From virtual farming to ramen robots, mushrooms and maggots, Shannon Harley reports on the latest innovations (some straight from Australia) shaping the global food industry.
Cutting edge agriculture
The rural idyll of the beef or dairy farm has not really changed in centuries – think flat plains or rolling hills of green pasture punctuated by wooden-post fences and traversed by an ever-chewing rotation of cattle. And, apart from the introduction of the tractor, the world of crop farming looks a lot like it did a few hundred years ago, too. But field robotics and digital agriculture are about to shake up the pastoral picture as we know it, and Australia could be placed to be the Silicon Valley of ag-tech.
Virtual fencing is being pioneered by Agersens, the Melbourne-based Australian agri-tech business bringing its world-first virtual herding technology to livestock farmers. That’s right, a beef farm without fences is possible with the release of Agersens’ eShepherd livestock collar, a solar-powered collar that allows farmers to remotely herd and graze cattle from an iPad or computer via GPS signal. “We can give precise cues to the animals because the AI [artificial intelligence] in the collars allows this,” says Sally Haynes, Agersens Chief Scientist in Animal Behaviour Innovation and Welfare.
Bots or ‘digital farmhands’ are another key feature of the new wave of AI-facilitated virtual farming. “A digital farmhand can go over a row of crops and detect pathogens, plant growth and monitor the plant,” says Salah Sukkarieh, Associate Dean and Professor of Robotics and Intelligent Systems at the University of Sydney. Bots monitoring pasture, spraying weeds and herding animals would enable farmers to collect real-time data and develop models that would boost productivity, and reduce waste and costs.
“There are already autonomous mines in WA, and autonomous stevedoring in Sydney and Melbourne,” says Sukkarieh. “Moving this tech into agriculture isn’t hard.”
While this all sounds rather futuristic, we’ve had robotics bubbling in the kitchen since 2009, when Fuamen Ramen noodle shop in Nagoya, Japan, debuted two robotic arms working in sync to create up to 800 bowls of noodles a day. More recently, robo chefs Koya and Kona showed up in Shanghai, turning out perfect bowls of ramen in just 90 seconds at Toyako Robot Ramen.
The buzz on bugs
The current systems we use to produce food are less than desirable when it comes to sustainability. How so? The meat industry consumes 70 per cent of arable land (this includes the land used to grow animal feed), requiring 15,000 litres of water for every 1kg of beef produced, and if food waste were a country, it would be the third largest contributor of methane gas in the world. One Australian sheep-farmer-turned-insect-farmer has come up with a solution for reducing both food waste and the environmental toll of intensive animal farming. And it’s creating quite a buzz.
Olympia Yarger is pioneering the insect farming industry in Australia, and her start-up Goterra, of which she is the CEO and founder, is a closed-loop farming system that diverts food waste from landfill – where it generates methane gas – to mobile insect farms where crickets, maggots and flies break down the food scraps, and are themselves reared into a high-protein, sustainable source of food for humans and livestock. Gram for gram, insects are one of the cheapest, most efficient and nutritious food sources available, and while they are a part of many traditional diets around the world, from East Africa to the Amazon, we’re still working on developing our taste for bugs here in Australia. Yarger, who is based in the ACT, says insects are the protein source of the future and recently spoke at the Global Food Forum in Sydney about the need to revolutionise the way we think about our protein sources from beyond beef to bugs.
The new shopping basket
The World Wildlife Fund (WWF) recently released a report titled ‘50 Future Foods’ that highlights foods that will improve the global food system, in regards to human and environmental health. While the report includes some legumes, cereals, grains, plants and tubers that we may already be familiar with, there are less common varieties to consider the next time you’re prepping dinner.
Why is it important to expand our diets? In short, because they have significantly shrunk, leading to mono-cropping and loss of agro-biodiversity, not to mention the adverse effect this has on ecosystems and the human body. “Most of us might believe it’s our energy or transport choices that cause the most serious environmental damage,” says Dr Tony Juniper, CBE, Executive Director for Advocacy at WWF. “When in fact, it’s our food system that creates the biggest impact.”
Today, we rely on a very small range of foods – 75 per cent of the global food supply comes from only 12 plant and five animal species. Just three varieties – rice, maize, wheat – make up nearly 60 per cent of calories from plants in the entire human diet, and if we are to keep up with demand from the swelling global population (predicted to reach 10 billion by 2050), new climate-resistant, nutrient-dense crops are going to be needed.
Algae are nutrient-rich and critical to our existence on the planet. They are responsible for half of all oxygen production on earth and all aquatic ecosystems depend on them. They contain essential fatty acids and can be rich in protein, offering a meat-like umami flavour found in Japanese cuisine via kombu and wakame varieties of seaweed.
Legumes, which include beans and pulses, fix nitrogen in the soil – essential for returning nutrients to the land after livestock grazing or large-scale cropping – and are a sustainable source of plant-based protein. Fiona Simson, a mixed farmer and grazier in NSW and the first female president of the National Farmers’ Federation, rotates legume crops and beef cattle on her property. You’ve likely already eaten chickpeas, fava (broad beans), adzuki, mung beans and lentils, but the report anticipates the rise of underused varieties such as bambara from Africa and cowpeas, which look similar to black eyed peas.
Edible cacti are drought-resistant and are expected to launch out of Mexico, where they’ve long been part of traditional diets. Have you eaten nopales, the broad, flat paddle-shaped leaves from the prickly pear cactus, sliced into a salad?
Globally, we consume an extremely limited range of grains, and wheat is grown on more land area than any other food crop. The spread of gluten intolerance, which has been linked to the dominance of modern, GMO varieties, leads us to consider alternative ancient grains. Amaranth was eaten by the Aztecs and can be grown at altitude with little water. Buckwheat can be used as a cover crop to stop soil erosion and, despite the name, is gluten-free and not related to wheat. Millet is one of the most nutritious cereals eaten in many parts of Africa, while fonio, another ancient grain from Africa, dates back to ancient Egypt and has a nutty, delicate taste, is gluten-free and is highly nutritious. Kamut is a variety of wheat grown for its ability to tolerate different climates without the use of pesticides. Teff is touted to be the next supergrain – it’s already commonly used in Ethiopia in its national dish of injera – a nutty pancake made from a slightly fermented batter made from the ground teff grain.
There are more than 2000 edible varieties of mushroom, and their super power is that they can grow where many other foods would not, including in the dark and on by-products from other crops. Chido Govera, a farmer, activist and entrepreneur based in Zimbabwe, promotes mushroom cultivation from cornstalk, and now coffee waste, as a means of food security and financial independence for hundreds of women living in poverty in her country and beyond. She took to the stage at Sydney’s MAD Symposium in 2016 and shared her story of the moment her life changed as an 11-year-old orphan when she was selected to take part in a university mushroom-growing program. Since then, mushrooms have literally changed her life, and will continue to do so for many others.
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