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NANOTECHNOLOGY AND AGRICULTURE

Achieving food security through the very small

Nature Nanotechnology volume 13, pages 627–629 (2018)Cite this article

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Nanotechnology could make agriculture more efficient and more sustainable, but more systematic understanding of the mechanisms involved is necessary to prove the potential of nano-enabled agrochemicals.

In their detailed analysis, Kah et al. not only evaluated nanopesticides and nanofertilizers separately, but they also reported on a number of shortcomings in this rapidly developing yet somewhat limited dataset. This assessment of shortcomings will indeed be valuable to future efforts in this field, as much of these points can be taken as recommendations to produce more robust experimental design and resulting data. Among the most important shortcomings in the existing literature is the fairly consistent inadequate level of particle characterization data, particularly as the materials exist and weather in the system over time. In addition, the authors note there are currently no systematic well-designed field studies comparing nano-agrochemicals to their conventional counterparts. For example, slow or controlled release is often a major strategy of nano-enabled agrochemicals. Kah et al. note that slow release is a concept that has been around in agriculture since the 1960s, but no systematic comparison has been made between these more traditional strategies and the more recent nanotechnology-based platforms. Another shortcoming of experiments on slow release is that an evaluation of this process should occur over a sufficient time frame (that is, weeks to months) to approximate field conditions; instead, studies of this sort are most often done for short periods of time (hours to days) under laboratory conditions.

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Fig. 1: Global projections.
Fig. 2: Nanotechnology can enhance agricultural productivity and promote food security by a number of pathways.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Analytical Chemistry, The Center for Sustainable Nanotechnology, Connecticut Agricultural Experiment Station, New Haven, CT, USA

    Jason C. White

  2. Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry, Nanosystems Engineering Research Center for Nanotechnology-Enabled Water Treatment, UC Center for Environmental Implications of Nanotechnology, University of Texas at El Paso, El Paso, TX, USA

    Jorge Gardea-Torresdey

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  1. Jason C. White
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  2. Jorge Gardea-Torresdey
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Correspondence to Jason C. White or Jorge Gardea-Torresdey.

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White, J.C., Gardea-Torresdey, J. Achieving food security through the very small. Nature Nanotech 13, 627–629 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41565-018-0223-y

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