Establishing food security remains a global challenge; it is thus a specific objective of the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals for 2030. Successfully delivering productive and sustainable agricultural systems worldwide will form the foundations for overcoming this challenge. Smart agriculture is often perceived as one key enabler when considering the twin objectives of eliminating world hunger and undernourishment. The practical realization, deployment, and adoption of smart agricultural systems remain distant due to a confluence of technological, social, and economic factors. Edge computing offers a potentially tractable model for mainstreaming smart agriculture. A synergistic relationship exists, which, if harnessed productively, would increase the penetration of smart agricultural technologies across Majority-Minority world boundaries. The paper considers the prevailing context of global food security, smart agriculture and the pervasive issue of internet access. A survey of the state-of-the-art in research utilizing the Edge model of computing in agriculture is reported. Results of the survey confirm that the Edge model is actively explored in a number of agricultural domains. However, research is rooted in the prototype stage, and detailed studies are currently lacking. While potential is demonstrated, several systemic challenges must be addressed to manifest meaningful impact at the farm level.
The adoption of genome editing depends among others, on a clear and navigable regulatory framework that renders consistent decisions. Some countries like the United States decided to deregulate specific transgene-free genome edited products that could be created through traditional breeding...
To achieve food security for all, new resource policies for sustainable land and water use are needed. Land, water and energy need to be considered jointly in policies, not in isolation. United Nations, G20 countries’ policy makers, corporate and civil society actors, and...
Continually increasing food demand from a still–growing human population and the need for environmentally–friendly strategies for sustainable agricultural development require innovation and further enhancement of cropping systems’ factor productivity. The system of rice intensification (SRI) has been proposed as a...
AgriFoodTech start-ups are coming to be seen as relevant players in the debate around and reality of the transformation of food systems, especially in view of emerging or already-established novel technologies (such as Artificial Intelligence, Sensors, Precision Fermentation, Robotics, Nanotechnologies,...
The aim of this survey is to identify and characterize new products in plant biotechnology since 2015, especially in relation to the advent of New Breeding Techniques (NBTs) such as gene editing based on the CRISPR-Cas system. Transgenic (gene transfer...
