While profitable industries were usually on the downward slope of the bell curve, agriculture could be at the beginning a new curve, he said.
It was estimated there would be 50 billion devices connecting to the internet by 2020. By 2024 it was expected there would be a trillion sensors relaying information and by 2036, 100 trillion.
They would be tiny and easy to use and able to be sown in the ground or included in paint to provide a continual source of information.
Frey said sensor use meant food demands would become more science-based than fad-based.
“We are getting into a world of exponential change,” he said.
Companies would be able to grow from nothing to 50 million customers in only two or three days.
Electronic menus at restaurants would offer only items which fitted with customers’ dietary requirements while diners could use smart chopsticks to tell them if food was safe to eat.
And 3D food printing was “going off in lots of directions” with the prospect of a perfect apple being able to be created in that way. Its stem, core and leaf would all be edible, minimising waste and colour could be adjusted to consumer demand.
Frey said vertical farming could be transformed into silo farming where robotic arms would tend to plants grown underground.
Not only could that see a thousand times increase in production because the growing environment was regulated, vegetables could be produced right under the grocery store where they were eventually sold.
“There will be a big change in the next 20 years but the risks also go up.”
Thomas Frey
Da Vinci Institute
Landfills could become valuable production sites because of the nutrients discarded there, cultivated by driverless tractors.
Frey said atmospheric water harvesting could boost freshwater volumes, which made up only 2% of the world’s water and only 25% of which was accessible to humans.
Towers could be built to extract water from the air along with windmills and solar power performing the same function.
And a bicycle-powered device could continually refill a water bottle for the rider.
Big data will help farming
The use of big data scanning to sift through large amounts of information from around the world will be increasingly important in agricultural, physicist Sean Gourley says.
The Kiwi, now based in San Francisco, founded Quid, which handles big data for companies such as Walmart when they want to keep track of multiple public relations issues at one time.
He demonstrated the use of big data at the Beyond the Line of Sight conference by showing the results of a search he did over just a few hours on venture capital inputs into different agritech areas over the last five years.
He found US$9.86 billion had been invested by 798 companies in 44 countries.
“It gives a map of the landscape of technology, categorised into different areas,” he said.
New Zealand companies LIC and Z Tags featured in the animal health area, which would see a lot of excitement in the future.
Emerging technology areas were weather forecasting and the use of drones, with an example being Los Angeles company Orbital Insight, which had developed machine learning programmes to find and analyse data such as crop growth.
But the main use of big data in agriculture could be in the communication between farmers and consumers.
An innovation there was Farmigo, a small New York start-up company with the website Ditch the Supermarket. It let users order direct from producers.
And Chipotle, a United States Mexican restaurant chain with 1700 outlets, had used big data before moving earlier this year to make all its products free of genetic modification.
“There’s no excuse to not know what’s out there.”
