walk away with is a positive outlook on being able to meet the challenges of feeding a growing population by being much smarter about how we manage and deploy our resources.”

MSU Today airs Sunday afternoons at 4:00 on 105.1 FM and AM 870.

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