The latest agricultural revolution

In a world increasingly focused on high-tech, it's easy to forget that the single most foundational industry of all remains agriculture. Without food, nothing else matters. The fact that agriculture has always held this dominating position doesn't minimize the critical role that technology has long played in its development. It's been technology, both ancient and modern, that has allowed agriculture to feed a fast-growing population. Over 200 years ago, when English scholar Robert Malthus suggested that food production could never increase fast enough to support such growth, the immense potentials of advanced agricultural technology were completely unknown.

The relationship between agriculture and technology has, however, been volatile rather than smooth, with transformative ideas causing revolutions in how things are grown and distributed. The industrial revolution brought mechanization to the fields, allowing the energy of fuels to be applied to the cultivation of crops, resulting in greater yields from the same land and labour. More recently, the so-called green revolution, with its use of higher yield crops and improved fertilizers, has allowed struggling countries around the world to feed their own populations for the first time. Today, advances in genetics, electronic equipment, and even space technologies such as GPS have been successfully applied to enhance agricultural production.

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