Agriculture What does the future hold

Agriculture What does the future hold Agriculture What does the future hold?Posted April 26, 2019, by JennyHow do you provide quality food to people at a decent price without having a negative impact on the environment? This is the fundamental question that the agriculture industry constantly seeks to answer. So what are the current and future trends that will impact the industrys ability to provide a solution?We sat down with two senior agricultural academics at Charles Sturt University to find out what issues the agriculture industry is likely to face in the coming decade, and the ways it is potentially going to meet them. As David Kemp, hochschulprofessor of Agricultural Systems at Charles Sturt University, sees it, there is an underlying factor that will influence how farming is done in the future.When it comes to Australia, our farmers are very efficient but were going to have to get far more efficient in the future. With the way the population is increasing in Australia and ar ound the world well probably have to produce twice as much food as we do now. But theres no more obviously arable land. And with no more land you then have to improve the productivity of what youve got. And thats hard. All the simple stuff find new land, clear it and grow more crops was done in the last 100 years. You could, but today we have to think a lot harder about how to maximise the productivity of that land, and at the same time not do any damage to the environment.Jim Pratley, Research Professor of Agriculture at Charles Sturt University, echoes this basic driver for the future of the farming industry the need for more food to feed a growing population. There is a pressure to produce more. We will need 70 per cent more food by 2050 in the world than at the departure of this century. That means that in the first half of this century we will be producing more food than we have in the rest of the history of human civilisation. World population we have 7 billion now and it is projected to be 9.3 billion by 2050. So there are a few challenges out there. The whole package This equation is not as straightforward as it first looks. For Professor Kemp, it is not simply a case of growing more food by any means necessary.Agricultural science needs to take careful account of not just food production issues, but environmental issues and social issues around food production. Students now and in the future need to take a systems perspective when meeting the challenges of agriculture. Professor Pratley emphasised that agriculture must operate within a demanding marketplace. An industry does need the confidence of the people we call it social licence the idea that you are not going to do anything damaging during production. And if you do something that destroys public confidence, you lose that social licence quickly. Markets are more savvy about insisting on environmentally sound products, so the market demands are increasing for that sort of process. Now socia l licence features in most sectors planning, and they cant afford to jeopardise that market.That social licence can certainly be jeopardised, but Professor Kemp feels that in many ways this can be due to misinformation. There is a distortion in the media about large companies. The big operators have more resources to fix up environmental issues. Many farms now approximately two-thirds have off-farm income. They are not using the farm to fund something else. In fact, income is coming from off-farm avenues and used to improve the farm and make it a better place to be. Pollution from agriculture is a lot less than it has been