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Many folks assumed the future of farming is robots, algae vats, and soiling green, but is this

future forecast accurate? The answer, as we'll see today, is probably yes.

A few months back, we did a number of polls of some potential topics folks had suggested, and the winner over on our Reddit group was the future of farming.

It's an interesting topic in that until fairly recently, farming was such a common profession

that discussing its future was the same as discussing humanity's

future or the future of jobs.

But there are some very high-tech options we'll touch on today that might alter farming drastically,

including everything from vertical farming to growing meat or printing food, or even turning

humans into sidewalks who don't need food or who live in pods like in the Matrix,

fed nutrient gruel while living in virtual utopias. But I'd like to keep our main focus on the major new developments relating to challenges and opportunities that are likely to rise

in the next generation or so. This includes things like international dietary changes,

population growth, land repurposing,

genetic engineering, invasive species, and changes to local ecologies and environments, just name

a few.

We also need to keep in mind that farming is a big blanket term, and most individual farmers

have a single crop they specialize in, or a small handful. Homesteaders,

family farms, or polyculturists, often aimed to have several crops or products in medium

production, but this is not the norm, and whether or not it could become the norm economically

...