The future - and the future of technology - is notoriously hard to predict. Creativity was to be the last field AI would conquer, but generative models are producing bespoke art in seconds. Computers and the internet were initially called a fad - now they form such an integral part of society we couldn’t imagine a world without them. This doesn’t mean we shouldn’t think about the future. In fact, I think a key skill of entrepreneurs is being able to see what the future will look like, and build a company that makes that happen. This is what I call ‘world building’ - read more about it here. Some people are better at being correct about imagining what the future will look like. These are some of my thoughts on where I think we might be heading.
I have been predominantly thinking about how our food production systems work. However, part of this vision rests on what our energy systems will look like, so let's start with electricity.
Electricity
In 2018, Tsao, Jeffrey Y., et al. published a paper called The electrification of energy: Long-term trends and opportunities, in which they present a compelling argument that the vast majority of energy used in the future will be in the form of electricity and it will be cheap, abundant, and efficiently generated, distributed, and used in a dynamic grid. Some may call this hopeless optimism, even naivety, but I see a future where electricity is so abundant, generated using sustainable methods, that the way we think about energy use will change entirely. It will be so abundant, that in many cases it will become a side thought in our lives. Whole industries that are currently held back because of high energy costs will suddenly be viable.
How will this work? Matryoshka (or, Russian nesting) doll electricity grids where electricity is balanced at the community, neighbourhood, city, national, and finally international levels will connect energy sources with sinks in a dynamic grid. Electricity will be generated at each level through decentralised production at the lower levels, and large-scale centralised production at the upper level. These top-level electricity producers will provide baseline production (hopefully with fusion - come on physics, we believe in you!), while the lower levels will provide energy to their local networks using small-scale renewable energy production systems like solar and wind. In total, this system will be essentially free of permanent GHG emissions and will make electricity reliable and cheap. We might even get so good at producing it that we may pay people to use it when the sun is shining bright and the wind is blowing strong.
Energy storage will of course play a major role in this system, and we again will rely on improved battery systems or other storage mediums like hydrogen. It is less clear to me how this will turn out, but I am optimistic that we will make major advances in this field in the next 10-15 years.
This system will be highly complex and will require intelligent design and protocols to keep it all in sync, sort of like what BGP does for the internet. We need to build this.
But what will we do with all this energy? Well, let your imagination go wild. One thing is for sure: it will unlock a whole set of food production techniques that will create a more sustainable food system. Many of these techniques already exist, but require energy inputs that are presently too expensive to be viable.
Farming, food, and eating
Before I can describe what food production will look like in the future, let's be clear on what it looks like now. The vast majority of farming and agricultural activity is extractive - it takes more from the soil and local environment than it puts back. This destroys the land and local biodiversity, making the soil increasingly unsuitable for life (including growing crops and livestock), and results in a tremendously large release of GHG into the atmosphere. This all really started during the ‘Green Revolution’, a period that saw a huge shift in the way we grow food, using mass-produced chemical fertilisers, pesticides, and herbicides. Mechanization, controlled irrigation, and new high-yielding crop varieties all played important roles. This gave rise to the mono-crop world, with massive industrial farms, feedlots for livestock, and a general lack of respect for the ecosystems that allowed us to do all this in the first place. Let's refer to this as conventional farming.
We need a revolution, and I’ve always believed that the only revolution that we would likely have would be in agriculture.
I am convinced that if we’re going to solve the environmental crisis, we humans can’t continue on our current path. Business as usual isn’t going to cut it - that’s how we got where we are today. And nowhere is the crisis more pressing than in food production, the world's largest industry. The modern green revolution, with all its technology and chemicals, has failed us.
- Yvon Chouinard, from Let My People Go Surfing
Conventional farming is not the future. The next agricultural revolution will take us back to farming that cares for the earth. The food production systems of the future can be split into three main groups: field agriculture (growing crops and livestock), controlled environment agriculture (growing crops in greenhouses and vertical farms), and biochemical farming (cultivating yeasts and cell cultures in bioreactors). All three pillars will rely on precision farming techniques and will use robotics, automation, and AI to drive the production process (please excuse my use of buzzwords).
Field agriculture will shift to regenerative agriculture techniques, which is a system where food is produced by focusing on building healthy soil and functional biodiversity. These techniques have been shown to produce high-quality crops, consistent yields, be more resilient to environmental changes, and store CO2 in the ground. This isn’t one single technique, but rather a philosophy of farming. It typically involves growing multiple crops at once and often involves grazing livestock as well.
This sounds all well and good but has proven incredibly tricky to manage at a large scale. Due to the labour, management, and knowledge required to farm in this way, these techniques are currently simply too difficult and expensive to run at scale. I believe, however, that the use of robotics can change this.
Thomas Daum wrote an article titled Farm robots: ecological utopia or dystopia? where he discusses two options for the use of robotics in field agriculture. He argues that we’ll either head towards a world using large-scale robots that cultivate closed-off mono-crop fields, or a swarm of small-scale robots each tending to a different need of each one of a variety of crops. These robots act as one, each taking care of a plethora of different tasks - monitoring crop and soil health, weeding or dealing with pesticides, sowing seeds, or harvesting crop products. Farmers become managers of these robots, making overarching decisions about what to grow and where, but allowing the robots to carry out the plan. This may not be the ‘hands in the soil’, bohemian future that some dream of, but that world is just not feasible - we are tending towards less physical labour, not more, and like it or not, agriculture does need to be industrialised to cater to the modern world; we just need the right sort of industrialization.
Controlled Environment Agriculture, where crops are grown in environments where we can control many of the variables key to growth such as temperature, light, and nutrients, is a vital part of a sustainable food production system. Greenhouses, or their more technologically advanced sibling, vertical farms, can grow crops year-round while mitigating many of the negative aspects of crop production. These systems are already in use, and though they are struggling at the moment (mainly due to high energy costs), I see them playing major roles in the future (read more about my thoughts on vertical farming here). Vertical farms and greenhouses will grow high-value crops or will produce crops in parts of the world that don't have the right climate to grow their own, relieving large amounts of land to be rewilded. There could even be some synergy between CEA and field agriculture, where seedlings are grown in vertical farms and then transferred to the field, resulting in faster-growing and healthier plants. This is already happening for reforestation projects.
Growing food in bioreactors may sound unappetizing to many now, but I think this will become more and more commonplace. I need not talk of cell-cultured meat - at this point, it feels inevitable that this will become the most common way of consuming ‘everyday’ meat (while we will occasionally spend more to buy the less plentiful but nutritionally and environmentally better meat from regenerative field farms). The emerging market of precision fermentation will also become a major part of food production. Culturing specific bacteria or yeast in order to harvest specific compounds which can be used in the production of, say, milk, or protein (in the case of SolarFoods). These will become an increasingly important part of the food system, producing highly consistent, nutritious, and climate-friendly products.
To me, embracing these three aspects of food production will create a food production system that is far more planet friendly, while still maintaining our ability to produce enough to feed the whole world a nutritious diet. Some are not so certain, and I think for good reason - this could lead to monopolies, similar to Bayer, a fertiliser production behemoth, that control and profit off of these high-tech systems. This would be a terrible outcome, something we should keep in mind as we build the future, and should be actively legislated against to prevent it from happening. But this shouldn’t stop us from building. There are so many opportunities in this space. We need to make the revolution happen.
Why am I so convinced?
It's not just that I think this is what will happen, I believe that these things essentially need to happen. I can’t see a future that doesn’t look like this in which we have also prevented climate breakdown, and thus the mass destruction of human society.
This is the future that we need to build.
How do we do all this? That’ll be a think for another time.
If you’re interested in the future of fields other than electricity and agriculture, let's get in touch. I’d love to hear about them.
References
Tsao, Jeffrey Y., et al. "The electrification of energy: Long-term trends and opportunities." MRS Energy & Sustainability 5 (2018).
Daum, Thomas. "Farm robots: ecological utopia or dystopia?." Trends in Ecology & Evolution 36, no. 9 (2021): 774-777.