Ensuring Agricultural Sustainability Via Innovative Technology Sources

Agritech businesses in the APAC arena are increasingly opting for innovative technologies to maximise food productivity, thereby, to adhere with soaring demands.                                                         

 FREMONT, CA: The APAC arena has risen to fame as the world’s largest producer of milk and pulses and the second-largest producer of cereals like wheat and rice. That is, with a high-yielding variety of seeds, increased usage of fertilisers and pesticides, an expanding irrigation network, and conducive policy measures, APAC nations’ governments are attaining critical success in food production, which is anticipated to continue in the future. However, deteriorating soil health and excessive reliance on groundwater for food security by the growing population of the APAC region often pile up potential challenges, underscoring the need to address them with distinct consideration.

The United Nations has concluded a critical rise in the APAC population, which is expected to soar exponentially in the upcoming years, emphasising food and nutrition security critically. As a result, national governments in the region are opting for efficient new-age solutions to overcome horizontal issues like climate change, competing land uses, biodiversity loss, declining soil health, and depleting groundwater. Thus, the Food and Agriculture Organisation of the UN elucidates that the current resource-intensive agricultural practices in the arena will likely modify the land and water systems, instigating critical threats to food productivity and security in the arena.

However, nearly 40 per cent of the APAC arena’s workforce is highly dependent upon the workforce, due to which the effect can often be intimidating. The agriculture industry frontiers in the region are making a paradigm shift towards sustainable agricultural practices via new-age solutions like precision farming and digital technologies, thereby stimulating their developmental and environmental priorities.

Moreover, harnessing modern digital technology practices in the agricultural space has elevated on a critical scale in recent years, proffering an effective transition towards sustainable farming and achieving increased productivity. Hence, agritech companies in the APAC arena are harnessing varied innovative technologies like remote sensing, big data, the internet of things (IoT), and artificial intelligence (AI) to enable farmers by generating actionable insights.

A critical adoption of these digital technologies is likely to add value across the entire supply chain, ranging from sowing to harvesting, thereby reaching the final consumers as destined. Implementing precision farming practices substantially improves crop yields in the agricultural space while minimising the use of resources and thereby eliminating the dire need for resource-intensive farming techniques for farmers. This, in turn, helps in reducing the production costs in the agricultural space, thus increasing farmers’ incomes with optimal usage of valuable resources like groundwater. Wherein, these digitised platforms also play a crucial role in waste management.