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Balancing flavor and forests

In northeast Madagascar, vanilla isn’t just for ice cream — it’s how many families make a living. But vanilla prices bounce up and down like a yo-yo. So, what do farmers do when prices crash?

A new study finds they get creative, planting other crops like cassava and peanuts to keep food on the table and money coming in.

This kind of diversification helps keep forest areas intact.

Payments for conservation tell a different story. While farmers are encouraged to leave more land forested, they also reduce crop variety, and, in some cases, push younger farmers to expand into shared lands, creating new challenges.

Ultimately the results show that supporting both farming and forests isn’t one size fits all. Consideration must be given to farmers’ ages, land access and the rhythms of the vanilla market.

More like this: A greener education

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Croptimal choices

The long haul toward food security begins at the source, and precision farming is capitalizing on the latest technologies to feed the world while ensuring we still have a habitable Earth.

Agriculture has a long list of impacts on the planet from water use to pesticides. And the more we farm, the more impact we make. Fortunately, a revolution in farming technologies is helping farmers maintain yields and honor the land that provides them.

“Good farmers, who take seriously their duties as stewards of creation and of their land’s inheritors, contribute to the welfare of society in more ways than society usually acknowledges, or even knows.

These farmers produce valuable goods, of course; but they also conserve soil, they conserve water, they conserve wildlife, they conserve open space, they conserve scenery,” wrote Wendell Berry, American writer and environmental activist, in his book “Bringing It to the Table: On Farming and Food.”

Randy Price, precision farming specialist at Louisiana State University Agricultural Center, says precision farming has ample benefits for farmers, consumers and the environment and presents solutions of how farmers can live up to this standard.

Pesticides protect the crop and the global population’s food supply, but they have a significant impact on the environment.

According to a 2023 study out of Chang Mai University in Thailand, “The transport of pesticides from crop-growing regions has resulted in widespread contamination, not only of soils, water bodies, and/or crops but also of the atmosphere via various pathways.” Precision farming technology, however, might be a part of the solution.

Send in the drones

Drone technology can help, Louisiana State’s Price says. “Drones are allowing farmers and consultants to obtain overhead images of farm fields and land areas at greatly reduced prices over satellite and other methods.”

Drones can be fitted with sensors and imaging technology, and this data plays an integral role in active farming. Among other uses, the data can help farmers identify fungal contaminations, pest infestations or areas of growth congestion.

Identifying these issues early and targeting specific locations eliminates the need to spray entire crops with pesticides — which means less toxicants in the air, soil and food supply: better for the land, better for the consumer, less costly for the farmer and safer for farm workers.

IMAGE: AI Generated, KUST Review
In the greenhouse

While other innovators are focused on open farmland, the researchers at Khalifa University are looking at ways to automate greenhouses. Read more›››

“We have a significant community of scholars working in the area,” says Lakmal Seneviratne, director of the university’s Center for Autonomous Robotic Systems.

Research focuses on using robots, whether drones or mounted on rails, to collect information about plant health and readiness for harvest. Machine-learning resources help predict disease and fruit yields and analyze soils, he adds.

“Tactile devices (could also) predict fruit ripeness,” Seneviratne says. KU is partnering with UAE agtech giant Silal on a 2,000-square-meter greenhouse in Al Ain, but commercial greenhouses could easily be hectares in size, he says.

For now, the project is focused on strawberries, blueberries and tomatoes.

KU is also partnered with ASPIRE’s International Virtual Research Institute for Food Security in the Drylands. “A lot of investment is happening in the UAE,” Seneviratne says.‹‹‹ Read less

Once the problem is identified, a drone is programmed to spray the affected area with the appropriate pesticide avoiding overuse. Price says the more common precision tools are yield monitors.

This technology allows farmers to determine their crop yield within a specific unit area of their land and perform on-farm analysis, allowing for informed planning and decision-making. Understanding which areas are underperforming or overperforming is crucial to this process. Monitors and analysis assist irrigation allotment, fertilizer volumes and crop rotation.

Research also includes testing. “They will try different application rates (fertilizer, irrigation, additives, etc.) on small areas of a field, such as twelve rows plot down the whole field, etc., and then use the yield monitor at the end of the year to quickly (and easily) see the differences in that plot,” Price says.

Mapping the land

All of this information helps farmers create a prescription map of their land — something Price says is challenging and labor intensive. He says he believes for areas over 3,000 acres, mapping needs to be easier. The knowledge bases are inadequate at this stage and still required are “systems that will convert remote sensing data into actual disease and pest damage assessments.”

He and his team are working to make this happen with automatic flying drones.

“They take off, fly a field, land and recharge automatically,” he says, adding that low-level flights that record data at 10 meters from the crop surface allow high-resolution images of plant leaves to be recorded (with location) for automatic analysis with AI and other techniques.

Price’s team has been collaborating with several companies to create automated flight platforms for remote-sensing drones and additional yield monitors for sugarcane.

Price says AI will be the major contributor going forward to analyze crop damage and assess pests and disease. This would allow for fully automated treatment by sprayer drones. The drones then would collect the next remote-sensing data for analysis. Assess, treat and repeat.

In addition to crop health, AI offers data-driven decision-making opportunities for soil conditions and weather patterns.

“Over time, precision farming should allow farmers to more precisely treat various areas of land, without over-treating other areas and create a more sustainable agriculture,” Price tells KUST Review.

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Totally tubular

The humble potato may seem a simple vegetable, but its growth relies on an energy intensive respiration process that becomes increasingly complicated with rising global temperatures. That’s why researchers are working to modify its process and increase crop yield.

The enzyme, RuBisCO, needs to bind to carbon dioxide during photosynthesis but about 25 percent of the time, latches on to oxygen instead. This non-sensical sidetrack produces a toxic byproduct that is problematic for growth quality and quantity (it can decrease crop yields by up to 50 percent) and is typically instigated by heat stress.

The solution?

Researchers from the University of Illinois Urbana Champaign in the United States injected a gene into the nucleus of the plant cell. This produces a protein that makes its way to the chloroplast used in the photosynthesis where it breaks down the toxic derivative, eliminating the chloroplast’s need to send it out to the rest of the organelles. This effectively bypasses the energy-intensive photorespiration process and creates a new pathway, called AP3.

The genetically modified potato was tested over two growing seasons in Illinois and during an extreme heat wave in which temperatures exceeded 35 degrees Celsius and the results — that increased yield by almost a third and maintained nutrition value — suggests there is hope in assisting crops to navigate climate change. This modification can also be passed on to the next generation.

The study was published in Global Change Biology

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