How to Organize interdisciplinality as a Productive Tool to Ecological Change?
The complex problems cannot be solved by any single discipline. They call for an interdisciplinary and cooperative effort to reach a smart solution.
Prof. Dr. Ovid Tzeng
How to Organize interdisciplinality as a Productive Tool to Ecological Change?
An Interdisciplinary Solution for Smart Future Agriculture
The earth is in deep trouble physically from the polluted land to the polluted sea and to the polluted air. We also witnessed more and more extreme weather changes due to global warming. Shortage of safe food production is at the corner everywhere. In 30 years, the total global population is expected to reach 7.5 to 10.5 billion, which undoubtedly will intensify the pressures of food demands and escalate the food prices. The complex problems cannot be solved by any single discipline. They call for an interdisciplinary and cooperative effort to reach a smart solution. First of all, it requires an agricultural designer to develop a whole green and smart agricultural total solution for growing healthier high value crops in the aid of intelligent management. Through sensors, smart devices, internet of things (IoT), and big data analysis, we can digitize knowledge, automatize production, and simplify operations in order to optimize products, which can be traced through computerized systems for the purposes of intelligent production and digital marketing. Second, we need we need to integrate various useful technologies to complete a customized designing of farm, thus, lowering the threshold of technology farming and create a smart farming managing environment for new generation. Third, the core farming technologies should include non-toxin environmental monitoring, bacterial distribution database, pests and fungal diseases AI forecasting system and eco-friendly bio-pesticides. Also, CRISPR-cas9 technology in genetic research will be an important tool to be implemented for disease control. Finally, intelligent production technologies and smart management applications can help all farmers overcome challenges and increase overall production efficiency and quantity, in order to ensure food safety of crops, increase profit of farmers, most importantly, lower the burden of environment. With such a vision of smart agriculture which requires the integration of knowledge across disciplines, experimental programs are currently in place at the southern campus of the National Chiao Tung University. These are all new programs to be implemented and I will highlight some of them in our panel discussions.
