Preserve ancient agricultural wisdom, sow a digitally sustainable future | 李众 Li Zhong | TEDxBeijing

Key Concepts

• Agricultural Heritage Systems (AHS): Traditional, often ancient, farming practices and landscapes that have evolved over centuries, demonstrating sustainable interactions between humans and nature.
• Global Important Agricultural Heritage Systems (GIAHS): A FAO-designated program recognizing outstanding landscapes of aesthetic beauty, high biodiversity, and resilient ecosystems managed by local communities.
• Digital Agriculture: The use of advanced technologies like IoT sensors, drones, AI, big data, and blockchain to optimize farming practices, improve efficiency, and enhance sustainability.
• Rice-Fish Co-culture System: An integrated farming method where rice is grown in paddies alongside fish, creating a mutually beneficial ecosystem that reduces pests, weeds, and the need for chemical inputs.
• Implicit Knowledge: Experiential, uncodified wisdom passed down through generations, often difficult to articulate or document.
• Explicit Data Models: Codified, analyzable, and transmittable information derived from implicit knowledge through digital means.
• Blockchain Technology: A decentralized, immutable ledger system used for secure and transparent record-keeping, enabling traceability and value recognition in agricultural supply chains.
• World Food Forum (WFF): A youth-led global network initiated by the UN FAO to empower young people in transforming agri-food systems.

Introduction: The Dual Crisis of Agriculture

The speaker begins by recounting a personal experience in Hani, Yunnan province, observing an elderly man's intuitive understanding of irrigation needs based on centuries of accumulated wisdom. This anecdote highlights the profound, implicit knowledge embedded in traditional agricultural practices, which is now at risk of being lost as younger generations migrate to cities. This loss represents not just an individual's wisdom but an "entire system of wisdom for communicating with nature."

Humanity stands at an "unprecedented crossroad." On one side, technology is advancing rapidly with satellites, sensors, and AI interpreting crop language. On the other, thousands of years of farming wisdom are quietly fading away. The global food system faces a dual challenge:

• Global Hunger and Population Growth: The UN Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) reported that in 2024, over 295 million people are living in severe hunger, with catastrophic levels reaching a historical high. The World Economic Forum predicts that by 2050, the global population will approach 10 billion, requiring a 56% increase in agricultural output.
• Environmental Impact and Productivity Limits: Traditional agriculture models are nearing their productivity limits, often requiring increased inputs that lead to environmental problems. The global food and agriculture system contributes up to 31% of greenhouse gas emissions. Climate change, in turn, intensifies droughts, floods, and land degradation.
• The Deep Contradiction: While hundreds of millions struggle with hunger, approximately one-third of all food produced globally is wasted annually. This contradiction poses a severe challenge to achieving the UN 2030 Sustainable Development Goals.

The Silent Crisis: Disappearance of Agricultural Heritage

Simultaneously, a "silent crisis" is unfolding: the disappearance of agricultural heritage.

• Chintian Rice-Fish Co-culture System (Zhejiang Province): This system, in use for 1,200 years, exemplifies a mutually dependent relationship where fish eat pests and weeds, and rice protects the fish. It allows a single plot to produce both rice and fresh fish, minimizing pollution from fertilizers and pesticides while maintaining biodiversity. It represents a philosophy of cooperating with nature rather than conquering it.
• Hani Terrace Fields (Yunnan Province): The Hani people have achieved a balance between humans and nature through an integrated system of forest, village, terrace field, and water systems. This system is recognized by the UN FAO as a Global Important Agricultural Heritage System (GIAHS). To date, 99 GIAHS sites have been designated worldwide, with 25 located in China, serving as "ecological laboratories honed by time."
• Global Abandonment: However, as young people move to cities, this ancient knowledge is left without successors. Similar situations are occurring globally, with terrace fields in the Peruvian Andes being abandoned and African dryland farming systems being replaced by monoculture. The loss of agricultural heritage is a global crisis.

The Solution: Empowering Traditional Wisdom with Digital Agriculture

The speaker argues that the choice between efficient but fragile modern agriculture and sustainable but less efficient traditional agriculture is not an "either/or" question. The solution lies in combining the two, and "the key is digital technologies." Empowering traditional wisdom with digital agriculture is presented as the definitive solution.

Three-Step Plan for Digital Empowerment

The speaker proposes a three-step plan to achieve this integration:

Step 1: Reading Ancient Wisdom with Digital Technology (Digital Archiving)

• Challenge: The implicit, experience-based knowledge of elders (e.g., a Hani elder knowing when to irrigate by observing clouds, soil, and stream flow) is not easily transferable and will be lost if not digitized.
• Methodology: Use machines not to replace farmers, but to learn from them and convert their wisdom into "storeable, analyzable, and transmittable data."
• Technologies:
  • Soil sensors: Continuously monitor moisture and fertility across terrace fields.
  • Miniature weather stations: Record microclimates of small areas.
  • Drone spectral cameras: Monitor rice growth.
  • AI algorithms: Analyze a farmer's lifelong decisions.
• Goal: Create a "digital library for ancient agricultural wisdoms," transforming implicit experiences into explicit data models. This is deemed the "first and most critical step of protection: the digital archiving."

Step 2: Decoding Ecological Mysteries with Data Analysis

• Challenge: While traditional systems like rice-fish co-culture are known to be "good," their precise ecological benefits and functional relationships are often not quantified.
• Methodology: Through continuous data collection and modeling, "quantify its goodness."
• Examples: Determine the nitrogen and phosphorus cycle efficiency, the precise functional relationship between fish species density and pest/disease control.
• Impact of Data:
  • Optimization: Data allows for slight adjustments (e.g., fish-to-rice ratio) to increase economic efficiency while maintaining ecological benefits. Even small efficiency gains, scaled across large production volumes, lead to "massive economic growth."
  • Replication: Data-validated successful ecological farming models can be promoted and replicated in other regions with similar conditions globally, giving "local wisdom a global potential."

Step 3: Connecting Tradition and Markets with Digital Platforms

• Challenge: Protection of heritage cannot rely solely on sentiment; farmers safeguarding this heritage must receive tangible economic returns.
• Methodology: Digital technology can empower this by shortening the distance between heritage sites and value markets.
• Technologies:
  • Blockchain technology: Create immutable digital IDs for products like Chintian's rice and fish. Consumers scanning a QR code can see the field of origin, cultivation methods, and the ecological/cultural story behind it. This is "more than just traceability; it is value recognition." Consumers are "voting for systemal production method and the protection of a culture heritage."
  • Live e-commerce broadcast and "adopting a terrace field" programs: Allow products like Hani terrace rice to directly reach urban consumers.
• Goal: Farmers become storytellers and brand ambassadors, and cultural premiums are directly fed back to them, encouraging more young people to stay in agriculture and dedicate themselves to its development.

Real-World Applications and Pilot Projects

These visions are not distant science fiction. Small-scale pilot projects in China and other parts of the world are yielding "very exciting results."

• In Heilongjiang, digital technology manages modernized farms.
• In Yunnan, the same technology interprets ancient terrace fields.

These two approaches are not in opposition but are "moving towards to the same goal: a highly productive, efficient, resilient, and a sustainable agriculture future." Traditional heritage provides "time-tested ecological models and a treasure trove of a biodiversity," while digital agriculture offers "unprecedented tools to understand, optimize and promote these models." Agricultural heritage systems are likened to "seed banks" storing biological answers, and digital technology to a "precision seeder" to cultivate these answers.

The Key Force for Transformation: Youth

The speaker identifies youth as the "key force for agriculture transformation."

• Role of Youth: They are "digital natives with global vision and an innate pursuit of a sustainable development." They use AI for farm management, big data to reduce food waste, and blockchain to enhance supply chain transparency. They are "actors of the present."
• World Food Forum (WFF): The speaker highlights the WFF, an independent, youth-led global network initiated by the UN FAO in 2021. Its goal is to foster a global movement empowering young people to drive agri-food system transformation towards sustainable development goals.
  • Initiatives:
    • In Chengdu, WFF collaborated with UNDP and other UN agencies to create a 2,000 sq meter co-creation space for young scientists, entrepreneurs, and farmers to explore digital agriculture for youth innovation.
    • In Shanghai, WFF co-launched "Youth Action on Green Agri Heritage" with the China Internet Information Center to help young people apply modern technologies to protect agricultural heritage.
    • In Beijing, WFF held youth hackathons with the Chinese Academy of Agricultural Sciences, encouraging young people to use technology and creativity to solve agricultural challenges.
    • Through its network, WFF has promoted innovative practices to countries including South Korea, Laos, Mongolia, and Italy.

Youth are both "digital natives and also the green pioneers," capable of building a bridge between tradition and modernity.

Conclusion: A Digital Agriculture Revolution

Agriculture, the starting point of human civilization, will inevitably determine our future. Every agricultural revolution has reshaped social progress. Today, humanity stands on the threshold of a "digital agriculture revolution." The choices made by the current generation will decide whether we can build a home that can feed 10 billion people while allowing all other species to thrive.

The answer lies "at the intersection of our past and future," in the ability to use "most cutting-edge technologies to safeguard the most ancient wisdom." The call to action is to use digital technology to inject new life into ancient agricultural wisdom, drawing from ancient wisdom a philosophy of balance and coexistence to nourish cold algorithms. The ultimate goal is to "sow a seed that rooted in the ancient soil, nourished by the digital technologies and which will ultimately grow into a towering tree to shelter all of our humanity."