🍲 The future of food: Exploring Agtech farming | Counting the Cost (Feature)

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The UN's Food and Agriculture Agency says the world will need to change the way it produces its food in order to cater to an increasing global population. Emma Hayward went to Scotland to look inside the world of vertical farming.

"If it's just about delivering calories, there's enough land around the world and probaby enough resources for people [to feed the world]. The problem is where that food has to be, whether it's nutritious enough or whether it's affordable," according to Adam Anders, co-founder and managing partner at Anterra Capital, the largest single dedicated agtech fund in the world.

"Agtech is the adoption of new ideas, new technologies, be it digital, biotech, material sciences applied to any aspect of the food and agriculture value chain. That works from the stage of breeding, pesticides, on farm practices, transportation, shelf life and logistics."

An agtech farm would consider "the genetics, the actual performance of the plant ... and ... once you've actually made a planting decision, how can you use data to be more precise, both about that first moment of planting and to treat that plant as it grows... Then a treatment process of the next generation of pesticides and harvesting and how can the farmer best market their product."

"Digital biotech solutions are available to help every aspect of that for the farmer ... Using your smartphone or an ipad in order to prioritise what to do that day, to know more in specificity where there might be disease pressure, how you can more accurately apply pesticide or look after your field and actually farming at that more detailed at that level will be helped more by technology," says Anders.

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