The food system is a major contributor to climate change. Technology is key to the significant shifts in global production and consumption that are needed to meet the Paris targets By Julia Zacharenkova, OPEC Fund HOW DRONES ARE REVOLUTIONIZING AGRICULTURE
F ood systems are deeply entwined with the climate crisis: they are both impacted by climate change and, at the same time, major contributors to the problem. A 2021 report by the World Bank entitled What’s Cooking: Digital Transformation of the Agrifood System explores how digital technologies can improve the food system. “The digital revolution has enormous potential for transforming the agriculture and food system in ways not previously seen – by drastically lowering information asymmetries and transactions costs The digital revolution has enormous potential for transforming agriculture in ways not previously seen... improving the lives of farmers, as well as the nearly eight billion people who depend on them for food.
that plague the system, and, as a result, improving the lives of farmers, as well as the nearly eight billion people who depend on them for food,” says Task Team Lead Kateryna Schroeder, an agriculture economist. One new approach, made possible thanks to technological advances, is so-called precision agriculture. The term describes a farming management concept based on observing, measuring and responding to inter and intra-field variability in crops. To date, precision agriculture techniques have been accessible for the most part only to large-scale farmers for whom the economies of scale warranted the investment in what used to be expensive hardware and services. Now, innovative solutions that leverage free satellite data are starting to become more affordable and thus more widely available.
The use of drones provides large benefits by improving the environmental sustainability of agricultural operations through minimizing environmental damage from agriculture, for example, by reducing nitrate leaking, improving water-use efficiency and increasing fuel efficiency. In addition to precision agriculture applications drones offer a wide range of promising ways to enhance the management of agricultural assets more broadly: they can improve the monitoring of livestock, fences, trees, and wildlife, and help farmers document their farms to improve their creditworthiness. A key factor in enabling an increase of, and efficiency in, food production is providing farmers with relevant information. Drones allow farmers to gain a birds-eye view of their crops, permitting them to detect subtle changes that cannot be identified at ground level. Moreover, multispectral imaging enables drones to pick up on crop conditions that are not always clear to the human eye, such as water stress, fertilizer needs, pest infestations, and diseases. Drones are equipped with specialized sensors that can collect multispectral images that are used to generate data on crop quality such as the Normalized Difference Vegetation Index – an index that describes and measures the greatness and density of the vegetation captured in a satellite image.
The potential of drones In an effort to mitigate climate
change, development practitioners are increasingly looking into the potential of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs), commonly known as drones. After agricultural aircraft have been in use for more than a hundred years, the use of satellites to assess crop health from the sky has increased in recent decades. The continuing reduction in cost, size, and complexity of drones mean that farmers could leapfrog from more traditional methods of agriculture to precision agriculture.
Kateryna Schroeder, Task Team Lead, the World Bank
Drone image (above): Sensvector/Shutterstock.com
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