Source: NC A&T COLLEGE OF AGRICULTURE AND ENVIRONMENTAL SCIENCES, 6/22/21


Growing enough food for an ever-increasing world population on the same amount of land will be one of the future’s most daunting tasks. But it’s a mission that agriculture professionals can become equipped to handle by working together to solve problems centering around food, energy and water security, according to the National Science Foundation.

The Convergence Accelerator workshop, sponsored by the National Science Foundation, brought together nearly 200 participants from across the nation to re-imagine what agriculture’s future could become using digital tools to make agriculture more efficient and precise.

“There is a large deficit between the amount of food we produce today and the amount it will take to feed the world in 2050,” said Gregory Goins, Ph.D., chair of the Natural Resources and Environmental Design department and one of the hosts of the virtual meeting. “NSF knows that solving problems of such a magnitude will take input from all disciplines, not just the agricultural or governmental ones. We can’t tax our way out of the problem. These sessions allowed experts from a variety of fields to all come together, discuss, and then report possible solutions.”

The four-day “brainstorm” included representatives from industry, agricultural practice and research, government officials and other stakeholders, and featured sessions on such topics as the tools and materials needed to develop precision agriculture; identifying types of data and their usefulness; and developing sustainable delivery systems. Each session included discussions of both the issues at hand and possible solutions.

The sessions will result in a cumulative report for the NSF to make widely available throughout the industry, allowing industry, research and other partners to make proposals for further work on various parts of the problem, funded by the foundation.
Researchers, teachers and Extension leaders from across the CAES participated in the sessions, led by Goins and co-leaders from Iowa State and Penn State.

“The nation has emerged from the pandemic into a very different economy than the one we had a year ago,” said Goins, who is a former program officer for NSF. “The pandemic exposed the need for the agricultural sector to operate more efficiently and better sustain environmental quality – and to be more resilient in general. As a result, there is a renewed interest for cutting-edge technologies. We need to innovate very rapidly, and investments in digital and precision agriculture allow us to meet the challenges of making a profit, making more food and sustaining the environment.”

Limits of the current system of government-subsidized, non-local production were quickly exposed during the pandemic, Goins said.

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