A host of new and emerging agricultural technologies lie on the horizon that could revolutionise how we think about food production, but a separate report published in the journal One Earth suggests that low-tech solutions could be just as effective.

Agriculture and food production account for 34 percent of global greenhouse gas emissions, making these sectors critical in efforts to address our current overshoot of the climate planetary boundary. They are also having profound impacts on freshwater, biodiversity, and nitrogen and phosphorous nutrient cycling — each of them planetary boundaries that we must balance if we are to keep conditions on Earth habitable for generations to come.

Yet, within the agri-food problem may lie a golden opportunity for climate solutions: That’s because the productivity and, ultimately, the profitability of agri-food systems are based on photosynthesis, a process that removes CO2 from the atmosphere, and our agricultural lands have huge potential to become a net carbon sink and contribute positively to addressing the climate emergency.

In a perspective article for PNAS, Daniel Northrup and colleagues compared projected greenhouse gas emissions from different agri-food technologies with current emissions for maize cultivation.

They found that a combination of novel technologies — including digital agriculture, crop genetics, and electric vehicles — implemented as part of a three-phase transition could achieve a 71 per cent reduction in greenhouse gas emissions from row-crop agriculture in the next 15 years. At the same time, these practices aim to build soil carbon stores, which could pave the way to net negative emissions from the sector.

The first phase would optimise current agri-food technology by employing digital agriculture to reduce the amount of nitrogen fertiliser used on crops by applying smaller amounts more precisely, a method that could cut emissions by 23 per cent.

Next, existing technologies would be replaced with low-emission equivalents, including green methods for synthesising fertilisers, and replacement of fossil fuel-powered farm equipment with electric equivalents run by renewables. This step could include selective breeding or genetic engineering for certain crop traits, such as improved nitrogen absorption through plant roots.

The final step in the agri-tech transition would involve a full redesign of the agricultural system, making use of swarms of small agricultural robots to practice automated precision agriculture with high-performing crop varieties, guided by distributed sensors. An advanced agricultural system like this might reduce carbon emissions by more than 1,700 kilogrammes per hectare, according to the study.

Read the full article about technology in agriculture by Claire Asher at Eco-Business.