Nearly 750 million people face hunger today, according to the U.N. World Food Program. And by 2050, global demand for food is expected to increase by 50 percent from 2010 levels, the World Resources Institute says.
A smart agriculture special-issue report recently released by the IEEE Smart Agri-Food Initiative says meeting the demand will require technology to expand food production. The report highlights research, case studies, and new ways of applying technology to inform farmers, engineers, and policymakers.
Leading the initiative is IEEE Fellow John Verboncoeur, chair of the smart-food program and professor of electrical and computer engineering at Michigan State University, in East Lansing.
“Food security is becoming a systems-engineering problem,” Verboncoeur says. “We’re no longer talking only about tractors and irrigation. We’re talking about sensing, communications, computation, automation, and sustainability all working together.”
Although not formally trained as an agriculture scientist, Verboncoeur’s first involvement with smart agriculture was as an undergraduate at University of Florida in 1985-86, where he helped develop an SmartAg aeroponics system for NASA for the International Space Station. It used mist to spray the plants’ roots and lightweight pneumatic structures to hold the vegetation in place.
He has also chaired the executive committee of Michigan State’s SmartAg Initiative since it launched in 2017. He chaired the program’s leading interdisciplinary efforts to apply engineering and digital technologies to farming and food systems.
Verboncoeur connects the shift of using engineering as a force multiplier for farming to lessons learned from the IEEE Smart Village program, which supports projects and organizations bringing electricity and educational and employment opportunities to remote communities. Agriculture, he argues, requires the same systems-level mindset.
“The challenge isn’t just inventing technology,” he says. “It’s making systems practical, affordable, and deployable.”
From digital twins to autonomous harvesting
A central theme across the Smart Agri-Food Systems report is the convergence of automation, data analytics, and sustainability.
One paper, “Smart Agriculture, Precision Agriculture, Digital Twins in Agriculture: Similarities and Differences,” addresses the confusion regarding how researchers and practitioners define and apply the technologies to farming.
The paper was written by Dilan Onat Alakuş, a research assistant in the software engineering department at Kırklareli University, in Türkiye, and Ibrahim Türkoğlu, a software engineering professor at Fırat University, in Elazığ, Türkiye.
Unclear terminology can lead to inefficient investment and poor adoption of the technologies, the two authors say. They note that agricultural methods based on traditional practices and intuition lack a thorough analysis of their environmental and economic impacts.
They describe how…
Read full article: Engineering Is Critical to Boosting Food Security
The post “Engineering Is Critical to Boosting Food Security” by Willie D. Jones was published on 06/15/2026 by spectrum.ieee.org