The Role of Mathematics in Growing Food
It is a fact that many in this world are hungry. According to a recent report prepared by the United Nations and other international organizations, approximately 2.3 billion of the people on the planet —29.3% of the world’s nearly 8 billion humans—were moderately or severely food insecure in 2021. And that number continues to grow.
At the same time, a rapidly changing climate is drastically affecting the world’s weather patterns in ways that make it much more difficult for farmers everywhere to produce the food necessary to feed the growing global population.
Faced with the dual challenges of climate change and global population growth, there is clearly a pressing need to develop new agricultural techniques and technologies that will enable farmers to increase and ensure reliable food production. And that’s where mathematics comes in.
When one buys a car, one seldom gives a thought to the math-driven engineering, design and software development that was to produce that automobile. Nor do most consumers appreciate the critical role math has played in the production of a bag of flour or a box of breakfast cereal.
But the fact is that in the United States and other countries with well-developed agricultural sectors, math is everywhere on the farm. In fact, the constantly improving technological advancements that underlie what is now called “precision agriculture” rely heavily on methods that could not have been developed without the use of advanced applied mathematics.
Precision farming practices that use the combined output of geographic information systems (GIS) and the federal government’s Global Positioning System provide a key example. As noted on the GPS.gov website, the marriage of the two systems enables “the coupling of real-time data collection with accurate position information, leading to the efficient manipulation and analysis of large amounts of geospatial data.”
The mathematical manipulation and analysis of this data has been in agricultural use for several years, allowing farmers to map and monitor their fields in ways that enable them to perform a wide variety of tasks, such as sampling soil, scouting crops, mapping yields, guiding tractors and applying fertilizer at variable rates according to the specific needs of various areas of a particular field. The same GPS/GIS-based technology improves efficiency by allowing farmers to work through the night or during rain or fog.
But it doesn’t end there. Scientists are also harnessing math to advance other areas of agriculture, such as the development of seeds that are specially modified to contain traits adapted to specific growing scenarios. In this area of precision agriculture, plant breeders could, for example, gain the ability to address emerging climate challenges by creating a breed of corn customized to thrive in certain soil, at a higher temperature, with less water and a shorter growing season.
Mathematicians are also working with biologists to create models that aid in the creation of environmentally friendly approaches to controlling pests and increasing production without the use of pesticides—as in the case of two British mathematicians who worked with Ukrainian scientists to design an organic method of defeating a destructive parasitic nematode.
It is true that many people automatically associate “mathematics” with numbers in a textbook. But when it comes to the role those numbers play in agriculture, it is clear that math will continue to be an indispensable tool in our efforts to feed the world in the years ahead.
Sources:
"UN Report: Global Hunger Numbers Rose To As Many As 828 Million In 2021". Who.Int, 2022, https://www.who.int/news/item/06-07-2022-un-report--global-hunger-numbers-rose-to-as-many-as-828-million-in-2021.
"GPS.Gov: Agricultural Applications". Gps.Gov, 2022, https://www.gps.gov/applications/agriculture/.
Team, Web. "From Blackboard To Food Bowl – How Mathematics Is Helping To Feed The Growing Global Population : Mathematics Research : ... : Research At Sussex : University Of Sussex". Sussex.Ac.Uk, 2022, https://www.sussex.ac.uk/research/explore-our-research/mathematics/how-mathematics-is-helping-feed-population.
