By Jeff Rowe
With the world’s population projected to reach nearly 10 billion by 2050, the global agricultural sector faces a defining challenge that mirrors one of the central themes of the World Economic Forum Annual Meeting 2026 – building prosperity within planetary boundaries.
For agriculture, this means feeding more people without cultivating more acres. The answer lies not in expanding farmland, but in revolutionizing how we farm the land we already have by fusing decades of agronomic expertise with the transformative power of data and artificial intelligence (AI).
This challenge is compounded by shifting markets and geopolitical uncertainty. Farmers worldwide – from the wheat fields of Australia to the US corn belt, to the smallholder farms of India – are grappling with rising expenses, volatile markets, extreme weather and labour shortages.
Such challenges are forcing more and more farmers to sell up. In the US alone 160,000 farms have disappeared since 2017, an 8% fall. Simply put, farmers must do more with less to stay competitive in the global market.
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