The Future of Food, Agriculture, and Aquaculture

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Plastic Food Packaging Contains Harmful Substances
April 25, 2024

Introduction:

(Eurekalert) Plastic is a very complex material that can contain many different chemicals, some of which can be harmful. This is also true for plastic food packaging.

“We found as many as 9936 different chemicals in a single plastic product used as food packaging,” said Martin Wagner, a professor at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU’s) Department of Biology.

Wagner has been working with chemicals in plastic products for several years. He is part of a research group at NTNU that has now published its findings in the Environmental Science & Technology journal. PhD candidates Molly McPartland and Sarah Stevens from NTNU are the lead authors of both studies.

Interfering with hormones and metabolism

In one study, the researchers looked at 36 different plastic products that are used to package food. These products came from five countries; the United States, the United Kingdom, South Korea, Germany and Norway.

“In most of these plastic products, we found chemicals that can affect the secretion of hormones and metabolism,” Wagner said.

Read more here: https://www.eurekalert.org/news-releases/1042141

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Artificial Intelligence to Make Crop Production More Sustainable
May 6, 2024

Introduction:

(Eurekalert) Drones monitoring fields for weeds and robots targeting and treating crop diseases may sound like science fiction but is actually happening already, at least on some experimental farms. Researchers from the PhenoRob Cluster of Excellence at the University of Bonn are working on driving forward the smart digitalization of agriculture and have now published a list of the research questions that will need to be tackled as a priority in the future. Their paper has appeared in the European Journal of Agronomy.

That the Earth feeds over eight billion people nowadays is thanks not least to modern high-performance agriculture. However, this success comes at a high cost. Current cultivation methods are threatening biodiversity, while the production of synthetic fertilizers generates greenhouse gases, and agricultural chemicals are polluting bodies of water and the environment.

Many of these problems can be mitigated by using more targeted methods, e.g. by only applying herbicides to those patches of a field where weeds are actually becoming a problem rather than treating the whole area. Other possibilities are to treat diseased crops individually and to only apply fertilizer where it is really needed. Yet strategies like these are extremely complicated and virtually impossible to manage at scale by conventional means.

Harnessing high tech and AI to become more sustainable and efficient

“One answer could be to use smart digital technologies,” explains Hugo Storm, a member of the PhenoRob Cluster of Excellence. The University of Bonn has partnered with Forschungszentrum Jülich, the Fraunhofer Institute for Algorithms and Scientific Computing in Sankt Augustin, the Leibniz Centre for Agricultural Landscape Research in Müncheberg and the Institute of Sugar Beet Research in Göttingen on the large-scale project geared toward making farming more efficient and more environmentally friendly using new technologies and artificial intelligence (AI).

Read more of the Eurekalert article here: https://www.eurekalert.org/news-releases/1043630


Extract:

(European Journal of Agronomy) The rapid decline in the cost of sensors, robots, and computing power, as well as rapid advances in AI, offer opportunities for sustainable intensification (Grieve et al., 2019). Existing precision agriculture tools are becoming increasingly connected, accurate, efficient, and widely applicable (Finger et al., 2019). Combining these tools with process-based agro-ecosystem models enables new ways of crop management by predicting plant ideotypes for specific environments (Lynch et al., 2022), by predicting the performance of crops in a specific environment, the development of diseases, pests, and weeds or the demand for nutrients (Caubel et al., 2017, Colbach et al., 2014, Seidel et al., 2021). These models also enable the assessment of the impacts of novel technologies from local to landscape or regional scales (Duru et al., 2015, Kersebaum et al., 2015), which may contribute to the design of more effective policies and regulations and enable new field arrangements.

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