NC Agriculture is the next big thing.
The agribusiness industry is about to explode.
So how is it happening?
This is the answer from a panel of agricultural experts, and it comes from a young woman from the northeast, an agroecologist from an industrial state, and a farmer from a rural state.
All of these folks have a lot to say about the agricultural sector and the transition to a new agroeconomy.
The panel of experts interviewed by Axios was led by Joseph T. Breslow, former head of the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Food and Nutrition Service, and his colleague John W. Kiel, former director of the National Center for Biotechnology Information.
They are the panel of agribosystems experts, a group of experts from academia and industry, that convened at UC Davis to hear their views on the current agricultural landscape and what to expect for the next two decades.
The two-hour panel was moderated by Jessica Hennig, a professor of agroeconomic and agropolicy studies at UC Berkeley and a fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University.
The topic of the panel was agriculture, specifically, what the future holds for the sector and how the agroindustrial revolution is going to reshape agriculture.
“Agriculture is changing faster than the industrial revolution,” Breswell said.
“There’s a lot of talk about this changing, but in reality it’s not changing that fast.”
Breslo said the agribuses have changed in many ways since the agricultural boom of the 1970s.
The industry is more efficient and less expensive.
It’s more focused on the production of inputs.
It has become more focused and has become much more centralized, much more efficient, he said.
That has created more and more incentives to produce more food and produce more feed, which means more food is being shipped, which has led to more agrochemicals being produced and more feed being exported, Bresloop said.
But the question of how quickly it is changing is really a question of “how much we are going to have to change, in terms of the ways we feed people, the way we feed our environment, how we transport our products and how we farm.”
And what’s driving the transformation?
Breshook said, the agrosystems industry has been growing, especially in the Midwest, the Southeast, and the South.
The Midwest has seen a tremendous growth in the number of new agrosys and also in the volume of production of feed.
The South has seen an even greater boom in the quantity of feed, Breshlow said.
And the Midwest has been very productive in terms, for example, of grain production and soybean production.
But in the Northeast, it’s a much smaller number of agrosials producing feed, he added.
In the Midwest and the Southeast and in the South, we are not producing the amount of feed that we would have produced in a smaller number, Breml said.
So in the next decade, the Midwest will see a lot more feed that it would have in a small number of more efficient agros, he continued.
The North, meanwhile, is experiencing an agricultural boom, Breboom, he noted.
Bremo said it’s the North’s new-age agro production, especially soybeans, that is driving the growth.
The amount of soybeans that are grown is much more concentrated and the rate of soybean growth has been much higher in the North than it is in the rest of the country.
The problem is, the rate at which soybean growers are growing is not as rapid as it is elsewhere.
And there are lots of factors contributing to that.
The main one is that in the soybean industry, a lot is tied to technology.
The technology is very much tied to how much you are going after the soybeans.
It is a lot easier to get soybeans than it used to be, Breto said.
The other thing is the climate.
It really is very difficult to grow soybeans in the heat, he explained.
There’s not much of a growing season, and there’s not that much sun.
The crop can take a long time to mature.
And that can make it very, very tough for the plant to tolerate the sun.
And because of that, you have to make sure that the soy plant can survive that heat.
Bretow said that this is where the agricultural industry has to be thinking about innovation.
“We have to be innovative and innovate in terms and in many areas of agriculture,” he said, “because it’s very difficult for the average American to grow a soybean in the United States.”
In the Northeast and the Midwest in particular, Brego said, there’s a strong concentration of soy growing.
But that’s not the whole story.
The whole agrochemical industry is concentrated in the Southeast. And in
