News
Issue #2002 - 02 (January 2002)
(Updated Jan.16, 2002)

APPLICATIONS 

Wireless Technology Can Save Agriculture Industry, Futurist Says

In the past decade, the reputation of the agriculture industry worldwide has been tarnished by genetically modified crops, contaminated food, and mad cow disease, just to name a few. 

According to futurist Lowell Catlett, advances in wireless technology like Bluetooth could resurrect the industry. As professor of agricultural economics at New Mexico University, Catlett offered his latest insights at the annual meeting of the California Plant Health Association.

Catlett's Vision of the Techno-Dependent Farm

A scientist has developed a laser, dubbed the pepper laser, which is no larger than a grain of pepper.
These tiny lasers are sprayed onto corn or vegetables. With Bluetooth devices placed around the perimeter of a farm field, the plants attached with these pepper lasers can tell a central computer if it needs water or nutrients every minute of the day.

"When we can use these methods to assure the consumer that their agriculture and their food are certified pure all the way back to the source, they will pay for it," Catlett told his audience. "Every plant and animal product that can be monitored to its source, and certified, will be gold to the consumer."

Catlett is convinced that baby boomer with pay dearly for "certified pure" food but the industry must change its ways. " Agriculture today "isn't just about a commodity anymore," Catlett says, "It's about everything you can wrap around that commodity."

By applying the advances in wireless technology along with sophisticated marketing concepts, the black halo hanging over the agriculture industry will slowly disappear, if Catlett has his way. 

(Summary of Western Farm Press article)


For more information: not available

Mobileinfo Comments & Advisory:  A very interesting concept but in our opinion, technology is not ready and business case is weak.

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