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Digital agriculture to design sustainable agricultural systems

Nature Sustainability volume 3, pages 254–256 (2020)Cite this article

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The global food system must become more sustainable. Digital agriculture — digital and geospatial technologies to monitor, assess and manage soil, climatic and genetic resources — illustrates how to meet this challenge so as to balance the economic, environmental and social dimensions of sustainable food production.

Fifty years ago, many people doubted the ability of the world to feed itself. While food security remains a challenge for the poorest people, the global food system has been so successful in producing cheap food calories that today three-times more people in the world are obese than underweight due to malnutrition1. The current food system is able to do this largely because of crop and livestock production technologies that produce and deliver more food calories to more people than was previously thought possible. But agriculture’s contributions to greenhouse gas emissions, water pollution and biodiversity loss show that major agricultural systems are on largely unsustainable trajectories2. As Schramski et al.3 point out, changing the way we produce and use energy in agriculture as well as the rest of the economy must be an important part of meeting the sustainability challenge. However, it seems unlikely that a development pathway for a human population approaching 10 billion could be achieved with less total energy use. And since some environmental costs will be associated with increased energy use and a substantially larger human population, achieving a more sustainable development pathway will involve managing trade-offs in complex natural and human systems among economic, environmental and social dimensions of human well-being4. It now appears likely that moving agriculture towards a more sustainable development pathway will depend largely on crop agriculture, particularly if the sustainable human diet is to be largely based on plant-based foods. This will involve trade-offs associated with the demands such a pathway will place on land, water and genetic resources in many parts of the world5.

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Fig. 1: DA in agricultural systems.

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Acknowledgements

This research was supported by the US Department of Agriculture/National Institute for Food and Agriculture (awards 2015-68007-23133 and 2018-67003-27406), US Department of Energy, Office of Science, Office of Biological and Environmental Research (awards DESC0018409 and DE-FC02-07ER64494) and Michigan State University AgBioResearch. We thank G. P. Robertson, P. Grace, S. Swinton, J. Hatfield, R. Martinez-Feria, S. Archontoulis, J. Jones and J. Ritchie for their comments on previous versions of this manuscript.

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  1. Department of Earth and Environmental Sciences, Michigan State University, East Lansing, MI, USA

    Bruno Basso

  2. W.K. Kellogg Biological Station, Michigan State University, Hickory Corners, MI, USA

    Bruno Basso

  3. Department of Applied Economics, Oregon State University, Corvallis, OR, USA

    John Antle

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Correspondence to Bruno Basso.

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Basso, B., Antle, J. Digital agriculture to design sustainable agricultural systems. Nat Sustain 3, 254–256 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41893-020-0510-0

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