
Farming 2.0 is high tech, healthy, animal friendly & sustainable
The Science of a healthy life
Some might think that organic farming is a tired old buzzword from past times that promises to ruin the life of farmers and cheat customers of their money. And yes, organic farming is harder to do for the farmer, costs money initially to adapt to, and often times our broken food industry make the up front cost for the customer at checkout higher as well. But, Farming 2.0 is a step forward, making use of high tech, automation and the very latest science to make farming more ecological and efficient, while making the end product healthier to eat for the end customer. And is that not the future?
A better one that is.
Farming 2.0 is friendlier towards the animals, the planet, the customer, and the farmers. Helping us all increase the amount of healthy food being produced, while we lower the resource drain, pollution and adverse health effects of "fossil fuel" farming. In the end costing society, this planet, and you and me far less than the real cost of the unsustainable,. low quality crap that "fossil fuel" farming produce.

Photography by Mike Koontz
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The factual difference
Healthy Farming 2.0
[ vs 'Fossil fuel farming' ]
In my quest to keep this one as easy to overlook as possible for you, here is a short summary of what I call, Farming 2.0 and the actual difference in cost and nutrition between the final product that you end up eating, vs the food that the fossil fuel driven factory farming has been producing last few decades.
Further down below I´ll talk some more about all the other differences, but first up is the nutritional difference in what you are eating if it is done in a sustainable way versus the more destructive factory farming way.
At the bottom of this article, you can also find links to recent studies, as well as my own "farming 2.0" sci.fi short story "our tower of glass" I wrote a year ago that paints a picture of high tech farming in big sustainable cities. All in all the kind of things that combined work together to create a healthier and more sustainable global tomorrow.
A nutritional difference
British Journal of Nutrition and other studies shows us that organic farming that allow the animals to graze outdoor gives us meat and dairy products that contain up to 50% more omega 3 compared to the meat and dairy products you can buy from the many factory farmers that keep their cows living out their entire lives indoors 24/7.
Other studies looking at farmers that produce crops and greens, berries and fruit instead of meat and dairy found the same benefits with healthier food being produced when they adopt a modern day sustainable approach.
Increased health while also increasing yields. I recently wrote about Japanese indoor farming giant 'Spread' which has increased their sustainable lettuce production to 30 000 head per day, all year round by going high-tech green.
For instance, organic crops including carrots, broccoli, apples, strawberries and blueberries all have substantially higher concentrations of a wide range of nutrition, such as antioxidants, anthocyanins, and flavonols compared with conventional crops being produced from 'fossil fuel' farmers.
Sometimes that final nutritional difference can be as high as 60+%.
If that is not enough for you, you can further add the fact that organic farmers also pollute the food you eat with far less toxins like cadmium ( a metal ) and fertilizers, and also make use of far less antibiotics. You see, a 'fossil fuel' approach to farming does not just pollute the air, soil and water for the farmer and their surrounding area. It also pollutes the food itself.
And the same thing applies of course to fisheries, be it wild or farmed fish.
In the end having a big health impact on not just the person that consume the final food product but also the entire planet. Add to that the simple fact that high tech green farming like what Spread is doing is also increasing the amount of food that is produced, the case for going all out on farming 2.0 is a no brainer.
All this is very much like you buying and eating food with or without added sugar. Sugar is great for the sweet tooth, but pure crap for your health, body, and wellbeing.
Food simply is not just about the amount of calories it feeds you or the exact amount of protein and fat each serving contains. Everything in the food that you buy and eat ( or grow ) impact your own body and your short and long term health and well being. And depending on the methods used to grow it, it also have just as big an impact on our soil, air and waters and wildlife.
As such, beyond the difference in the final product and the health impact it has on you, farming 2.0 also, pollute the entire planet far less, while at the same time being far kinder and healthier towards the workers, wildlife and farm animals.
Now, what is farming 2.0?
Farming 2.0 is my own term for the global change we are now seeing towards a healthier and less destructive modern day farming.
Yes, it sadly requires investments short term to change the way most produce food products right now. But that is a very low price to pay for society, and it is as needed as the change from oil and coal to sustainable energy resources is. And just like the immense long-term benefits for your own health, and wallet, the planet and all of us that sustainable energy production gives us all vs fossil fuel energy, farming 2.0 equally much ends up being a way forward that benefits our wallet as much as our health.
And that financial bonus includes the farmer too. Long term we all make money by going farming 2.0.
Farming 2.0 is not a way back to out of date hard manual labor, instead farming 2.0 makes use of sustainable energy, automated robots, and drones, smart facial recognition software and systems working in tandem with established science of how to work together with our planet's natural resources and ecosystem.
If you are worried about the impact of robots, computers, gmo and drones. Please think again, because all that high-tech actually allow animals to graze naturally without human interference. And it helps us clean up nature too.
Avoiding destructive and inhuman farm practices, resource drain, fossil fuel and pesticides. A 2.0 farmer doesn't have to manually check and handle the cows (and other animals, or the farm produce) day in day out like they are required to do right now.
Robots and drones and smart systems actually do that far better since most animals do not like having people around at all, since they associate most workers with stress and unpleasant things. But a silent drone in the sky above, or a robot and 4k UHD live streams feeding smart computer systems surveying cows and chickens keeping track of their individual movement and behavior, analyzing how they eat and move, if they fight or are ill, monitoring and measuring their health, and seamlessly reporting it all back to the farmer 24/7 in easy to understand reports and numbers, showing how the herd and every individual animal, or plant, is actually doing, that is real progress towards a more efficient and ecological farming.
As good as a farmer might know their animals today, daily farm work involve a lot of more or less educated guesswork. People simply cant manually survey a herd of cows 24/7, and as such a lot of cows spend a lot of time with small and big ailments that negatively impact their well-being, issues that might impact not just the cows own health but the rest of the herd as well as the milk it produces and thus the farmers own economy.
It ( farming 2.0 ) increase the amount of healthy food that is produced, while also lowering risk and stress, and long-term cost and impact for both animals and humans and society at large. The healthier we produce things, the healthier food we eat, the less our mutual burden on health care becomes.
On the crop side, things are exactly the same, automated facilities and robots, and drones can grow, survey and maintain crops and fruits 24/7, all year round, far better than having a long list of slave workers ever could manage. Increasing both the healthy output while, long term speaking, lower stress, bad health and financial cost of farming for the farmer and society.
And yes, that certainly includes sensible GMO´s done right too.
Farming 2.0 is a way forward, combining nature and animal-friendly modern day science and knowledge, with old school farming principles and healthy high-tech advancements.
Links to recent studies and articles talking about sustainable, modern day farming can be found down below but the down line is that farming becoming smarter and healthier is good news for you and me, the farmer, the planet and the animals.
Short term however, society do have to butt in to make that change happen, most farmers cant cope financially on their own to make that change. Nor can customers be asked to continue to pay with their wallet and health just so society can continue to produce unhealthy food in destructive ways.
But be that as it might, just as we are all right now starting to globally speaking change from fossil fuel energy to sustainable energy, Sweden for instance, this month ( June 2016 ) announced that the entire nation will be 100% powered by sustainable energy no later than 2040, that same wonderful change is happening for farming and food production.
It is happening and it is unavoidable because it is just as needed for our individual health and well-being, as it is for humanity and our planet as a whole. The way we produce food, and the way we distribute it and the quality of the food we produce and eat. It is all an equal part of our own global ecosystem, and it is all changing right now, not because it is fun, but because it is the right thing to do, and it is the long needed thing to do.

Photography by Nasa, The Blue Sky of Pluto - “Who would have expected a blue sky in the Kuiper Belt? It’s gorgeous,” said Alan Stern, New Horizons principal investigator from Southwest Research Institute (SwRI), Boulder, Colorado.
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