Engineering Is Critical to Boosting Food Security
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Willie Jones covers transportation for IEEE Spectrum and the history of technology for The Institute.
IEEE’s Smart Agri-Food Initiative is helping coordinate the use of technologies such as autonomous aircraft, Internet of Things, and remote sensing to improve crop yield and diminish waste. Nearly 750 million people face hunger today, according to the U.N. And by 2050, global demand for food is expected to increase by 50 percent from 2010 levels, the World Resources Institute says.
A smart agriculture special-issue report recently released by the IEEE Smart Agri-Food Initiative says meeting the demand will require technology to expand food production. The report highlights research, case studies, and new ways of applying technology to inform farmers, engineers, and policymakers. Leading the initiative is IEEE Fellow John Verboncoeur, chair of the smart-food program and professor of electrical and computer engineering at Michigan State University, in East Lansing.
“Food security is becoming a systems-engineering problem,” Verboncoeur says. “We’re no longer talking only about tractors and irrigation. We’re talking about sensing, communications, computation, automation, and sustainability all working together.” Although not formally trained as an agriculture scientist, Verboncoeur’s first involvement with smart agriculture was as an undergraduate at University of Florida in 1985-86, where he helped develop an SmartAg aeroponics system for NASA for the International Space Station.
It used mist to spray the plants’ roots and lightweight pneumatic structures to hold the vegetation in place. He has also chaired the executive committee of Michigan State’s SmartAg Initiative since it launched in 2017. He chaired the program’s leading interdisciplinary efforts to apply engineering and digital technologies to farming and food systems.
Verboncoeur connects the shift of using engineering as a force multiplier for farming to lessons learned from the IEEE Smart Village program, which supports projects and organizations bringing electricity and educational and employment opportunities to remote communities. Agriculture, he argues, requires the same systems-level mindset.
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