Coca-Cola Life launches in the United Arab Emirates

Coca-Cola Life launches in the United Arab Emirates: Coca-Cola has launched its stevia-sweetened Coca-Cola Life in the United Arab Emirates (UAE).

The re-birth of cheese: cheese snacks are the number-one dairy growth opportunity

Connecting cheese to the snacking trend could mean market success, according to New Nutrition Business.

Probiotic supplements on rise in global €40bn market

Latest data from Euromonitor International shows the global probiotics market is worth about €40bn, yoghurt continues to be the dominant mode of delivery although probiotic supplements are growing fastest.

Tetra Pak introduces 3D virtual reality simulator at Gulfood

Tetra Pak showcased its 3D virtual reality simulator at Gulfood to show guests how they can get up close and personal to their machinery without having to visit a factory.

Pest control: Wicked weeds may be agricultural angels.

Farmers looking to reduce reliance on pesticides, herbicides and other pest management tools may want to heed the advice of Cornell agricultural scientists: Let nature be nature – to a degree. “Managing crop pests without fully understanding the impacts of tactics – related to resistance and nontarget plants or insects – costs producers money,” said Antonio DiTommaso, professor of soil and crop continue

Top 10 technologies in precision agriculture.

1. GPS/GNSS It’s hard to tell exactly where the state of precision agriculture today would be without GPS — literally. From virtually the moment agriculture gained access to position locating satellites in the 1990s, operators and manufacturers have found various ways to tie into these tools to make managing field work much easier and accurate. “In North America and Europe, growers can turn on the tractor and get to work almost immediately,” says T.J. Schulte, Marketing Manager for Trimble Agriculture Division. Looking beyond these capabilities, experts say that satellite technology is truly deserving of its “global” moniker. “No longer can we refer to all these systems as GPS — that’s not an accurate description when referring to new Global Navigation Satellite Systems (GNSS) receiver technology today,” says Greg Guyette, President of Insero. Instead, he adds, GNSS covers all countries’ satellite constellations including GPS, GLONASS, and Galileo. 2. Mobile Devices After figuring out where precision agriculture stands on the planet, the next most important innovation these past 20 years would have to be the development of mobile devices. The world today would be an entirely different place without them, according to Illinois Grower John Reifsteck. “Without the cell phone, we probably would still be sitting in the barn a lot, waiting for someone to come to the barn and make things work,” says Reifsteck. Today, cell phones have morphed into a whole host of useful mobile devices including smartphones and tablets. So ingrained has this technology become that experts estimate that there are more mobile devices on today — 7.25 billion — than people (around 7.2 billion). As of 2016, most precision agriculture manufacturers that dabble in the mobile devices market have spent most of their time trying to expand the capabilities these products can offer to users. “We run our business on the 20-minute rule when it comes to getting information to the user,” says Dr. Marina Barnes, Vice President of Marketing for FarmersEdge. “If you can’t get your technical data to work for the farmer within the first 20 minutes after he receives it, he’s probably never going to use it.” continue

Digital farms : the future of Agriculture.

 

 Farmers, ranchers and growers the world over are transitioning to precision agricultural methods, i.e., subdividing their acreage into many unique sub-plots -- in some cases right down to the individual plant, tree, or animal -- thereby enabling increased productivity, trace-ability and lower overall costs.

 Low-cost aerial vehicles, sensors and cameras are integral to the process and are being used to map, observe, sense and spray. 

 Robotic automation is already widely practiced and can be seen today in milking systems and increasingly in precision techniques that use sensors and drone-mounted cameras to steer tractors and to monitor soil for temperature, moisture, disease, varmints, crop quantity, weather damage, and nutrient content. 

 This data is then analyzed in order to improve decision-making on planting, weeding, pruning and chemical application. 

Digitally-controlled farm implements are already in use in developed countries and most Western farmers and ranchers are high-tech to some extent and more variable-rate dispensing devices are on the horizon. 

How technology in agriculture can reduce extreme poverty.

Self-steering kits can be found in most new tractors and follow RTK/GPS and digital guidance with levels of accuracy down to the centimeter level. 

 There are partially and fully automatic and robotic devices for most aspects of agricultural functions from grafting to planting, from harvesting to sorting, from packaging to boxing, but because the metrics of their implementation have thus far been too costly, and the safety and liability aspects difficult, so they are not widely deployed. 

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 These challenges are being met with a new group of vendors, lower costs, and new robotic products, often marketed in the form of Robotics-as-a-Service (RaaS). Adding to these challenges are ever-increasing costs and lack of available water, labor and tillable land. continue