innovation in food and...

© 2017 Institute for the Future. All rights reserved. | CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 | iftf.org © 2017 Institute for the Future. All rights reserved. | CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 | iftf.org

Innovation in Food and Agriculture

A futures perspectiveRebecca ChesneyResearch Director

Institute for the FutureFFAR | November 30, 2017

© 2017 Institute for the Future. All rights reserved. | CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 | iftf.org


• Independent nonprofit research organization

• Practical foresight for a world undergoing rapid change

• 2018 will mark 50 years of foresight research

• Qualitative research focusing on convergence of technology, culture

2

© 2017 Institute for the Future. All rights reserved. | CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 | iftf.org 3

There are TRENDS:patterns of change from which you can

extrapolate with confidence

IFTF focuses on SIGNALS of disruptive change: emergent phenomena for which

patterns are not yet clear

We look for connections across signals and researchthe enablers, accelerators, and barriers to form

forecasts about new possibilities


Challenges to Innovation in Food

and Agriculture:

Internet of ActionsOpen Source Approaches

Engineered Food Systems




and Agriculture:

Internet of Actions



Internet of Information

Internet of Actions

evolution of the Internet

Internet of Intelligent Things


SIGNAL: son uses ML to encode farming parents’ practices


Video: Kazunori Sato via youtube


SIGNAL: Blue River Technology manages crops at plant level


Video: Blue River Technology via youtube

© 2017 Institute for the Future. All rights reserved. | CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 | iftf.org 9Source: New York Times

“Putting it a little simply, one robot can spend 10,000 hours learning something, or 10,000 robots can spend one hour learning the same thing.”

- Ken Goldberg, UC Berkeley


Internet of Actions: a distributed global network of autonomous robots and intelligent systems

11


”There are very few coveted permanent, tenure-track jobs in the country devoted to algorithmic accountability… There is essentially no distinct field of academic study that takes seriously the responsibility of understanding and critiquing the role of technology—and specifically, the algorithms that are responsible for so many decisions.”


AI and machine learning are optimized for speed and scalability, not liability and oversight. • How can we balance speed and scalability with

longer agriculture life cycles?

• How do we encode constraints into these algorithms for human and planetary health?

• How do we build capacity and collaboration across computer science and food and ag sciences, and what new farm models might emerge?

challenges for food and ag


”John Deere sold farmers their tractors, but has used software to maintain control of every aspect of its use after the sale.”




and Agriculture:

Open Source Approaches



SIGNAL: Canadian farmer creates self-driving tractor using open source components

17Video: Matt Reimer© 2017 Institute for the Future. All rights reserved. | CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 | iftf.org


SIGNAL: Farm Hack do-it-yourself community



SIGNAL: makerspace builds low-cost lab equipment


SIGNAL: biohacker community crowdfunds synthetic biology


• DIY bio may serve a complementary role to academic and corporate research

• Governments should fund networks of community labs

• Create more opportunities for interaction between DIYers and governments

Woodrow Wilson Center recommendations


Open source, DIY communities provide shared resources and create low-cost alternatives—but they’re not integrated with institutional research. • How might FFAR and academics partner with open

source communities?

• What are tradeoffs between open source and protected IP for innovation and regulation?

• How might we map knowledge networks?




and Agriculture:

Engineered Food Systems



commercializing cellular agriculture


Images: New Harvest


commercializing cellular agriculture

We need: “understanding the energy inputs and outputs, and how much material, how long it’ll take, and costs and other things like safety and ethics. What we’ve realized is that there’s just not enough data out there to do these calculations… to understand the actual requirements of the atomic components of particular sugars and proteins, or whatever else you want to look at, and the related outputs."Dr. Marianne Ellis,

University of Bath

Source: New Harvest


building a standardized systems-wide data infrastructure

“With flavor alone, we’ve got folks who have built a wine wheel, a chocolate wheel, a coffee wheel and a beer wheel to describe flavor profiles that exist. We don’t want to create any more wheels. We want to connect those wheels to an information superhighway for food...”

“We know we don’t want botnet attacks on our food supply, so this area of research where food security meets internet security is a critical emerging field.”

Dr. Matthew Lange, UC Davis IC-Foods

Sources: Forbes, Digital Trends


Engineering new food systems comes with great opportunity, but the rush to commercialize may outweigh benefits.• How can we think of bioreactors and indoor farms not

as discrete farms but nodes in the larger system?

• How might we model and simulate cellular ag and indoor farming futures—including input and distribution networks outside of the “farm” itself?

• How might these new models illuminate opportunities for traditional agriculture?



Rebecca Chesney

[email protected]/foodfutures


innovation in food and...

Documents