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Before the pandemic, consumers and governments did not think much about food supply chains. Now, most Canadian consumers are probably aware that 40 per cent of the beef they eat comes from a single meat processing plant in High River, Alberta. Consumers are also aware of how dependent we are on foreign workers in our food processing plants and on our farms.
While the food supply system did not break, the pandemic has shown that our food supply system is vulnerable to ‘external shocks’. Once the pandemic starts to end, we will enter into a public discussion of food security. Many farm organizations and governments are even now thinking about how to achieve better food security for Canadians.
How will our food supply system evolve to reduce risks of an external shock like the pandemic? One obvious change will be increased automation of farms and processing plants. This automation will take labour efficiency to a new level. Entire categories of manual jobs will be eliminated and we will be less reliant on manual labour (foreign or domestic). The push for automated harvest machines will increase, in order to decrease reliance on manual labour.
But we are still a long way from a machine that can ‘think’ like a skilled apple harvester (let alone pruning and thinning). Nonetheless, progress is being made with ‘machine vision’. Machine vision is needed because it is not enough to refine or make clearer the picture of an apple on the tree. What is needed is to be able to remove the image of the leaf in front of the apple and fill in the missing part of the image (or to distinguish the individual apples from an overlapping image of apples). This ability to complete an incomplete image, or to see an object from different perspectives and recognize it as the same object, is natural to a human being but for machines it is a difficult problem. However, rapid progress is being made in machine vision.
A more immediate and basic gain in labour efficiency can be made through the use of self-propelled platforms in orchards. Previous attempts have shown a need for a self-leveling platform, perhaps with a combination of conveyor belts and gentle loading of bins. These machines now exist, and growers will be more tempted to invest due to the pressures on the labour supply.
There exists enormous amounts of data in the tree fruit sector that are simply being collected and not utilized. The pandemic shows that using data to assess a situation (e.g. determine which strains of the virus are spreading fastest or have the highest mortality) and to do contact tracing is essential.
Similarly, the food system needs to increase its ability to use data - to improve efficiency, to guide products to the best markets taking into account the incremental costs of gaining that market, to anticipate how consumers in different countries respond to different types of apples or cherries.
For example, we have a tremendous amount of production data on farms, but unfortunately, a lot of it is written down and not in electronic format. We have a tremendous amount of storage data and also retail sales data. It is not linked. There is no learning possible, unless we do special research in limited situations - as we do now. However, rather than sporadic improvements by collecting data for specialized research projects, linking the existing data could lead to enormous and consistent gains for the food system.
Another area that has changed as a result of the pandemic is the commerce of selling and transporting goods. In order to better manage the flow of goods from producer to packer to retail market, better tracking is needed. Once the information on location, transfer between sites, and the status of the product (e.g. date packed, quality and size, variety, temperature regime in storage, transportation method and time in transit), then management of the system for efficiency can be assessed and implemented. Up until now, these improvements were from periodic studies or system breakdowns. Now, the information will be available constantly and assessed continuously. The age of “blockchain” has arrived, where data will follow a product throughout the system. This ability to trace and build food product information at each stage will result in enormous change and improvements in our food system and food security.
Beyond all of these possible technology changes, food security requires a fundamental re-thinking of our food system. Has government policy to achieve the lowest food prices helped or harmed our food security? Has our increasing reliance on consolidated packers and retailers increased or decreased food security? Are we sharing the gains in efficiency and food security fairly between all of the participants in the food system? Developing new technologies and answering basic questions on food security will be an outcome of the world pandemic of 2020.
Glen Lucas, General Manager BCFGA