A few weeks ago, Bayer held a global meeting to look towards the future, entitled The Future of Farming Dialogue 2018. The event acts both as a shop window and a display centre for the expanded company which recently concluded its takeover of Monsanto.

The meeting heard perspective and opinions from the top brass in the company. But, just like the previous year, there is little in terms of information on the type of new tools that European, and particularly Irish, farmers might like to hear about.

Given the many alternative directions that the expanded company is taking, it seems likely that there will be fewer new chemical tools in the pipeline, especially for Europe.

Neither was there any information on the impact that the purchase of Monsanto will have on the direction that Bayer will take in the future.

While we have known of this purchase for a long time, Bayer and Monsanto were expressly prevented from talking or sharing data up to very recently. So the crunching of numbers and the examination of what is in the different cupboards was still largely unknown at that point.

Plant protection matters

Liam Condon is president of the Crop Science Division of Bayer. Liam is Dublin born and he opened his presentation by stating that it is less than 200 years since over 1 million people perished due to hunger in the Irish famine.

Liam Condon, president of the crop science division of Bayer AG, at the Future of Farming Dialogue 2018.

That was a consequence of a food-crop failure and the social consequences were devastating. We have come a long way since then and the industry has a lot to be proud of, Liam stated.

The crop protection industry has largely prevented such parallel disasters around the globe, but this is seldom acknowledged. Current predictions of global population hitting 10 billion by 2050 (from 7.5 billion today) put pressure on global food supplies.

Increasing population and decreasing agricultural land mean that the available farmland per person will drop from around one acre per person in 1961 to less than one third of an acre per person by 2050. Add other issues such as water, climate change and plant health and the future will have lots of challenges.

“Food security is a complex issue,” Liam stated. Nature has a part to play in terms of weather and natural resources, but so does politics in terms of regulations, trade conflicts, etc. Culture also impacts through beliefs and emotions regarding food. There are no easy answers to food security, but complex changes do require holistic approaches.

Liam said that Bayer is attempting to shape agriculture for the future to benefit farmers, consumers and our planet. It intends to do this through a combination of seeds and traits, crops protection and data sciences.

The incorporation of Monsanto looks like driving Bayer into number one positions in corn, soya beans, horticulture, cereals and digital farming. The new company is trying to develop new market standards in innovation, sustainability and digital transformation of farming systems. And it wants to do this with measured responsibility to society as a whole.

Liam told me that no change is expected for the Bayer business in Ireland in the short- to medium-term. On glyphosate, he said that Bayer hopes to change public opinion with regard to this active. Nothing has changed since the EU registration, but he was uncertain as to the future of glyphosate in the EU.

Food from Mars

Top of the agenda for the gathering was a presentation on growing food on Mars. If, like me, your immediate reaction is that transport cost would murder the project, then we need to broaden our minds.

The project had a definite and real purpose. Connor Kiselchuk works with NASA and he explained that man’s ability to spend time in space and travel greater distances is limited by the amount of food a space craft can carry. If man is to travel as far away as Mars, then we must find a way to produce food during the journey.

A research project called EDEN ISS is underway to study this possibility. Obviously, it is not taking place on Mars, but in another inhospitable environment – the Antarctic.

The aim is to grow food (plants) with the minimum of resources. This means minimal water, growing space, efficient use of light sources and nutrients. Partners in the project include University of Guelph, German Aerospace Centre and Bayer’s Jeff Schell Fellowship.

There are now numerous projects taking place to assess the production potential of a range of food sources. These are real projects using technologies like root misting with nutrients rather than hydroponics or extracting moisture from the air to use for plant production.

There can be little doubt but that the very basic research being conducted to understand the simple principles of growing plants with minimal resources will find its way into the crop production technology toolbox in the future.

Drone multitasking

In another presentation, Justin Gong of XAG told how global agriculture today involves:

  • A total world population of 7.64 billion.
  • World arable land totalling 1.43 billion hectares.
  • 1,872m2 arable land (0.46ac) per capita.
  • 4,121,220 tonnes of pesticide use (active ingredient).
  • In China, only 7% of plant protection product application is mechanised. The work at XAG aims to build a digital farming infrastructure to provide platforms for precision agriculture. Ultimately, it aims to connect land, crops and people and to make agricultural intelligence practical. XAG is involved in the production of unmanned aircraft and has sold over 53,000 such devices already.

    The first step for such a system is to build a digital infrastructure of the site(s). This involves producing a high definition map to show field identification, obstacles and prescription services. It does this using RTK positioning, night operation, obstacle avoidance, swarm operation and it must be adaptive to all terrains.

    An XAG drone applying pesticide using a ULV spray atomisation system.

    The monitoring equipment can do pest and disease monitoring, crop growth monitoring, drought/flood assessment, field boundary identification, irrigation guidance and chemical application. And all this is autonomous. A lot of spraying is done at night if conditions suit. This drone unit has a capacity of 5ha/hr, so a swarm system can have substantial spraying capacity.

    The devices use ultra-low volume spinning discs fitted on to the propeller motors of the drone. The propellers were specifically designed to prevent a vortex effect being generated from the downward air movement.

    Malaria menace

    There is always an unexpected gem at an event like this and the one that hit me was a presentation on malaria. Presenter Sarah de Souza described the mosquito as the deadliest animal in the world, saying that a child will die of malaria in Africa every two minutes.

    Those who suffer from this disease will incur reduced farm productivity due to ill health and this leads to low income and poverty. And poverty perpetuates the impact of the disease.

    The objective is to eradicate malaria by 2040. Sarah said that this alone would save 3.8 billion agricultural working days to add to the productivity of agriculture. This could be a real game changer, but there has been significant progress so far.

    Malaria is transmitted by mosquitoes, so control of the disease means either preventing infection or the eradication of the insect. Simple actions like insecticide-treated bed nets and the use of residual insecticides inside houses have helped greatly. But “insecticide resistance is the greatest current threat to the future of malaria control,” according to Pedro Alonso, head of the World Health Organization global malaria programme.

    Insect resistance is a real problem because of the limited number of insecticide classes and the fact that these are also used in agriculture. This leaves limited options to change or rotate products.

    Sarah’s research found that the risk of resistance development is increased when insecticide families are used both in agriculture and human health.

    For this reason, Sarah said that agricultural practices and vector control need to be considered together.