Industries: Agriculture

Jan
24

Tricking Your Taste Buds into the Future

What if we could end childhood diabetes, fight world poverty and engage in a more sustainable form of agriculture just by tricking our taste buds? Sounds farfetched–if not impossible–doesn’t it? After watching this insightful TEDx talk by Homaru Canto and Ben Roche, two innovative chefs from Chicago, I think you might have a more open [...]

Dec
7

Futurist Jack Uldrich’s Predictions for 2012

Blackout Friday #1: In an attempt to appease consumer unease over the growing use of facial-recognition technology, a handful of retailers will admit prior to “Black Friday” that they have deployed the technology during the 2012 Holiday season but will claim they are using it only as a “safety tool” to monitor crowds and prevent [...]

Dec
1

A Perennial Idea About the Future of Farming

I’m in Guelph, Ontario today to deliver a keynote on innovation to the Agricultural Adaptation Council. One of the ideas I intend to put on their radar screen is that of perennial crops. Before the invention of agriculture all crops were perennial. With the advent of modern farming, annual crops become the norm. The transition [...]

Nov
8

Farming the Future for Insights

As I was preparing my keynote presentation for the AgGateway 2011 Annual Conference (which I’ll deliver tomorrow in Las Vegas), it occurred to me that 100 years ago (when the population of the United States was roughly 160 million), 50 percent of all Americans were involved with agriculture–meaning 80 million people. Today, there are an [...]

Nov
3

The Future of Biofuels

“The scope of what you can do is expanding as the cost of sequencing is dropping like a rock.” The above quotation is from Andrew Paterson who led the sorghum sequencing project. Sorghum might not sound all that exciting but it is the number two biofuel crop in America after corn. If sorghum can be genetically manipulated [...]