Saving Bees with the Internet of Things
Bees are a crucial link in the food chain, but pesticides, monoculture growing operations, and diseases have caused the global honey bee population to decline by a full third in recent years. This is why a beekeeper has built a cost-effective model that can determine the weight of distant or distributed hives and issue a warning to his cell phone when it detects significant anomalies. In most cases, the food supply is running low, a hive has tipped over, the surrounding area is unsuitable for honey production, or the bees have simply moved on.
 
The Land Grab for Farm Data
From government agencies to commodity traders, hedge funds, biotech companies, and, of course, seed, chemical and fertilizer manufacturers, everyone wants a piece of the “internet offarming.” Specifically, ownership and control of agronomic and equipment data is understood to have dramatic escalating value. Which seed varieties were the most successful and where? Which plant populations performed best? Whose recommendations outperformed their peers?
 
Do Cows Get Seasick? Welcome to Rotterdam's Floating Dairy Farm
In the Dutch city of Rotterdam a team of developers plans to build a floating dairy that will be an example for feeding cities in an ever more populous and urbanized world. The project envisages 40 cows on a 1,200 square meter floating platform, producing 1,000 liters of milk a day to be pasteurized and processed into yogurt in a dairy on the floor below. The project developers hope to begin building this autumn.
 
Africa's Population Boom Is Both Danger and Opportunity
One of the great structural changes of the coming decades will be the huge relative shift of the global population to Africa where the population is expected to double to 2 billion by 2050. Drought threatens much of the continent and while some regions are fertile, food security will remain an issue of paramount importance in the face of growing population.