In 2011, the number of people on Earth passed 7 billion and by 2050 that number is expected to jump up to almost 10 billion. Aside from trying to feed all these people, we'll still need to feed livestock as well (at least given current dietary needs and preferences). One efficient way to do this is through vertical farming—growing plants on trays indoors, which has the advantage of using far less space than traditional farming. But even this requires lots of human labor and equipment that farmers and ranchers can't always afford.
Enter California agricultural tech company FodderWorks (a division of Simply Country, Inc). FodderWorks has created a fully automated robotic fodder-growing system that can produce daily quantities of fresh, non-genetically-modified food for livestock. It takes a system that already greatly reduces water and land use, and maximizes it even further, by making it faster. You can watch the robot work in a dramatic video posted by Fodder Works on YouTube (above). It’s like Ridley Scott’s take on ag-tech. [...]
The most commonly used grain to make fodder is barley, because of its high nutrient content, and its availability (it’s also the most popular grain for brewing beer). “Really any type of cereal grain can sprout in the system,” FodderWorks General Manager Kyle Chittock told Motherboard in a phone conversation. “But just from a nutritional standpoint, barley works very well for all types of livestock and actually if you look at research on growing sprouts for human consumption, barley is one of the healthiest things out there. A superfood.” [...]
Chittock contends that FodderWorks' robotic system isn’t taking away from any jobs, because this type of feed production simply hasn’t been done before. He also pointed out that not only can many individual farmers not afford to employ a large workforce just to create animal feed, but in fact, the robotic fodder system “allows our customers to be more efficient so they can grow their businesses, which in turn creates even more agricultural jobs,” Chittock said. “We sell a product with a benefit to the consumer,” he continued “which in turn employs a manufacturing team to assemble a product, employs the steel supplier, aluminum suppliers, the irrigation companies we buy parts from, electronics companies, designers, marketers, and numerous others.”
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