01/09/22

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FutureFarming.com

> Case IH Connected Farm gets the most out of digital technology
3,000 hectares Connected Farm in Brazil has complete digital agriculture solutions for pre-planting, seeding, treatments, harvesting and post-harvesting. The Axial-Flow Series 250 Automation combine uses artificial intelligence to partially automate harvest and increase productivity.

> Cropify offers growers technology for objective grain classification

> Precision harvesting market to grow to USD 22.4 billion by 2027

> Best management practices for harvest data

> LYRO to deliver robotic packers to growers

> HarvestEye measures size and count of potatoes during harvest

> Off-the-shelf components to speed up harvest automation

> Australian harvesting robot picks apples in seven seconds

> Wageningen University on a quest to develop the best robotic grippers

> Using harvesting platforms to broaden the workforce

> Green Growth Yield Monitor simplifies collecting harvest data

> Finding and overcoming field robot limitations
A new field robot design might look good on paper, and it may even work under lab conditions or specific field settings. Change the conditions in which it has to operate, though, and things can get tricky. In Ontario, an autonomous working group has been putting an array of field robots through the ringer. The accomplishments – and yet-to-be-solved failings – of several machines were exhibited.

> Field robots:
Solinftec Solix sprayer robot uses the sun to auto-detect and spray weeds
In addition to its Solix Scouting robot, Solinftec will soon have a new automated weed identification and control system on the market. The new Solix Sprayer robot, designed to detect and spray weeds, will be available in 2023.

> Drones: Vietnamese farmer adopts drones in rice farming
62-year-old Vietnamese farmer Le Thanh Nguyen is one of the earliest farmers in Vietnam to adopt agricultural drones in rice production. He uses a XAG P100 drone for crop spraying, fertilising and seeding.

> Expert opinion: How predictive maintenance and analytics can improve farming
Technologies like Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Robotics, Computer Vision, and the Internet of Things (IoT) can help farmers lower equipment repair and maintenance costs.

> Crop solutions: Disease detection is in the air
New technology is being developed that can collect crop pathogen microorganisms for DNA analysis, from the air and more.

> Soil health: CropX launches nitrogen leaching monitoring tool
CropX Technologies announced the commercial launch of a new capability for its farm management system. The new tool continuously tracks the movement of nitrogen and salts in the soil.

See futurefarming.com


Portrait of a Peasant Woman, by Sir George Clausen

03 - 01/09/22

Smoking: How large of a global problem is it? And how can we make progress against it?

The WHO estimates that every year around 8 million people die prematurely as a result of smoking — this is about one in seven deaths worldwide. Smokers lose on average about 10 years of their life. Millions more live in poor health because of it.

Smoking is a particularly large problem in high-income countries. There, cigarette smoking is the most important cause of preventable disease and death.

In this article from July 2021, we detail the massive global health burden of smoking. We also describe how the progress against smoking that the chart shows has been achieved: through a public health campaign that makes use of a wide range of measures.

See ourworldindata.org 01/09/22

Trimble to Acquire French Ag Tech Company Bilberry

Bilberry is a pioneer in applying AI technology that identifies a wide variety of weed species in real time for a broad range of crop types.
See globalagtechinitiative.com


Ceres Imaging, Soiltech Wireless Form Partnership to Optimize Irrigation Strategies

Ceres will use Soiltech Wireless technology to deliver unique water optimization and irrigation insights to their customers.
See globalagtechinitiative.com


Harnessing the Digital Evolution

Agricultural Platform brings streamlined connectivity, organization to crop data collection.
See globalagtechinitiative.com


A Normandy Peasant, by Sir George Clausen

04 - 01/09/22

AgTech and Genomics Pioneer Pattern Ag Closes $35M Funding Round

Using breakthroughs in genomic sequencing, Pattern provides predictions about next season’s pest, disease, and fertility risks to crops.
See globalagtechinitiative.com


Intelinair Named 2022 'AgTech Data Analytics Company of the Year'

AgTech Breakthrough recognizes the top companies and technologies in global agricultural and food technology markets today.
See globalagtechinitiative.com


EOS Crop Monitoring Selected As 'Yield Forecasting Solution of the Year' in the 2022 AgTech Breakthrough Awards

Remote sensing technologies and satellite image analytics are gaining more recognition as reliable and effective tools for agriculture.
See globalagtechinitiative.com

Rising and falling costs

01 - 01/09/22

Meet the GROWhort: 3Bee hopes to avert bee-pocalyspe with hive monitoring tech GROW, AFN, by Jack Ellis

You might not realize it, but we all get a massive buzz off of bees.

For millennia, humans have reared these creatures for their honey, prized for its utility as a sweetener, preservative, and for its medicinal properties.

More than that, bees are our planet’s arch-pollinators; responsible for helping many of the world’s plants to reproduce. That means they play a much bigger role in our survival than simply producing honey (tasty as it may be.) Pollination leads to new generations of plants that oxygenate our atmosphere, strengthen our soils, sequester carbon – and, of course, that feed, clothe, and shelter us.

But pollinators — including bees — appear to be in decline. The picture is a complicated one that is yet to be fully explained, but disease, parasites, habitat destruction, and climate change are all argued to play a role.

Italian startup 3Bee is aiming to fight back on behalf of our furry friends by using technology to “listen to the bees’ needs and intervene when they are unwell,” as it states on its website. This tech platform include sensors that can be placed in honeybee hives in order to monitor what’s going on inside.

3Bee recently joined the GROW Impact Accelerator, which is backed by AgFunder and GROW. AFN spoke to the startup’s CEO Niccolò Calandri (NC) to find out more about the buzz-iness…
See agfundernews.com


Clean energy cheap enough to be politically palatable

02 - 01/09/22

Virridy partners to improve water security in Africa through climate finance-based model, AFN, by Lucy Ngige

Virridy (formerly Sweetsense) a developer of satellite-powered sensors that monitors environmental resources in Africa, has partnered with the Millennium Water Alliance (MWA) and the Mortenson Center in Global Engineering and Resilience at the University of Colorado Boulder to ensure that people facing the first impacts of climate change have access to reliable and safe drinking water.

The partnership claims to already support close to five million people’s water supplies in Ethiopia and Kenya.

It will expand over the next 12 months into other countries in East Africa like the Democratic Republic of Congo, using local networks and partners to support and maintain its water monitors.
…/…
See agfundernews.com


Winter is coming in Germany

03 - 01/09/22

Midstream Tech startups continue to bolster food supply chains navigating uncertain times, AFN, by Jennifer Marston

Midstream Tech startups — that is, those operating in the middle of the agrifood value chain — raised $3.8 billion in 2021, just a tad more than the $3.7 billion in 2020, according to AgFunder’s 2022 AgriFoodTech Investment Report.

Tools and services that bolster the food supply chain made up the bulk of funding deals for midstream technologies in 2021. This is unsurprising, given the state of the current supply chain that’s been upended by war, inflation, and pandemic-related breakdowns, and which may continue to be chaotic in the near term.

The AgFunder-defined Midstream Tech category includes technologies and services that address the middle of the agrifood value chain. That includes food safety and traceability, logistics and transport, and processing.

As Midstream Tech is in the middle, there’s often quite a bit of overlap with the consumer-facing Downstream category and Upstream companies working closer to the farm or lab. It also encompasses a wide range of technology types.
…/…
See agfundernews.com


Monkeypox in the world

04 - 01/09/22

A warming planet is changing our minds, by Busani Bafana, August 11, 2022
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The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), in a report published in February 2022, also revealed that rapidly increasing climate change is a rising threat to mental health and psychosocial well-being.

“Climate change has adversely affected physical health of people globally (very high confidence) and mental health of people in the assessed regions (very high confidence),” the top scientists said in the 6th Assessment Report on Impacts, Adaptation and Vulnerability.

“In assessed regions, some mental health challenges are associated with increasing temperatures (high confidence), trauma from weather and climate extreme events (very high confidence), and loss of livelihoods and culture (high confidence),” the IPCC warned.

Dr. Diarmid Campbell-Lendrum, WHO climate lead and an IPCC lead author, notes that WHO member states have prioritized mental health in any effort to protect their citizens from the impact of climate change. But only a few have implemented national health and climate change plans owing to lack of funding.
Voir allianceforscience.cornell.edu


Megalodon shark was longer than a bus

A 3D model of a colossal shark that roamed the oceans millions of years ago suggests that the beast was 16 metres long and could have eaten a whale in just a few bites. Few megalodon fossils exist, but researchers were able to create the digital model using a rare collection of vertebrae and teeth, as well as scans of modern great white sharks (Carcharodon carcharias). They calculated that the ancient creature weighed around 70 tons — as much as ten elephants— and that its open jaw stretched to 2 metres wide.
See theguardian.com


Quatre taureaux (vers 1650), par Paulus Potter (1625-1654), Galerie Sabauda, Turin

06 - 01/09/22

A first thought for today

Someone needs to explain to me why wanting clean drinking water makes you an activist and why proposing to destroy water with chemical warfare doesn't make a corporation a terrorist.
Winona LADUKE, activist, environmentalist, economist, and writer (1959 -)


A second thought for today

I cannot walk through the suburbs in the solitude of the night without thinking that the night pleases us because it suppresses idle details, just as our memory does.
Jorge Luis BORGES, writer (1899-1986)


A third thought for today

In the new version of the law of supply and demand, jobs are so cheap -- as measured by the pay -- that a worker is encouraged to take on as many of them as she possibly can.
Barbara EHRENREICH, journalist and author (1941-)


Un laboureur et son troupeau (1648), par Paulus Potter, Gemäldegalerie Alte Meister, Cassel (Hesse)

07 - 01/09/22

Beyond organic farming – harnessing biodiversity-friendly landscapes, byTejaTscharntke, IngoGrass, Thomas C.Wanger, Catrin Westphal, Péter Batáry

Biodiversity continues to decline rapidly, despite decades of repeated national and international policy efforts. Agricultural intensification is a major driver of biodiversity losses, while conversion to organic farming has been suggested as a key technique to halt or reverse this trend.

In contrast to this widespread view, certified organic agriculture raises local richness of widespread species by just a third when compared to conventional farming. This is achieved through waiving synthetic agrochemicals, but leads to considerable yield losses, requiring the conversion of more land to agriculture to obtain similar yields.

Diversifying cropland and reducing field size on a landscape level can multiply biodiversity in both organic and conventional agriculture without reducing cropland productivity.

Complementing such increases in cropland heterogeneity with at least 20% seminatural habitat per landscape should be a key recommendation in current biodiversity frameworks.
See sciencedirect.com/


Trading down for all

05 - 01/09/22

Nori integrates with FarmLogs to help more farmers monetize their soil carbon, Medium, by Nori

>>> Simplifying the process of enrolling in carbon markets
At Nori, we’re creating a marketplace that brings transparency and true price discovery to the world of carbon programs. For the past 5 years, we’ve been building tools, talking with growers, and enrolling farmers into our carbon marketplace. From the 15 farmers who have been paid over $1.6 million dollars for the sale of their carbon credits to the many more who are actively working with our team on enrolling their data, we have a foundation of working directly with farmers at every step. We know their pain points and have been steadily growing our marketplace with the farmers whom we serve.

And now that we’ve established that foundation, it’s time to ramp up.
.../...
See medium.com


Mobile phone sales decline

06 - 01/09/22

The Roots of Ukraine Resistance, by Yuliya Tymoshenko, Aug 19, 2022

Ukraine's success in fighting Russia's much larger army is rooted in the fact that the country has been unified, in a way that it has not been in centuries, by a single purpose: preservation of its sovereignty, lives, and liberties. And now that unity is fueling the spread of partisan warfare in areas controlled by the occupier.
.../...
Resistance concludes with nothing like the elation that everyone would expect victory over Nazism and fascism to have delivered. Instead, Kochanski reveals how confusion, disappointment, and bitterness reigned as the partisan armies began to confront an uncertain future and their failures during the war. Kochanski quotes one: “As the smoke cleared from the battlefield, it began to emerge that we had suffered a huge national defeat … We clutched at the last illusory straws of hope. We had yet to adapt to the new situation, and now faced an enemy within.” The Nazis had lost, but for half of Europe a new and hideous occupation – by Stalin’s Red Army – had begun.

Ukraine’s liberation, when it comes, as it must, will not bring with it such disillusion. Yes, we will be numbed for a time by the sheer scale of the task of reconstruction looming before us. But we will also find in our country a continuing unity on the great goals that we are defending in this war: sovereignty, democracy, and Europe.

We will end this war with the foremost hope of our national existence since 1991 – the promise of EU membership – within our grasp. Securing our membership in the Union will, of course, demand a tenacity, resilience, and unity of purpose, akin to what our people are demonstrating today. But just as the occupied nations of Western Europe built vibrant democracies on the ruins of Nazi rule, and the ex-communist EU members in Central and Eastern Europe have built ever freer and more prosperous societies since throwing off the Soviet yoke in 1989, we in Ukraine, remembering the horrors of our struggle today, will see the hard reforms needed to join Europe as a much lower price than what we are now paying for our freedom.



The end of single-family houses

07 - 01/09/22

Regenerative farming is the future, says Prince Charles, Farmers Weekly, by Philip Clarke

Moves toward a more regenerative style of farming in the UK have received a warm endorsement from the Prince of Wales, who said failure to address some of the issues associated with industrialised agriculture was “too grim to contemplate”.

Addressing the 22nd World Congress of Soil Science in Glasgow on Thursday (4 August), Prince Charles described soil as an asset that was all too easily “overlooked, degraded and polluted”.

“Yet healthy living soil can securely feed growing populations with a nutritious and varied diet, mitigate the effects of climate change, and provide water and flood management,” he said.

“Indeed, soil is absolutely critical for delivering the ecosystem services on which we all rely. So, it is high time that such an extraordinary, miraculous living organic system, so disastrously degraded by industrialised agriculture, receives the proper attention it deserves.”
.../...
See fwi.co.uk


Teheran replacing Moscow

08 - 01/09/22

Pesticides, pollinators and food security, by Jonas Kathage, Jun 24, 2022
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>>> Conclusion
The Commission’s press communications make it sound as if the proposed pesticide reductions will surely increase food security. However, this view is not supported by the Commission’s own impact assessment, which, apart from indicating much greater uncertainty, points to a reduction in agricultural production (in line with other recent analyses of the F2F and Biodiversity Strategies) - and reductions in agricultural production would certainly not increase food security, but rather reduce it.

A closer look at the postulated causal mechanism suggests that the Commission’s press communications and Vice President wildly inflate the risks pesticides pose to pollinators, and the benefits (wild) pollinators bring to crop production (and thus food security). They manage to do this by citing numbers without the necessary qualifications, leaving out context and by dismissing any positive contributions of pesticides to food production, resulting in a narrative that becomes a highly distorted version of what the evidence actually says.

1. Never mind the inconsistency between the interview, the speech and the press release in these numbers and what they refer to.

2. For example, for soybean, rapeseed and sunflower the dependence on pollination is only 25%. For pulses, tomatoes and citrus it is only 5%.
It is highest for apples, pears and peaches (65%) and some other fruits (40%).
The important cereals grown in the EU do not depend on pollinators at all.
So it is disingenous to say “dependent“ without further qualification.
These numbers come from another JRC report (Vallecillo et al., 2018) underlying the pollination chapter in the 2020 JRC report (Maes et. al, 2020).
The 2018 report cites Klein et al. (2007) as the source for these numbers, but I could not find them there. All Klein et al. (2007) seem to provide (Suppl. Material 2) are ranges of production reductions without pollinators.
Their “essential” category of >90% reduction without pollinators comprises only watermelon, cantaloupe/melon, pumpkin/squash/zuchini and a handful of rather exotic fruits and nuts. For the melons and pumpkin/zuchini types, it is the honeybee that is a primary pollinator (as for many other crops dependent on pollination).
See jkathage.substack.com


Le Taureau (1647), par Paulus Potter, Mauritshuis, La Haye

08 - 01/09/22

This factory breeds 30 million mosquitoes per week. Here’s why. By Bill Gates, August 15, 2022

These mosquitoes are allies in the fight against dengue and other deadly viruses.
See gatesnotes.com


Farmer’s Daughter: Activist lawsuits hinder EPA’s ability to balance ecological risk assessments, by Amanda Zaluckyj, The Farmer’s Daughter USA
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The truth is that these biological evaluations aren’t going away anytime soon. As soon as the EPA settles one lawsuit, another one pops up. We can expect that to continue.

Despite the pressure, it’s absolutely imperative that the EPA has the time and resources available to make scientifically sound conclusions. Because all of those registrations are important crop-protection tools without which farmers will see lower yields and, as a result, a smaller food supply.

So instead of a knockout punch between FIFRA and ESA, the EPA needs to choreograph a graceful ballet routine to harmonize the two.
See agdaily.com

Healthy life expectancy, or the number of years someone can expect to live in good health, is rapidly improving in Africa.

In 2019, African healthy life expectancy hit 56 years. On average, healthy African lifespans expanded by around six months every year since 2000.

See pewresearch.org 01/09/22