Earlier this year, a group of Illinois faculty members led the development a very thought-provoking issue of the National Academy of Engineering’s (NAE) quarterly publication The Bridge, published in September 2011.
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Earlier this year, a group of Illinois faculty members led the development a very thought-provoking issue of the National Academy of Engineering’s (NAE) quarterly publication The Bridge, published in September 2011.
“The focus was on the synergy between agriculture and information science and technology, areas where Illinois is a national thought leader and should continue to be,” explained Andrew Alleyne, associate dean for research in the College of Engineering. “For the collection of scholarly papers, we pulled in corporate partners in leadership positions from IBM, ADM, Monsanto, and John Deere.” Alleyne, who is the Ralph M. and Catherine V. Fisher Professor in the Department of Mechanical Science and Engineering, served as editor for the publication.
Andrew Alleyne
“The topics addressed in this issue of The Bridge respond to two major trends that affect our planet: population growth and urbanization. The predicted population growth for the first half of this century is daunting. Depending on the estimate, there will be 9 to 10 billion people by mid-century," Alleyne stated in his introduction to the publication. Together, the five scholarly articles included in The Bridge examine ways to meet increases in demand using the knowledge and natural resources currently at our disposal, including information technology (IT), which has been underused in the agricultural context.
K. C. Ting
"The current population is just under 7 billion, meaning that there will be about a 50 percent increase from the beginning to the middle of this century," he added. "One may debate the relative accuracy of particular models, but they all agree that there will be many, many more mouths to feed in the coming decades.” Experts also predict a change in demographics by mid-century—a growing middle class that is part of a global shift from agrarian lifestyles to city-based lifestyles around the world.
According to the authors, information technology could have at least as big an impact on agriculture in the next half-century as mechanization had in the previous century. In addition to identifying individual challenges associated with meeting future agricultural goals, the authors break the discussion down show how different elements of IT can be used to address these challenges, and they offer suggestions for accelerating the integration of IT and agriculture.
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Tarek Abdelzaher
Opportunities for decision making in agriculture are enhanced and enabled by the ubiquity of information gathering and the power of modern information processing," they wrote. "If, for example, data analytics associated with data mining tools can be combined with contextual or situational information from models or sensor data, the combined data could provide input for powerful computing algorithms that could provide support for the right decision choice at the right time. Moreover, such decisions could be made scalable so decisions for one geospatial location or one agricultural product would not conflict with other decisions.
“We have no choice but to increase our output with available resources, and information technology, which offers many opportunities for addressing challenges to increasing global agricultural output, must play a central part in meeting that goal,” the U of I authors contend. “Although IT has influenced many industries and greatly improved the management of supply chains, to date it has only influenced agriculture in a relatively localized way. It will take buy-in by all stakeholders and coordinated, communal efforts on a global level to integrate agriculture and IT to meet the needs of a hungry world.”
To download a .pdf of the Fall 2011 edition of The Bridge, visit the National Academies' website.
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Contact:Andrew Alleyne, College of Engineering.