The Space Beyond

Ramez Naam spends much of his time thinking about the future. But recently, the Singularity University lecturer—and one of the early architects behind Internet Explorer, Outlook, and Bing—has shifted his attention away from how people navigate cyberspace to the grimmer question of whether our planet can keep up with the future. Peering through a prism of technology, he wonders how the world’s resources will be able to keep pace with its population growth.

Naam is quick to note that he’s not the first person to probe the question. In 1798, Thomas Malthus, the forefather of population scares, issued humanity’s first warning that dire consequences awaited should the earth’s population continue growing unabated. Much later, in the 1960s, a new generation of Malthusians published best-selling books heralding mass famines if we didn’t prevent the explosion of what they dubbed “the population bomb.”

Malthusians new and old fear that agricultural production simply can’t grow fast enough to feed the ever-rising number of people on the planet. But to date, they have simply never been right—while famines do happen, it’s not because the world can’t produce enough food—and Naam is also quick to point out that he’s no Malthusian. “Whenever the need has been great, or the financial rewards high, inventors come calling,” Naam wrote in his 2013 book, “The Infinite Resource: The Power of Ideas on a Finite Planet.”

Today, Naam and the Malthusians can agree on this: The need for innovation has never been greater. By 2050, according to the World Resources Institute, we’ll have to find ways to grow food production by 70 percent to meet the needs of an estimated global population of 10 billion people.

But beyond overall population growth, there will be another 2.9 billion people joining the global middle class by 2030, according to a 2012 report from Reuters. Led by China and India, these fast-developing countries are providing their citizens with better education, more skilled jobs, higher incomes, and rapid urbanization. As they seek out a more prosperous middle-class life, similar to those in developed countries, they’ll disproportionately drive up the world’s demand for food, water, and energy, stretching thin some of the world’s already limited resources.

“Though it will take a while for the world to reach this level of affluence,” Naam says, “it is a foot race.”

Just as our hunter-gatherer ancestors evolved into farmers 12,000 years ago, today’s farmers are quietly undergoing a distinctly 21st-century transformation.

“It used to be, if you could turn a wrench you’d be good at farming,” Ernie Burbrink, a farmer at Tom Farms in Leesburg, Ind., told the New York Times in December. “Now you need to know screen navigation, and pinpointing what data should go where so people can plan and predict.”

While the dramatic innovations in farming practices in the 20th century saw crop yields skyrocket and still continue to move the dial, digital technologies are ushering in a paradigm shift on the farm. “I’m hooked on a drug of information and productivity,” Kip Tom, the seventh generation family farmer who owns Tom Farms, told the Times. “We’ve got sensors on the combine, GPS data from satellites, cellular modems on self-driving tractors, apps for irrigation on iPhones.”

What Tom is describing is an early form of the Internet of Everything—the idea that all things will be connected to the Internet through sensors that communicate with one another, analyzing and acting on the data they gather, with or without human interaction. It’s a technological ecosystem that’s being rapidly embraced by the agriculture industry for everything from crop productivity to pest control to—perhaps most urgently—irrigation.

Because crops require water and feeding a planet requires a massive amount of crops, irrigation is responsible for using 70 percent of the available freshwater in the world, according to Naam. Unfortunately, running parallel to the Malthusian fear of food scarcity is the very real threat that the world is running out of water; more than a billion people around the world lack access to clean water—not to mention the historic droughts taking place in California.

Over the past four decades, Australia, with its majority desert climate, has spearheaded efforts to use water more efficiently in agriculture, cutting the amount of water needed to grow a bushel of grain by a factor of three. Much of that has been focused on how the water is deployed, such as moving from flooding a field to spray irrigation to drip irrigation, an incremental and ongoing dedication to increasing precision. Now, with the emergence of the Internet of Everything, smart technology pioneered by Silicon Valley startups has the potential to revolutionize irrigation, taking that precision to unprecedented heights.

“At the moment, there’s a huge, glaring omission within the whole of agriculture,” says Isaac Bentwich, founder of agriculture analytics startup CropX, in an article in TechCrunch. “Virtually all agriculture systems irrigate land uniformly. Even the most advanced technology always treats land as though it were uniform.”

But because land can be different, even across a small plot, CropX has built what Bentwich calls “the Internet of Soil.” The company uses sensors placed in a field’s soil to analyze the land and, through a mobile app, tell farmers how much water to use to maximize the harvest across each portion of the farm. According to Bentwich, farmers using CropX have been able to achieve water savings of 25 percent—a huge number, especially considering a recent USDA survey that found just 10 percent of farmers use any tool to optimize their irrigation.

In the coming years, barring Malthusian catastrophe, that will have to change. Today, the average person in India and China consumes just 40 percent and 28 percent, respectively, of the amount of water consumed by the average American. In the coming decades, as billions of people in those countries climb into the middle class, they’ll expect the 24-hour access to tap water that Americans take for granted and will consume more foods that require more water to produce. Billions more still in poverty will continue to clamor for even moderate access to clean water.

Faced with such unprecedented stress on a water supply that can’t be expanded, even Bentwich, the exact type of the inventor Naam expects to defy the odds, can see where the Malthusians are coming from. “Agriculture has undergone three major revolutions in the past 150 years,” he says. “Each one assumed that water was limitless—water was always used to grow more out of every acre. Now, water has literally run out.”

Like Ramez Naam, Stefan Heck and Matt Rogers, authors of the recent book “Resource Revolution,” are optimistic. “The challenges we face may be unprecedented,” they write, “but, simply put, any bet that we will succumb to a global economic crisis is a bet against human ingenuity. No such bet has ever paid off.”

That ingenuity, as seen in CropX’s work in agriculture, is already beginning to play out across various sectors, offering clues for how the technology may trickle through the economy to validate the authors’ faith that innovation can prevent a global famine.

Consider OPower, an energy company working to make energy use more efficient in a world that still depends on high-pollution fossil fuels. The company recognized that the massive amount of energy used by Americans on heating and cooling was being inefficiently tracked, so it began collecting real-time data from energy meters in people’s homes. In doing so, it essentially turned regular meters into smart meters—creating an Internet of Energy not unlike CropX’s Internet of Soil. OPower sends its customers a report on their energy usage, using data to understand when they were and were not home and how efficient their energy use was. It lets customers see how they compare to their neighbors and whether they’ve been particularly wasteful.

Studies have shown that by using OPower’s service, people can reduce their energy usage by 2 percent. As modest as that sounds, if everyone in the U.S. were able to drop their energy usage by 2 percent, it would free up the use of the equivalent of 130 power plants, according to Heck and Rogers.

Meanwhile, there’s also Waze, a crowdsourced, real-time GPS and traffic navigation app bought by Google for $1.3 billion in 2013. Waze capitalizes on the sensors in its millions of users’ smartphones to effectively create an Internet of Traffic. By tapping into its user base of drivers, it collects their GPS locations and determines which cars are moving, where they’re going, and how fast they’re traveling, automatically providing the best route from point A to point B given real-time traffic and road conditions.

Perhaps more than any other app today, Waze has “illustrated the promise of the ‘Iinternet of Tthings,’ showing how a vast network of connected devices can make life easier,” according to Quartz’s David Yanofsky, using another common phrase for the Internet of Everything.

As these companies are proving, networks of smart technology aren’t limited to any specific industry or task. What they offer is the possibility of unprecedented efficiency—reducing your energy footprint, getting you places faster, and increasing your crop yield—largely by analyzing data that had previously gone uncaptured. So as experiments and success stories continue to emerge elsewhere—from connected pill bottles that make sure patients take their medication to clothes that track your biometrics—it ought to raise questions for the emerging breed of technologist-farmers to answer.

“How can robotics and automation make farming much more efficient,” asks Dror Berman, managing partner at Innovation Endeavor, the lead investor in CropX. “How can we use data sciences to make the farm more efficient?”

For now, these continue to remain open questions, but as a population bomb for a new generation approaches, today’s Malthusians should take consolation in Naam’s perspective. “The problems we face are incredibly serious, but not insurmountable,” he says. “In fact, that’s been the state of our global food situation for most of the last 200 years.”∎