With the global population at 8.1 billion, and the UN predicting 10 billion in 2050, how do we keep feeding the population on the same amount of land while reducing our environmental footprint?
We need to be smarter and more innovative to balance reducing agriculture’s impact on global emissions and ensuring all people have access to safe and healthy food.
Reducing crop and animal losses is the first step in maximising the land and managing finite resources.
Weeds, insect pests and diseases can destroy a third of a crop before it can be harvested. Pests also render food unpalatable or unsafe for eating during transport and storage. Crop protection products that reduce and, in some cases, eliminate insect damage allow the consumer to purchase high-quality produce free of insect fragments or pest contamination.
Technologies also help increase crop yields and ensure the health of farm animals, allowing farmers to produce more efficiently, productively and sustainably. They also allow efficiency of food production processes, avoiding the need to acquire more land for food production.
By reducing crop and animal losses, we’re also maximising scarce resources like water, fertiliser and energy.
Innovations such as those which minimise the release of nitrous oxide into the atmosphere from crops and animals are another way that the crop and animal health sector is contributing to sustainable agriculture. These are applied as coatings on fertiliser or on animal feed. Animal vaccinations are another way of minimising nitrogen loss.
Crop protection and animal health products ensure that farmers and growers can produce enough food for all the people who enjoy eating our excellent dairy products, blemish-free fruit and vegetables, and quality grass-fed meat.
Helping to keep food prices in check for the consumer, by minimising losses, is another benefit of these technologies.
As a necessary component of modern agriculture, continued access to safe crop protection and animal health products is important for the viability of our farmers and our growers. Without them, New Zealand would be exposed to the very real risk of significant crop loss and economic harm.
But more needs to be done for local farmers to be able to adopt the technologies that are available to farmers offshore. Farmers and growers are concerned about the lack of effective tools to manage growing pest and disease burdens, especially in horticulture. This has left them grappling with the dilemma of how to handle potential biosecurity incursions and elevated pest or disease burdens without losing their crops.
Animal and Plant Health NZ is working with the government to address this and arm growers with softer, more targeted and environmentally-friendly solutions to managing pests and weeds, many of which are already available in other parts of the world.
A science-based approach to farming practice and policy will become even more important over the next generation and those to come.