Productivity Pace Pt 2
I’m Bob Larson. As we learned yesterday, a new report shows the current pace of ag productivity won’t be enough to feed the world by 2050.
Part of that shortfall, according to the GAP Initiative’s Ann Steensland, is many farmers around the world don’t have access to modern information and tools to be more productive …
STEENSLAND … “Here in the U.S., we are incredibly productive, with the most productive, the longest history of productivity in the world. It's made a huge impact on our agriculture, but we need to continue that growth, and we've been a little stagnant for a couple of years now, and so we're looking to the next generation of technologies, so, it could be things like gene-edited crops, continued improvements in precision agriculture, the next generation of how we use data, and other tools.”
So, Steensland says we're looking at quickly-evolving technologies to give us another productivity burst in the U.S. …
STEENSLAND … “We are very blessed in this country to have a phenomenal land grant system, to have the extensive extension systems that we do, and the farmers benefit from that and have for many, many decades now. And our investments in research and development here are beginning to tick up a little bit, which is good, but we're pretty far behind where we need to be, so there's still some work to do here.
Steensland says we need to be embracing a science-based approach we have and making sure that farmers have access to it and understand how to use it.
