Aidan Connolly is the President of AgriTech Capital, a food/farm futurologist, and author of "2-1-4-3, Plan your Explosive Business Growth," Described as the world's least digitized industry by McKinsey analysts (joint last position with hunting), the food producers of the world could only agree that agriculture has struggled to avail of the breakthroughs in technology that have transformed other industries. Uber has disrupted transportation, Netflix the movies, Airbnb the hotel business, online money movers who hold no cash now dominate banking and we purchase apps from companies who don't make them. Yet, farming seems to have changed little in the 10,000 years since the first animals were domesticated, and many believe that it will change little in the coming decades. However, I contend that this view is myopic and fails to recognize the degree of disruption already happening in farming. Sean Moffitt, managing director of Futureproofing, listed the 30 new technologies that both are currently seeing the greatest dollar investments and that industries will require to futureproof themselves for the next decade.

IMAGE: Smart data packages are providing food producers with greater insight, making production greener and more cost-efficient, but also generating new revenue streams - all thanks to the Evarest platform currently... view more Food production is a complex process involving the careful monitoring and management of raw materials, supply chains, market prices and much more besides. Access to smart data enables food producers to plan intelligently and to optimize their production processes allowing them to produce the required quantities more cheaply and in a more environmentally friendly way. But this data can also be used to create additional revenue streams for producers - something that will be demonstrated at this year's digital edition of Hannover Messe by members of a research consortium led by Professor of Business Informatics Wolfgang Maaß of Saarland University and the German Research Center for Artificial Intelligence (DFKI). In their'Evarest' research project, the team turns proprietary data into a commodity that can be traded securely without disclosing any intellectual property or trade secrets. What is next year's harvest of cocoa beans or strawberries going to be like?

The robot can gather a piece of fruit and sort by size automatically. Last month as our Mixing Bowl colleagues Michael Rose and An Wang were interviewing Sonny Ranaswamy of the USDA's NIFA to better understand current US food and agriculture labor issues, we were representing The Mixing Bowl in discussions on potential solutions to food production labor issues through automation and robotics. At this year's RoboUniverse event in San Diego there was a full-day track on December 14th dedicated to the application of robotics to agriculture. The industry track, pulled together in great part by Nathan Dorn, CEO of Food Origins and an Advisor to The Mixing Bowl, featured a knowledgeable group of automation/robotics experts and food producers who drew on their experience to define the opportunities and sharpen focus on the challenges. Nathan authored a detailed summary of the day in a post on Agfunder.