Smart dust... is nano farming the future?

The year is 2025. An army of nano-sensors have been scattered like dust across the fields and farms of Britain. They are the eyes, ears and noses of the farming world; programmed to work together, designed to respond to every variation in water, temperature or nutrients and networked to respond immediately to disease and attack. No, it’s not sci-fi; this could be the reality of farming – sooner than you think.

Nanotechnology and ‘smart dust’ is receiving huge investment around the world and it could be used to create a safer and more efficient food and agriculture system. So, what is it?

Essentially nanotechnology is the manipulation of matter at the atomic scale and smart dust is the use of tiny wireless sensors and transponders (no bigger than the head of a match) to communicate the information they sense. They can be sprinkled across a field and linked to existing farming equipment used in precision agriculture and to your computer. 

It’s already being used in other sectors. Smart dust has been sprinkled on Great Duck Island off the coast of Maine (USA). A network of 150 wireless sensors have been monitoring the micro-climates in and around seabird nesting burrows with the aim of developing a non-intrusive habitat monitoring kit. There are also several organisations developing Smart Packaging systems. Kraft foods is developing an ‘electronic tongue’ – an array of nanosensors which are extremely sensitive to gases released by food as it spoils, causing the sensor strip to change colour as a result. An end to sell-by dates?

And the agricultural industry has it in its sights. The US Department of Agriculture created a roadmap in September 2003 that predicted that nanotechnology will transform the entire food industry, changing the way food is produced, processed, packaged, transported, and consumed. They’re so confident they’re investing around 3.7 billion USD and the European Union are following suit – ploughing around 1.2 billion into research.

So, it might not be long before smart dust is helping you to monitor your soils, crops and livestock, helping you to react better to disease and become more efficient. Ultimately, precision farming, with the help of smart sensors, could increase productivity in agriculture by providing accurate information to help you make better decisions.

What do you think? Are you excited by the prospect of ‘nano farm management’? Or are you concerned about nanoparticles in food?

Claire Wyatt co-manages the Farming Futures project.

• For an example of smart dust in action in the fight against Phytophtora click here.
• Read the excellent report about Nanotechnology in Food and Agriculture by the Institute of Nanotechnology, 2003.
• The "Down on the Farm" report is the first comprehensive look at how nano-scale technologies will affect farmers, food and agriculture.
• Read Peter Madden’s blog on ‘Smart Dust’.