According to the predictions of the UN in 2015, the population of the planet is likely to be nearly 10 billion in 2050 (9.7m is the median estimate) – which represents an increase of 35% from today.  Such an increase in population will potentially cause great problems in many areas, including in the production of foodstuffs sufficient to feed such a large number of people, and in answer to this the agriculture industry is looking to technology to help it address the issues.  The farming industry is hoping to deploy robotics in order to improve the efficiency of farming, and to assist in resolving some of this issues it faces – one of which is wastage.  According to Professor Simon Blackmore, the head of Engineering at the University Harper Adams (specialising in agricultural studies) something between 20% and 60% of food grown is thrown away at the point of harvest due to the standards required by the purchaser (the UN puts this figure at somewhere between 30% and 40%).   It is currently believed that this level of waste could be reduced through the introduction of robotic harvesting techniques – through which harvesting can be conducted specifically according to need; so only those strawberries which meet the requirements would be harvested.  Quite what would happen to the strawberries which are not harvested is not clear, but one could assume that these could be diverted away from direct sales to the public and sold instead to the less demanding packaged food industry…  or perhaps they would simply be left to rot as they are today.

It would not be only in the field of harvesting that such robotics could be useful however, such specialised automata could also be used to closely monitor and tend for the crops; by virtue of close monitoring, pesticides and insecticides could be targeted at specific areas of specific plants, thus removing the need to spray entire crops.  This would not only have the benefit of saving resources, but would also presumably improve the taste and quality of the produce.   It seems possible then, that through the introduction of such robots we could improve our yields and possibly reduce waste, allowing us to feed our increasing population.

I would argue however that this is simply another example of humans avoiding the issue, and treating the symptom but not the disease.  In this case, the disease is a combination of an ever expanding population and the disdain in which we hold the natural world (and apparently our own future).

Before we even start to look at producing more, we could simply look to at the way that we consume food today.  Not only are we throwing away food which is in all probability perfectly good for consumption but which offends our eye, but we are also using the food that we do keep in ways which are not optimised.  The UN believes that it takes 7-10kg of cereals to produce 1kg of meat; and although these figures are disputed in some areas due to their basis on the ‘feedlot’ methods used in the US, it seems reasonable to me that even if we cannot agree on an exact figure, we can still conclude that it requires more grain to feed an animal for food than if one were to eat the grain oneself.  It would seem logical therefore, that one (immediate) method of increasing the food at our disposal would be to simply eat less meat!  Following the UN’s model (7kg grain = 1kg of meat) then, with no increase in agricultural capacity, humans could double the number of people fed just by cutting the amount of meat that we eat today, in half.

The problem that we face is not a technological problem, and not a problem that will be solved by technology.  This problem is a sociological problem; we want, we grow, we waste.  Using robots to increase yields can only address the symptoms.  Addressing the symptoms does not solve the root cause – it merely kicks the can down the road.  For as long as we continue to waste food, and continue to use the food that we produce to feed livestock instead of ourselves, then our ever-expanding population will continue to need more and more space for agriculture.  Modern agriculture remains the key driver for deforestation around the world, it contributes to the desertification of the world, the erosion of topsoil and the increase in flooding and natural disasters – not to mention the increase in carbon dioxide which contributes to global warming or the extinction of species of animal other than man via the destruction of habitats.

If we truly want to solve the problem, then the answer is to change the way we live.

Even if we are not prepared to stop eating meat, and even if we are not prepared to eat apples which have a blemish, there is another way to confront this issue: we curb the expansion of the population.  If we lived in an environment of infinite resource, then we could perhaps be forgiven for having no regard to the use to which we put the resources at our disposal.  Yet, our planet only has a limited amount of space, and it has limited resources, and of those only some which are renewable within the lifetime of humans.  It is folly therefore to think that we can continue to grow in terms of population and use of resources without at some point running out.  To me, it seems an even greater folly to be aware of the dwindling resources in your environment and yet to continue to use them faster than they can replenish.

We need to look at the problem – we need to look at ourselves.