Food production: the intuitive farmer is the farmer of the future

Justin Platt, founder and managing director of agricultural technical services companies Zylem and RegenZ, says that farmers don’t need more knowledge, but rather better ‘knowing’.

- Justin Platt

The modern focus on scientific and intellectual farming approaches has significantly advanced food production. Innovations such as fertilisers and machinery have enabled food production to keep pace with a booming population, and advances in the preservation of food have resulted in access to a greater variety of food all over the world.

However, in this drive to produce more and more food, acknowledgement of the impact of these activities on nature’s balance and resources, and an improvement of the situation, have largely been neglected.

The industrial, technological approach to farming works on a neverending cycle of interference.

Pesticides and herbicides destroy beneficial soil microbes and organic matter, which leads to plants not being able to optimally take up and use naturally available nutrients in the soil.

This leads to farmers using more synthetic fertilisers, which leads to degraded, acidified and compacted soil.

Poor soil quality causes unhealthy plants to become diseased, and in response, farmers apply more pesticides and herbicides. And so, the vicious cycle continues.

It’s no secret that a large proportion of agricultural soil is severely degraded, and we need to farm more sustainably if we want to feed our futures. I would argue that instead of basing management decisions on a purely rational and cognitive approach, farmers need to harness (and trust) their unique intuition.

WHAT IS INTUITIVE DECISION-MAKING?