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Châtenay-Malabry (FR - 92290), 14 January 2019
EFITA newsletter / 860 - European Federation for Information Technology in Agriculture, Food and the Environment
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If 100 people lived on earth...
See our earth
The demographic Armageddon will not happen: Seven-billionth human marks demographic change (2011) by Jim Forsyth (Reuters)
"For the first time ever, the human reproduction rate is slowing, in many places slowing significantly, and the slowing growth is not only happening in Europe and Japan."
Dudley POSTON, professor of sociology and demographics at Texas A&M University
…/…
The march of science led to a decrease in infant mortality and deadly diseases, and combined with a continued high fertility rate led to a huge population bloom. The two billionth human was born in 1930, and the six billionth in 1999.
Moreover, the warfare and constant societal violence that helped keep the population in check has retreated, Harvard University psychologist Steven Pinker says in his recent book “The Better Angels of our Nature.”
“It is really only in the countries of sub Saharan Africa where fertility is still high...,” Poston said, “but even in several of these countries there have been fertility declines in recent years.”
So Poston says while it took 12 years to reach Monday’s seven billion mark from six billion, it will take 14 years to reach eight billion — the first time in history a billion milestone has taken longer to reach than the one before — and then 18 years to reach nine billion.
Thus far the world has been able to produce enough food to feed its new mouths. The U.N. says world food production per person today is 41 percent higher than in 1961, thanks largely to the “Green Revolution” in farming which brought higher yields not only to Western farmers, but brought traditional subsistence farming in Africa and Asia into the modern age.
Food production per capita in India today is 37 percent higher than fifty years ago, according to the World Bank.
Some still fear food shortages and price rises, and problems with supplies of other commodities like oil.
“(Whether) the rate of farm production slow down or level off is uncertain,” Poston said. “But right now there is no difficulty.”
And the trends may bring problems of a different sort, he said, predicting the world will begin seeing the impact of declining populations in as little as 40 years.
“That is going to be the issue in the future,” Poston said. “We are going to have to start thinking for the first time in human history about fewer.”
That will mean thinking in an entirely new way about everything from resource production to old age pensions, he said.
See reuters.com
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The Applications and Benefits of Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR)
Webinar Thursday, January 17th
- Ship detection
- Oil spill monitoring
- Land surface deformation
- Burn area analysis
See harrisgeospatial.com
Register
Farm & Food 4.0
21 January 2019 – BERLIN (DE)
Sehen farm-and-food.com
See program
The Prague INSPIRE Hackathon 2019
21 - 23 January 2019 - PRAGUE
The first phase of the Prague INSPIRE Hackathon 2019 starts before the actual on-site hackathon. During the first phase, teams are formed and registered, and preparation of team projects for the on-site hacking is happening. You can create your own team with people you know or people you’ve worked with before. Or you can explore the existing ideas and teams that have been already created and you can simply join them.
The second phase includes the on-site hacking, presentation of results and winning ceremony, 21-23 January 2019 at the Czech University of Life Sciences in Prague. During the three days all projects will be finalised. All the teams will be invited to present their projects on the last day. For this reason, the teams should prepare presentations showing the results of their hackathon projects.
Registration – the registration process is twofold. First, you need to register your project including the title, abstract and other details. As soon as your project is registered, you can register all members of the team that will be working on the project. Or anyone interested in your project might sign up as the member of your team and contribute to the project execution.
See INSPIRE Hackathon 2019
See plan4all on Facbook
DSSAT 2019 International Training Program: Assessing Crop Production, Nutrient Management, Climatic Risk and Environmental Sustainability with Simulation Models"
20-25 May 2019 - University of Georgia Campus in GRIFFIN, Georgia, USA
The DSSAT Foundation, in collaboration with the University of Florida and the International Fertilizer Development Center, will host an international training program entitled DSSAT 2019 - "Assessing Crop Production, Nutrient Management, Climatic Risk and Environmental Sustainability with Simulation Models" from May 20 through May 25, 2019 at the University of Georgia Campus in Griffin, Georgia, USA.
The overall goal of the workshop is to familiarize the workshop participants with the Decision Support System for Agrotechnology Transfer (DSSAT v4.7); the Cropping System Model (CSM) for the simulation of crop growth and yield, soil and plant water, nutrient, and carbon dynamics; and the application of models to real world problems, such as crop and resource management, climate change and climate variability, carbon sequestration, food security, biofuels, and environmental sustainability.
See DSSAT Foundation web portal
Workshop registration web site
Contact: Gerrit HOOGENBOOM
E-mail: gerrit(a)ufl.edu
12th European Conference on Precision Farming
8-11 July 2019 - MONTPELLIER
The French organisers are pleased to welcome the return of the ECPA conference to France and to Montpellier. The conference will continue with the successful format of previous conferences of building in strong industry sessions and participation. Taking advantage of the location of Montpellier on the Mediterranean coast, this 2019 edition will be an opportunity to focus on precision farming applied to small Mediterranean farms. Of course, oral and poster presentations will be welcomed from authors on any precision agriculture topic, though particularly welcome on the list of topics shown in the Programme section. All prospective authors and presenters should view the ‘Key Dates’ section to ensure they can meet the deadlines.
See ECPA
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You Can’t Handle the Truth: 10 Things Agtech Needs to Admit
1) Why oh why can’t we get past this whole illusion that Big Data is going to save us all?
2) Stop trying to make algorithms that try to replace people or processes.
3) Can we please just stop making ridiculously expensive in-cab controllers?
4) Please, for the love of god, can people stop creating news articles about drones and robotics changing the world for agriculture?
5) Let’s figure this whole “who owns the data” stuff out.
6) As an industry, we need to be a lot more careful about giving away things for free.
7) I’ll say it, crop insurance and the USDA need to give incentives to use precision ag tools and data with discounts on insurance or by some other means like that.
8) Let us end this whole debate on what resolution and imagery type system is better than the next.
9) This industry, and in particular the few groups who control the narrative, need to actually just agree and make one darn file type used to transfer and create data.
10) Finally, stop saying that your tech or product or service or whatever was created to help feed the world by 2050. Don’t use the line that everyone says, “We are going to have 9.5 billion by 2050 and need to grow double what we do today” or whatever the stupid saying is.
See precisionmag.com
Zymergen Raises $400m Series C in Largest Ever Upstream AgriFood Tech Deal in US
Zymergen is not wholly focused on agriculture but it’s a significant part of its business and drove early demand for its molecular products that aim to replace petroleum-based products and other environmentally-damaging ingredients with a biological alternative. In agriculture, this means finding alternatives to chemically manufactured pesticides and fertilizers with microbial alternatives. In food, it could mean replacing preservatives or flavorings, or even packaging.
See agfundernews.com/
Indigo Acquires Satellite Imagery Startup TellusLabs for ‘Living Map of World’s Food Supply’
Indigo Agriculture, the microbial ag products startup-cum-agribusiness marketplace has acquired TellusLabs, a startup using satellite imagery to monitors the world’s croplands.
Indigo will integrate TellusLab’s data into its growing digital agriculture platform that today predominantly consists of farm-level data from trials undertaken with partner farmers in its Indigo Research program.
See agfundernews.com/
AI-Powered Digital Grocer Farmstead Raises $2.2m Series A in Mission to Finally Crack Perishable E-Commerce
“Farmstead started because when my daughter turned two, she started drinking a lot of milk and I found myself going to the supermarket after long days at the office buying the same things over and over, trying to get things delivered consistently without substitutions or packaging issues,” Elankumaran told AgFunderNews. “We all have computers in our pockets now. I get everything else delivered. Why can’t I get perishable groceries delivered?”
See agfundernews.com/
Why is Europe Behind in Food Tech Investment? By Louisa Burwood-Taylor
European food tech startups are on course to have raised between €750 million to €1 billion in 2018, according to different estimates. That will be around a 40% decline on 2017 funding levels.
See agfundernews.com/
Agritech Startup Spotlight: Wefarm’s 1m+ African Farmer Information Network Extends to Ag Marketplace
“I think, if you look at our vision, you could say that small-scale agriculture is the biggest industry of Earth. It’s a half billion people; it’s the entire world’s supply chain; it’s the origin or commodities markets, and nobody’s really built a platform on that,” Kenny Ewan, founder, and CEO of Wefarm, tells AgFunderNews.
Wefarm is a mobile phone-based farmer network and collective for smallholders farmers in Africa.
See agfundernews.com/
ESMERA EU Project
ESMERA offers eight industrial challenges addressing real-life problems in four challenge areas: Energy, Manufacturing, Construction and Agri-food. Under these areas, multiple sectors such as Gas & Oil, Nuclear, Assembly, Processing, Agriculture, Food Processing, Buildings and Infrastructure will be considered. The focus will be on applications that cannot be served by existing robotics solutions and thus are not provided by integrators or technology providers at the moment. The challenges will be selected to be open to innovation, meaning that they will allow multiple approaches to be used by the SMEs who will be free to explore new directions in developing robotics technologies
See esmera-project.eu
Autonomous compact robots hold potential for growers
Compact and autonomous robots are already being sold to growers. Here’s a look at one lab’s efforts to go beyond data collection to take on herbicide-resistant weeds.
See farmprogress.com
Traders go digital in new joint venture
Cargill, ADM to form GrainBridge, and farmers want to know more about what it means.
See farmprogress.com
Crop startup gets financial boost
Hi-Fidelity Genetics is a computation crop breeding company bringing new tech to the industry.
See farmprogress.com
Predicting the future of agriculture
Hi Fidelity Genetics is a computational breeding company. We use data science, advanced sensors and large scale DNA sequencing to build the best crop genomes in the world. We share a passion for solving hard problems like feeding the world and a mission to build genomes that can face what nature throws at them.
See hifidelitygenetics.com
BASF and VanderSat collaborate to provide farmers with high-precision, field-specific crop optimization
- Microwave sensing from space gives more precise measurement of moisture and temperature in fields
- Integration into BASF's xarvio™ Field Manager enables high-precision forecasting of yield risk
- Collaboration helps farmers make more accurate agronomic decisions
See vandersat.com
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Next
Efita
Congress in Greece in 2019! |
2019 Efita International Conference 27-29 June - RHODES - Greece The topics for the EFITA 2019 conference are detailed below within topic groups. Topic group 1: “Sensors” This topic group refers to the development or optimization of sensors and electronics for agricultural applications, such as field scouting and crop parameters monitoring. Particular sub-topics could be: - New sensors (optical, reflectance, etc.) - Wireless sensor networks - Image processing Agricultural robots are also within this topic, focusing on automation and control technologies to optimise robotic applications in agriculture. Particular sub-topics could be: - Scouting Robots - Action Robots - Machine embedded ICT tools Topic group 2: “Data” This topic group is related to all technologies and software that cure data mining, data warehousing, visualisation, knowledge extraction, big data management. Particular sub-topics could be: - Big data management - Data mining for agricultural information systems - Data visualisation - Data and Knowledge Management for extension services (with real examples) Other subjects within this topic are interoperability, semantics and knowledge management, such as: - Metadata and data standards in agriculture - Thesaurus management, Knowledge management - Ontologies for agriculture - Knowledge bases and Knowledge repository services - Web of Data, Linked Open Data Topic group 3: “Decision” This topic group is about modelling for simulation, prediction, crop management, design of ICT-intensive farming systems. Proposed sub-topics are: - Modelling and Simulation for agricultural production and farming systems - Weather prediction models for sustainable agricultural production - Multi-Agent systems Other “Decision” scientific work is about remote sensing, GIS technologies and spatial management of resources. It includes sub-topics such as: - Remote Sensing and GIS applications - Planning tools - Environmental information systems and Environmental management systems - ICT applications for natural resources management, including forestry - ICT applications for sustainable biomass production and use Finally, ICT applications regarding economical, organizational and business implications in agriculture are also used for business decision making. Such ICT tools are divided in: - Decision Support Systems for Agriculture - ICT applications for food chain and logistics - Traceability tools - ICT and business - Rural economies and ICT policies for rural development Topic group 4: “Action” This topic group is mainly about design of ICT applications for agriculture and sustainability focusing on precision and knowledge intensive agriculture. It includes sub-topics such as: - Computer tools for farming - Models of farming activity - Scientific computing applied to crop management -Expert systems in agriculture This topic group is also about web technologies and networking of actors all along the value chain of agriculture. It includes sub-topics such as: - On line farm services - Web applications (clients, devices, server-side) - Cloud computing applications - Social Networking, collaborative tools and crowdsourcing - Tools for e-agribusiness See efita2019 |
The Priest Can't Lie!!!
A very distinguished lady was on a plane arriving from Switzerland. She found herself seated next to a nice priest whom she asked:
"Excuse me Father, could I ask a favor?"
"Of course my child, What can I do for you?"
"Here is the problem, I bought myself a new sophisticated hair remover gadget for which I paid an enormous sum of money. I have really gone over the declaration limits and I am worried that they will confiscate it at customs. Do you think you could hide it under your cassock?"
"Of course I could, my child, but you must realize that I cannot lie."
"You have such an honest face Father, I am sure they will not ask you any questions", and she gave him the 'hair remover'.
The aircraft arrived at its destination. When the priest presented himself to customs he was asked,
"Father, do you have anything to declare?"
"From the top of my head to my sash, I have nothing to declare, my son", he replied.
Finding this reply strange, the customs officer asked, "And from the sash down, what do you have?"
The priest replied, "I have there a marvellous little instrument destined for use by women, but which has never been used."
Breaking out in laughter, the customs officer said,
"Go ahead Father. Next!"
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Contact: Guy WAKSMAN
E-mail: guy.waksman(a)laposte.net
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