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This premium article delves into the GreenTech 2022 event, held in Amsterdam from 14th-16th June, and summarises some of the key talking points of the event, such as controlled environment agriculture (CEA) productivity and increasing sustainability in CEA.

Discussions about the ethics of robots are no new thing, but with the technology maturing and applications preparing to be utilized in the everyday world, is it time to revisit the conversation?

Thursday 7 July 2022 - IDTechEx will discuss how vertical farms can fit in with the coming age of agriculture. This webinar will include discussions on what vertical farms can bring to the agricultural industry, an overview of several limitations faced by the vertical farming industry today, and several possible methods for vertical farms to increase profitability

Researchers have developed a tiny sensor for detecting pesticides on fruit in just a few minutes. The technique uses flame-sprayed nanoparticles made from silver to increase the signal of chemicals. While still at an early stage, the researchers hope these nano-sensors could help uncover food pesticides before consumption.

As prices of wheat, fuel, and fertilizer rise, the total costs for farmers have been increasing. Given the intensified financial struggle, together with higher demand for food production, improving farming efficiencies is imminent.

Solinftec will expand the launch of its new cutting edge AgTech robotic platform, Solix Ag Robotics, into Canada in partnership with Stone Farms and the University of Saskatchewan. The new technology aims to provide farmers and agronomists a new level of information to increase yields, improve the usage of inputs, lower environmental impact, and support the global demand for food supply. The goal is to have the robot commercially available for the 2023 season for wheat crops.

IDTechEx has recently released "Vertical Farming: 2022-2032", a market research report exploring the technology and market factors of the vertical farming industry, which has attracted much attention from investors over recent years. The vertical farming industry raised over $1 billion in funding in 2021, a record high that exceeded the combined funding generated in 2018 and 2019.

In the future, cameras could spot blackbirds feeding on grapes in a vineyard and launch drones to drive off the avian irritants, then return to watch for the next invading flock. All without a human nearby.

Each year, the world loses about 10 million hectares of forest — an area about the size of Iceland — because of deforestation. At that rate, some scientists predict the world's forests could disappear in 100 to 200 years. In an effort to provide an environmentally friendly and low-waste alternative, researchers have pioneered a tunable technique to generate wood-like plant material in a lab, which could enable someone to "grow" a wooden product…

Tomatoes gene-edited to produce vitamin D, the sunshine vitamin, could be a simple and sustainable innovation to address a global health problem. Researchers used gene editing to turn off a specific molecule in the plant's genome which increased provitamin D3 in both the fruit and leaves of tomato plants. It was then converted to vitamin D3 through exposure to UVB light.