Five Farming Technologies Take New Approaches to Climate Change
“Innovative ideas and devices are on the rise as heavier rainfall, harsher winters and disease-causing pests threaten to upend agriculture.”
Five Farming Technologies Take New Approaches to Climate Change
Innovative ideas and devices are on the rise as heavier rainfall, harsher winters and disease-causing pests threaten to upend agriculture
Plants growing in Freight Farms shipping containers are lighted with LEDs. FREIGHT FARMS
By Nidhi SubbaramanFollow
June 4, 2023
Agriculture faces some daunting challenges from a changing climate in coming years, scientists project. Heavy rainfall is expected to become more frequent, with resulting erosion of soil decreasing available nutrients. Growing conditions are forecast to change regionally—with some places seeing a potentially longer growing season, but others seeing drier, colder ones. Disease-causing pests and insects are expected to expand their range.
Growers soon could turn to new technological solutions to help cope. Here are a few of the latest.
Self-Planting Seeds
Wildfires have become bigger and more frequent as the climate has warmed, sometimes leaving hard-to-reach mountainsides razed of vegetation. As a possible solution for bringing slopes back to life, scientists envision tree seeds dropped by drone.
After the seed carrier drills into the soil, the seed germinates and a plant emerges. PHOTO: MORPHING MATTER LAB/CARNEGIE MELLON UNIVERSITY
Lining Yao, a mechanical engineer and materials designer at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh and a team of scientists have come up with a surprisingly low-tech device to help make sure that seeds dropped by drone germinate into saplings.
NEWSLETTER SIGN-UP
The Future of Everything
A look at how innovation and technology are transforming the way we live, work and play.
Preview
Subscribed
These seed carriers with curved tails and a tightly coiled stem are made of paper-thin sheets of wood and attached to a seedpod. When rainwater touches the tails, the material swells, propping up the seed carrier with its point facing into the soil. Seeds with tails had at least 80% success rate burying in lab tests, Yao and her colleagues showed in a study published in February in the journal Nature.
The researchers tested seeds of different sizes, including those of the whitebark pine, a high-altitude conifer that grows in regions of Western U.S. where wildfires are expected to increase. The team has had conversations with groups interested in aerial seeding, and is looking for partners for mass-manufacture and pilot tests.
“The bottleneck is to really scale up the manufacturing side of things,” Yao says.
ADVERTISEMENT
Pepper shoots emerge after a carrier containing seeds drilled into the soil. PHOTO: MORPHING MATTER LAB/CARNEGIE MELLON UNIVERSITY
‘Wearable’ Plant Sensors
A network of sensors for plants might help extend the life of farmers’ crops. Small, flexible sensors placed on plants’ leaves could monitor how a crop is coping with environmental stressors, from hot, dry spells to a lack of nutrients due to soil elements washed away in heavy rain, says Yong Zhu, a mechanical engineer at North Carolina State University.
Zhu is part of a team that built and demonstrated sensors that can gather information such as hydration and temperature in plants and their immediate environment, as well as chemical hormones released by the plant in response to infection or environmental stress. Made of silver, gold, and carbon nanomaterials embedded in a flexible polymer, the sensors were able to detect infection in tomato plants within four days, the team reported in a study published in the journal Science Advances in April.
Flexible sensors on plant leaves could stretch and grow as the plant does. PHOTO: GIWON LEE
Such sensors could provide a personalized report plant-by-plant to a farmer, allowing for precise delivery of water or fertilizer only when a plant needs it, says Qingshan Wei, a chemical engineer at NCSU who worked with Zhu. The current design is limited: The polymer hardens when exposed to the sun, and the setup is connected by wires to a computer and juiced by an external power supply. Future versions could be made of cheap, hardy, biodegradable materials that are solar powered, and wirelessly transmit environmental data, the team says.
High-Tech Hives
Farmers reap big rewards when their crops are pollinated by bees. But pollinator populations are declining, while climate change is shifting the bloom seasons that bees depend on to shore up food stores through the cold season, and causing harsher winters. When temperatures drop, bees retreat to the hive and rely on their stored food, but if they run out, or cluster in a corner of the hive too far from the store, they can starve to death. A team of roboticists in Europe hopes to change this.
Sensors and heating elements are built into a system that allows researchers to watch group behavior in honeybees. PHOTO: MOBOTS/EPFL/HIVEOPOLIS
The team has built a device that monitors bee colony temperatures during the winter within wooden boxed hives used in agriculture. Thermal sensors and heating elements are built into a beehive frame, and covered in a wooden layer with a hexagonal pattern coated in melted beeswax to encourage bees to build on it.
EXPLORE THE FUTURE OF EVERYTHING
The Future of Everything looks at the innovation and technology transforming the way we live, work and play, covering transportation, the workplace, health and more.
Researchers warmed the bees when they became static and gathered in a cluster during winter, and directed them to a food source at a different location by heating that section of the hive, the team reported in a March study published in Science Robotics. It was a partial success, says study author Rob Mills, a roboticist studying animal behavior at EPFL in Switzerland: Though the queen didn’t survive, worker bees survived two months longer than she did that season.
The hives aren’t ready for prime-time. For one, they are expensive to build outside a lab facility, and need an external power source to keep them humming.
To tide over cold temperatures, bees gather together in a “winter cluster.” PHOTO: ARTIFICIAL LIFE LAB/UNIVERSITY OF GRAZ/HIVEOPOLIS
Vertical Farming
In soaking humidity or searing heat, growers in over 40 countries are farming produce in high-tech containers made by the Boston company Freight Farms. Leafy greens like lettuce and kale, and roots like turnips and radish grow in specially designed vertical rows, lit with LEDs, and monitored closely for nutrition, water acidity, temperature, and more, according to David Harris, the company’s director of crop research and development.
Over two-thirds of all freshwater used globally goes to farming. In many places, climate change is expected to keep water in short supply even as demand increases. In a twist, growing plants in water instead of soil—what’s known as hydroponic farming—could ease the crunch because it uses less water overall.
Freight Farms says that people in over 40 countries are growing produce in the company’s signature shipping containers. PHOTO: FREIGHT FARMS
Compared with field lettuce grown in Arizona, lettuce in the containers use about 0.3% of water per head, the company estimates. And Harris says the farms use almost zero added water in humid regions like Puerto Rico. But the energy used to run the containers are a hurdle to wide adoption, Harris says. The units on average use about 170-270 kilowatt hours of energy a day, more than 5 times that of the average American consumer. It is currently cheaper to grow some plants like corn in fields, Harris says. And, some high-tech farming companies are reporting cooling interest from investors.
“In 20-30 years, if we started to see some industrial scale corn farming in hydroponic systems, that would not surprise me at all,” Harris says, as higher temperatures begin pushing farming in some places indoors.
Plants in vertical columns grow horizontally toward the lights, packing more plants per square foot, according to Freight Farms. PHOTO: FREIGHT FARMS
Robot Fruit Harvesters
As growing seasons shift with climate change, fruit may be ready sooner than growers expect.
Enter the robots. Tevel, based in Israel, has created a swarm of fruit-picking robots that could lend a few spare hands when fruits ripen unpredictably soon and risk spoiling on the tree, according to Ittai Marom, U.S. general manager at Tevel.
Tevel says its fruit-picking robots can identify ripe fruit by color and size. PHOTO: TEVEL
A platform on wheels serves as the base for a group of eight robots, which each have a picking arm ending in a gripper. As the platform rolls through an orchard, the robots fly up to tree branches, identify ripe fruit, pick it from the tree, and deposit them on a platform. There are cameras on the robot and Tevel’s software identifies ripe fruit after analyzing the color and size.
SHARE YOUR THOUGHTS
What do you see as promising technologies for surmounting challenges of a changing climate? Join the conversation below.
“Somebody who is today a team leader of a picking crew, in the near future might find themselves monitoring a robotic picker from the convenience of an air-conditioned pickup truck,” Marom says.
Tevel drones are connected to a platform on wheels that rolls through an orchard. PHOTO: TEVEL
As part of a handful of collaborations, the robots have harvested apples in Italy and Chile, and peaches, nectarines and plums in California. There is room for improvement on speed—for now people are still faster at gathering fruit off the trees, Marom says.
–Chase Gaewski, Marcy Ayres and Michael Bucher contributed to this article.
Write to Nidhi Subbaraman at nidhi.subbaraman@wsj.com
The Future of Everything
More stories from The Wall Street Journal's The Future of Everything, about how innovation and technology are transforming the way we live, work and play.