As the global population has expanded over time, modernizing agriculture with the aid of innovations like AI has been humanity's prevailing approach to staving off famine. A variety of mechanical and chemical innovations delivered during the 1950s and 1960s represented the third agricultural revolution. The adoption of pesticides, fertilizers and high-yield crop breeds, among other measures, transformed agriculture and ensured a secure food supply for many millions of people over several decades. Concurrently, modern agriculture has emerged as a culprit of global warming, responsible for one-third of greenhouse gas emissions, namely carbon dioxide and methane. Meanwhile, inflation on the price of food is reaching an all-time high, while malnutrition is rising dramatically.

Has the fourth agricultural revolution arrived and does it have the capacity to solve the issues of farming and food production? Or is it too early to know just what impact robotics could have on agriculture? CPM found out more at Cereals. The fourth agricultural revolution can't simply be about automating the third one. A lot of the discussion centred around technology hails it as a revolution and something that could bring about transformational change, but speaking at the Cereals Event, Harry Henderson of AHDB asked if this would be the case.

As the global population has expanded over time, agricultural modernisation has been humanity's prevailing approach to staving off famine. A variety of mechanical and chemical innovations delivered during the 1950s and 1960s represented the third agricultural revolution. The adoption of pesticides, fertilisers and high-yield crop breeds, among other measures, transformed agriculture and ensured a secure food supply for many millions of people over several decades. Concurrently, modern agriculture has emerged as a culprit of global warming, responsible for one-third of greenhouse gas emissions, namely carbon dioxide and methane. Meanwhile, inflation on the price of food is reaching an all-time high, while malnutrition is rising dramatically.

As the global population has expanded over time, agricultural modernisation has been humanity's prevailing approach to staving off famine. A variety of mechanical and chemical innovations delivered during the 1950s and 1960s represented the third agricultural revolution. The adoption of pesticides, fertilisers and high-yield crop breeds, among other measures, transformed agriculture and ensured a secure food supply for many millions of people over several decades. Concurrently, modern agriculture has emerged as a culprit of global warming, responsible for one-third of greenhouse gas emissions, namely carbon dioxide and methane. Meanwhile, inflation on the price of food is reaching an all-time high, while malnutrition is rising dramatically.

Co-Founder and CTO of Prospera Technologies, leading the company's vision to transform the way food is grown using data science and AI. The human race has come a long way in our ability to produce food at scale. Historian and author Yuval Noah Harari refers to it in his book Sapiens as "an agricultural revolution," using wheat as an example. Ten thousand years ago, wheat was a wild grass that grew in a relatively small region in the Middle East. Today, wheat can be considered one of the most successful plants in history, according to the evolutionary criteria of survival and reproduction. In regions where wheat never existed, such as the Great Plains of North America, you can drive for hundreds of miles without seeing anything else but wheat fields.

One of the most concerning challenges of the 21st century is the increasing demand for food to be interconnected with the booming population expected to reach almost 10 billion people by 2050. Agricultural revolution predicts an increase in global food production by almost 70% to be able to feed the additional 2 billion people while using the same amount of land. In this new context, agriculture and food sectors are becoming top priorities and our efforts should be focused on finding innovative and more efficient ways to meet the food requirements of the world population. As the numbers of farmers worldwide are decreasing and climate change is disrupting our seasons, turning arable land into deserts, Artificial Intelligence (AI) technologies could bring solutions to these problems, cutting down human effort and making the tasks easier. The analysts from Research and Markets forecast that by 2021, the global AI market in agriculture industry will grow at a CAGR of 22.68%.

Like all good economists, John Maynard Keynes was better at predicting the past than the future. Writing in Economic Possibilities for Our Grandchildren in 1930, Keynes said that in 100 years' time, people would work no more than 15 hours a week. With many people still clocking up 40 hours or more, that prediction was somewhat wide of the mark. It sounds great and certainly grabs the attention. However, there is one teeny tiny potential snag.

Agriculture has come a long way in the past century. We produce more food than ever before -- but our current model is unsustainable, and as the world's population rapidly approaches the 8 billion mark, modern food production methods will need a radical transformation if they're going to keep up. But luckily, there's a range of new technologies that might make it possible. In this series, we'll explore some of the innovative new solutions that farmers, scientists, and entrepreneurs are working on to make sure that nobody goes hungry in our increasingly crowded world. In Thomas Malthus' seminal -- though oft criticized -- 1798 work, An Essay on the Principle of Population, the economist took a long view of human history, observing that human populations, when they have an abundance of food, grow until they strain their resources, at which point scarcity sets in.

If rumors that James Cameron is interested in picking up Terminator 6 prove true, perhaps Bill Gates will be in the running for a cameo. Gates recently cautioned that robots are replacing humans in a wide range of jobs, and he proposed implementing a robot tax as a way to temporarily slow the spread of automation. He was promptly -- and predictably -- trashed by a bevy of economists. Lawrence Summers, the former U.S. treasury secretary, dubbed Gates' plan "protectionism against progress," and others scoffed that the founder of Microsoft had joined the ranks of Luddites. Economic growth has slowed markedly in the past decade, they pointed out.

By rights, Yuval Noah Harari should be an anonymous academic buried in an obscure university department somewhere toiling away on his somewhat dusty discipline – medieval military history. He's a professor of history at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and there is almost nothing in his background to suggest that he would write a book that has become one of the most talked about non-fiction bestsellers of the year – Sapiens. Or that he'd join the globetrotting TED-ocracy: the academic superstars who travel the world delivering keynotes on zeitgeisty topics, in Harari's case, the not inconsiderable subject of the history of the whole of mankind. When I meet him, he's just been the star turn at Penguin Random House's global sales conference. In May, he packed out Hay. Earlier this month, he delivered a TED talk.