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INTERVIEW RDA shares smart farm technologies to improve global food security
Cho Chae-ho, administrator of the Rural Development Administration, speaks during an interview with The Korea Times at the administration's Seoul office in Yeouido, Oct. 25. Korea Times photo by Choi Won-suk
By Ko Dong-hwan
State-run agency helps farmers cope with climate change
Swinging sickles, harnessing cows to plough and hand-planting seeds at rice paddies are now vestiges of the old agricultural scenes in Korea. In place of those traditional farming methods are smart farms, a rising bundle of cutting-edge technologies to grow crops with computer precision to control their quality regardless of climate conditions.
With climate change, technological advancements and the country's aging population, the new farming techniques have become almost inevitable.
The significance of smart farms is now shared worldwide. That's why Cho Chae-ho, administrator of the Rural Development Administration (RDA), a state-run agricultural research center under the Ministry of Agriculture, Food and Rural Affairs, is getting calls from countries to share Korea's smart farm technologies. In those countries, mostly in Africa, agriculture is a key industry.
Demand is now so high that the RDA is looking to stop expanding the global network of its Korea Partnership for Innovation of Agriculture (KOPIA), a smart farm help center now in 23 countries, and instead make the existing KOPIAs into regional bases for nearby countries in need of help. The measure has already unfolded in Asia, Africa and Central America where the RDA launched AFACI, KAFACI and KoLFACI, respectively, which are initiatives to support countries in each region with research and development for smart farms.
Cho said exporting smart farm technologies isn't just shipping farming machines and letting them do the rest. It involves teaching how to use the technologies in accordance with local environments and offering continuous support through the overseas help centers.
"Equipment exports should be accompanied by technical instructions on their use," Cho said. "Whether you want to grow lettuce or strawberries, to produce crops ideally requires specific environmental conditions like levels of humidity and temperature. And our job is to teach them how to control those conditions using our smart farms."
Implementing smart farms worldwide
To measure how much Korea has invested in helping other countries, the smart farm serves as a good index. The rising farming technologies are being offered by the RDA to help other countries via official development assistance (ODA) projects rather than exports. Behind the initiative is the authority's commitment to humanity's goals of ending starvation and poverty in rural areas.
The RDA's client states now number 52, including 14 members of AFACI, 23 of KAFACI and 12 of KoLFACI. KOPIAs are up and running in developing countries worldwide like Vietnam, Uganda and Nicaragua. Spurred by those ODA initiatives, the latest technological exchanges include farming rice, keeping livestock and planting potatoes more efficiently in local soils.
Each regional ODA office has its own localized goals. AFACI, after three years, has mapped Asia based on land information to provide more geological and environmental information for local farmers. KAFACI, with six years of cooperation with six African nations, helped them develop 15 new types of African rice. In Central America, technologies to grow coffee, cacao and green beans with strong resistance to flooding and pestilence are being shared by KoLFACI.
At the G7 summit in Hiroshima, Japan in May, the Korean government introduced a plan to launch the "K-ricebelt" that will feed seven sub-Saharan African nations by growing a singular optimal strain of rice using smart farms. The project started this year with the planting of 2,000 tons of rice seeds. In seven years, the figure will increase to 10,000 tons capable of producing 2.16 million tons of rice annually for 50 million people, according to the RDA.
"Smart farms, on our part, raise our global image immensely," Cho said. "Look at Denmark or the Netherlands. They are now agriculturally advanced countries after propagating their agricultural technologies and consulting nations. They are our paragons."
Participants of a forum jointly hosted by RDA's Korea-Latin America Food and Agriculture Cooperation Initiative (KoLFACI) and Tropical Agricultural Research and Higher Education Centre (CATIE) examine cacao fruit during a field study in Turrialba, Costa Rica, Sept. 1. The forum was held to improve cacao production technologies across Central American countries. Courtesy of RDA
Technologies against climate change
Smart farms and traditional labor-intensive farming both require human labor. But the former have much higher odds of growing successful crops because they are based on data-driven technologies to calculate golden recipes in a computer-controlled environment. Such efficiency is why the RDA is pushing for the digital transformation of farms in developing countries.
"The most challenging part is getting the right crops after controlling the conditions," Cho said. "Those who know the ideal growing conditions well are the farmers themselves. But most of them don't know how to use the data from sensors stuck beneath the soil or installed in LED lights above growing crops to read temperature or humidity in real time. So we hired people to read the data for the farmers. The accumulated data makes smart farms more accurate in prescribing artificial conditions for crops."
Some 400 smart farms in the country with their crops growing indoors or outdoors regularly transmit to the RDA their data showing the crops' entire lifecycle and every command automated by the computers. Among them, 157 farms growing onions, garlic, cabbages or apples in open air are being monitored by the authority so that it can accumulate data on environmental conditions to study ideal conditions for their growth.
The data gleaned nationwide is gathered by the RDA's Agricultural Science & Technology Information System (ATIS). The publicly available information pool keeps building up with new data. One of the datapool's beneficiaries is the country's Ministry of Science and ICT. The ministry used data on beekeeping and diseases of honey bees to build its own multiple databases.
Along with digitization in increasing industries, Cho pointed to climate change as another key reason for expanding smart farms. The scope is currently under the RDA's rigorous R&D. From 2020 until 2027, some 190 researches altogether worth $142 million are being undertaken by teams of universities, private firms and RDA officials.
"We are looking into whether tropical crops are adoptable in our soils amid global warming, how to make our current agricultural methods more sustainable under climate conditions that are becoming more extreme and, though a small portion compared to other industries, how to reduce carbon emissions in growing crops and raising livestock," Cho said.
Farms not only produce food for humanity, but also heal people's mental health. That's why the RDA is investing in new projects to use farming as a means to help those with illnesses, disabilities and goals to newly settle in rural communities.
"We are currently building a new local hub in Gimhae (South Gyeongsang Province) to promote farming's therapeutic effects," Cho said. "And a recent revision to Act on Research, Development and Promotion of Healing Agriculture will allow more establishments of such purposes to be government-certified to make themselves more trustworthy to the public."