Farming – Page 3 – Impact Lab

Ecological Products, Farming, Food, Great New Product, Science & Technology News

This brilliant hydroponic system puts a whole garden on your countertop

August 30, 2019

Growing your own food is one of life’s great pleasures—plus it’s good for you and for the environment. But in increasingly tight, urban homes, we don’t all have room for gardens. And hydroponic systems, as appealing as they may be, often appear to be a whole lot of hardware for only a bit of actual green. Some fresh arugula would be nice for dinner, but who wants giant plastic box taking up half their kitchen to get a few leaves?

The Rotofarm, by an Australian company called Bace (which appears to have produced skincare products in a past life), is a space-friendly hydroponic system, and it doubles as a beautiful sculpture in your home. With a circular design, which rotates plants like a Ferris wheel through the day, the Rotofarm is able to fit nearly five feet of growing area inside a countertop footprint of just 11 inches. Water is dispersed through the nutrient and water reservoir in the stainless steel base, and a bright LED grow light lives in the middle like a tiny sun. Then to harvest, you can tilt the farm 180-degrees and pull off its clear cover. You take what you want (kale, mint, lettuce, spinach, or, yes, marijuana), and close it back up.

Continue reading… “This brilliant hydroponic system puts a whole garden on your countertop”

Agriculture, drones, Electric Vehicles, Farming, Science & Technology News

Electric powered farm vehicles set to revolutionise agriculture sector

August 3, 2019

The use of battery power for agricultural vehicles and machinery promises to revolutionise the agricultural industry by lowering costs and improving production. From battery powered large tractors to autonomous small electric robots, battery and solar power are changing the face of agriculture.

Agriculture is under pressure to produce more food using a declining availability of additional arable land and water resources. Mechanised farming can improve food production in Africa, but requires energy, an increasingly costly input to the food production process. There is a need to control energy costs, as in any other industry, by the use of more efficient methods and machinery.

Agriculture is going through a revolution, brought about by new technology, moving to what is known as precision farming (PF), which uses satellite imagery, drones, ground based sensors, GSP systems and agri-robots to control the planting, growth and harvesting of crops. The traditional method of crop management involves blanket application of herbicides, pesticides and fertilizer, while PF makes use of automation and artificial intelligence to precisely control the amounts of fertilizer, herbicide and insecticide applied to crops, with resultant increased yield and greatly reduced use of the above. PF also reduces the energy used by agricultural machinery by directing action only where it is needed and focusing activities on specific areas only.

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Agriculture, Blockchain, Farming, Food, Science & Technology News

Blockchains’s impact on food and farming, explained

July 24, 2019

1. Is it possible to track where food comes from?

Several companies have launched services allowing shoppers to see a product’s journey from farm to fork, but they often depend on retailers agreeing to be transparent.

When you pop into a store to buy fresh fruit, vegetables or meat, it’s common for the packaging to reveal which country it is from. Some upmarket brands go further by offering stories about the farm and the conditions where the food was cultivated.

Tracking an item step-by-step through the manufacturing process can be hard — and, sometimes, even manufacturers and retailers themselves aren’t sure about a product’s journey.

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Agriculture, Automation, Farming, Robots, Science & Technology News

Meet the future of agriculture. Say Hello to DOT

July 8, 2019

Autonomous agriculture is here.

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Farming, Food, Green Friendly, Science & Technology News

Lab-grown diary could soon become the food of the future

June 26, 2019

First stop burgers, next stop cheese.

Lab-grown meat is getting a lot of attention along with plant-based meat substitutes. Technology is driving the industry toward providing alternatives to conventionally produced food products. Dairy proteins may be the next product produced in a lab, for use in fluid “milk” production and processed dairy products like yogurt and cheese, to name a few.

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Agriculture, Farming, Food, Machine Learning, Science & Technology News

MIT’s ‘cyber-agriculture’ optimizes basil flavors

April 21, 2019

The days when you could simply grow a basil plant from a seed by placing it on your windowsill and watering it regularly are gone — there’s no point now that machine learning-optimized hydroponic “cyber-agriculture” has produced a superior plant with more robust flavors. The future of pesto is here.

This research didn’t come out of a desire to improve sauces, however. It’s a study from MIT’s Media Lab and the University of Texas at Austin aimed at understanding how to both improve and automate farming.

In the study, published today in PLOS ONE, the question being asked was whether a growing environment could find and execute a growing strategy that resulted in a given goal — in this case, basil with stronger flavors.

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Farming, Farms, Internet of Things, Latest Trend, Science & Technology News

How IoT is being used for Australian agriculture in 2019

April 3, 2019

CSIRO’s Vertebrate Pest Detect-and-Deter (VPDaD) device

The development of IoT for agriculture is still in its early stages, but it looks promising as more farmers are putting these technologies to work.

Australian agriculture has historically been defined by long droughts and irregular rainfall. For farmers, these harsh conditions leave small margins for error, meaning that gruelling work on the paddock does not necessarily translate to healthy stock or strong crop harvests.

One way that farmers have adapted to these conditions is the use of Internet of Things (IoT) devices and sensors. But in comparison to other sectors, farmers have been slow to adopt these technologies due to concerns surrounding the cost of implementation and ongoing service—particularly when there is no immediate value received for certain IoT technologies, which can sometimes take several years of accumulating data before it shows its value.

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Analysis, Farming, Food, Health & Fitness, Science & Technology News, Shopping

Americans are divided over whether eating organic foods makes for better health

March 26, 2019

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Farming, Food, Great New Product, Legal Issues

You call that meat? Not so fast, cattle ranchers say

February 15, 2019

Sales of plant-based meat substitutes, like this burger made by Impossible Foods, increased 22 percent to $1.5 billion last year.

SAN FRANCISCO — The cattle ranchers and farm bureaus of America are not going to give up their hold on the word meat without a fight.

In recent weeks, beef and farming industry groups have persuaded legislators in more than a dozen states to introduce laws that would make it illegal to use the word meat to describe burgers and sausages that are created from plant-based ingredients or are grown in labs. Just this week, new meat-labeling bills were introduced in Arizona and Arkansas.

These meat alternatives may look and taste and even bleed like meat, but cattle ranchers want to make sure that the new competition can’t use the meat label.

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2019 Predictions, Analysis, Artificial Intelligence, Farming, IBM, Science & Technology News

IBM researchers predict 5 innovations will change our lives in 5 years

February 16, 2019

IBM Research has a long history of inventing the future, so the big tech company’s researchers take their predictions seriously. Today they are revealing their annual “5 in 5” predictions, which detail five innovations that will change our lives in the next five years.

IBM will talk about the predictions at its Think 2019 event in San Francisco on Wednesday from 10 a.m. to 11 a.m. Pacific time.

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Agriculture, cutting edge, Engineering, Farming, Food

Scientists engineer shortcut for photosynthetic glitch, boost crop growth by 40 percent

January 16, 2019

Aerial view of the 2017 field trials where scientists studied how well their plants modified to shortcut photorespiration performed beside unmodified plants in real-world conditions. They found that plants engineered with a synthetic shortcut are about 40 percent more productive. Credit: James Baltz/College of Agricultural, Consumer and Environmental Sciences

Plants convert sunlight into energy through photosynthesis; however, most crops on the planet are plagued by a photosynthetic glitch, and to deal with it, evolved an energy-expensive process called photorespiration that drastically suppresses their yield potential. Researchers from the University of Illinois and U.S. Department of Agriculture Agricultural Research Service report in the journal Science that crops engineered with a photorespiratory shortcut are 40 percent more productive in real-world agronomic conditions.

“We could feed up to 200 million additional people with the calories lost to photorespiration in the Midwestern U.S. each year,” said principal investigator Donald Ort, the Robert Emerson Professor of Plant Science and Crop Sciences at Illinois’ Carl R. Woese Institute for Genomic Biology. “Reclaiming even a portion of these calories across the world would go a long way to meeting the 21st Century’s rapidly expanding food demands—driven by population growth and more affluent high-calorie diets.”

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China, Farming, Science & Technology News

Some of the biggest livestreamers in China are not teenagers, but farmers

January 5, 2019

When most people think about countryside life, they envision plowing fields, feeding farm animals, and other grueling work. But China is seeing a new type of farm work becoming popular: livestreaming.

Yes, farmers livestreaming their work has become a hit in China – so much so that one of the country’s biggest ecommerce platforms has set up a special program to train them. Alibaba has announced that it’s planning a special poverty alleviation program for Taobao sellers in the countryside, including incubating 1,000 farmer livestreamers.

Continue reading… “Some of the biggest livestreamers in China are not teenagers, but farmers”