The Future of Farming Takes Root
Murat Kacira, of the UA Department of Agricultural and Biosystems Engineering, conducts research in the 750-square-foot Urban Agriculture Vertical Farm Facility (UAg Farm) located at the College of Agriculture and Life Sciences’ Controlled Environment Agriculture Center. One of his focuses is on improving air flow distribution systems in vertical farming operations.
A Coming Food Crisis
According to the United Nations’ report “World Population Prospects: The 2017 Revision,” the current world population of 7.6 billion is expected to reach 9.8 billion by 2050.
“That would be the equivalent of adding another China and another India to our planet in terms of population. That’s a lot of people and a lot of mouths to feed three times a day,” says Joel Cuello, who is a member of the UA’s BIO5 Institute and director of the Global Initiative for Strategic Agriculture in Dry Lands. “The United Nations predicts that to be able to meet the food demand by the middle of the century, we have to increase our current food production by 70 percent, and the corresponding crop production has to double. That is a very tall order.”
Read more of this story by Stacy Pigott of the University of Arizona here