New Report Looks At How Agribusiness Is Evolving

David Gutherie, KPMG's National Leader for Agribusiness says AgTech innovations like drones and sensors are creating opportunities to really transform farming and agribusiness industries.

He says the future for farming is like a control room with a number of monitors and sensors feeding in.

"That's essentially the vision of the farm of the future. It's going to be an office with a number of monitoring stations that will tell you what is working, what is not working. What are predictive yields, what are predictive issues within your farming operation."

The information is part of KPMG Canada's recently released three part report entitled "Growing Canada: How Agribusiness Is Evolving."

Gutherie says the next generation of farmers is here and moving us forward."These are young adults that grew up with a phone in their hand. They're used to doing things digitally, they're used to web based applications. They're used to everything, data, and then using that data, to analyze it to be more productive and increase yields."

He notes it's important to find more ways to produce our food as our population is expected to hit 10 billion people by 2050, that's up from approximately 7 billion today.

"We have a number of mouths that we're going to have to feed going forward. As our population increases we'll need to look at other ways to sustainably grow our food, by looking at preserving farmland. Converting any land that is farmable, or looking at other growing methods like controlled environment agriculture or vertical growing."