Smart Agriculture is a relatively new term that essentially defines precision farming, which is the application of modern Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) into agriculture, leading to what can be called the New Green Revolution. Smart farming has a real potential to deliver a more productive and sustainable agriculture, based on a more precise and resource-efficient approach.

A brief history of 20th-century agricultural revolutions

Thanks to the scientific developments, most of the 20th-century humanity managed to stay ahead in the Malthusian race between population growth and food supply. Technological innovations have significantly changed agricultural practices and increased the yield per unit of ground and the level of production per unit of labor.

There are four key innovations which transformed agricultural production – the internal combustion engine, the Haber-Bosch process of producing nitrogen fertilizer from the air, the introduction of hybrid corn and the focus on crop genetics and the development and use of farm chemicals.

Although internal combustion engines developed in the late 17th century, their adoption to a wide range of agricultural tasks, from field preparation to planting to harvest, came in the early 20th century. Tractors with internal combustion engines eliminated the need for draft animals, making land that had been used to grow draft animal feed available to produce food for human consumption, either directly or indirectly, through grain fed to food animals. Additionally, the introduction of tractors also reduced the level of human labor required by the agricultural sector.

Soon after, the Haber-Bosch process appeared in the agriculture scene. It enabled the extraction of nitrogen from the air and solved a significant limitation of agricultural production – the loss of soil fertility from continuous crop production in the same field.

This loss of soil fertility could be partially compensated by using animal manure, but this supply of nitrogen fertilizer either was not sufficient or did not provide the same revenue as the production of cash crops like corn, wheat and cotton.

The use of nitrogen produced by the Haber-Bosch process restored soil fertility and allowed for the continuous production of cash crops in a two or three crop rotation.

Another development came from chemistry. Crop diseases have been the bane of existence for farmers since ancient times. Farmers in the Fertile Crescent discovered that they could use Sulphur dust as a pesticide. However, the use of farm chemicals did not begin to accelerate until the 1920s with the development of a synthetic insecticide that could replace pyrethrum as an insecticide. From that point on, there has been a steady parade of insecticides, fungicides and herbicides to better control plant pests and diseases and reduce the farm labor needed for weed control.

The last innovation came when the world needed it the most. Speaking about global hunger at a meeting of the Ford Foundation in 1959, economist Forrest F. Hill said, “At best the world outlook for the decades ahead is grave; at worst it is frightening.” Nine years later, Paul Ehrlich’s bestseller, ‘The Population Bomb,’ predicted that famines, especially in India, would kill hundreds of millions in the 1970s and 1980s.

Luckily before those grim visions could come to pass, ‘bioengineering and crop-genetics’ transformed global agriculture, especially wheat and rice.

Through selective breeding, Norman Borlaug, an American biologist, created a dwarf variety of wheat that put most of its energy into edible kernels rather than long, inedible stems. The result was more grain per acre.

With this innovation, from the 1960s through the 1990s, yields of rice and wheat in Asia doubled. Even as the continent’s population increased by 60 percent, grain prices fell, the average Asian consumed nearly a third more calories, and the poverty rate was cut in half.

Therefore, “More than any other person of this age, he helped provide bread for a hungry world,” was cited when Borlaug won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1970.

What’s next for agriculture?