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Digital innovations drive future global agriculture

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Joe Schwartz

Global food systems are facing the challenge to feed a world population of 9.7 billion people by 2050 as land and water resources become diminished.


Joshua Woodard

Assistant Professor

Joshua Woodard,assistant professor of applied economics and management and an expert in agricultural business and finance at the Cornell SC Johnson College of Business at Cornell University, says that digital agriculture will play an important role in boosting agricultural efficiency and developing a sustainable food supply. Woodard’s paper “Innovation in Agriculture and Food Systems in the Digital Age” is part of the Global Innovation Index 2017 release at the UN Headquarters in Geneva, Switzerland, today.

Woodard says: 

“Increased storage and computational capacity, coupled with high-resolution environmental and remotely sensed data, have created unprecedented opportunities for data-driven discovery in agriculture and food systems.  Many agricultural improvements can be facilitated by these digital innovations.

“Digital agriculture offers new opportunities through the ubiquitous availability of highly interconnected and data-intensive computational technologies as part of the so-called Fourth Industrial Revolution. It can be applied to all aspects of agricultural production systems, and it reflects a shift from generalized management of farm resources toward highly optimized, individualized, real-time, hyper-connected and data-driven management.”

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