Science Breakthroughs to Advance Food and Agricultural Research by 2030 (2019) / Chapter Skim
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8 A Systems Approach
8 A Systems Approach
Pages 165-178
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From page 165... ...
, climate, food processing and distribution network data and information systems, and socioeconomic systems. Models are used to better understand how various entities interact within and integrate across the system, and to understand relationships among the natural environment, society, economy, and the various biophysical components of the food system.
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From page 166... ...
For example, how do changes in the microbiome of soil microorganisms related to N2 fixation affect the resilience of plants against heat or salt stress, to the nutritional value of the food produced, or to feed conversion efficiency in animals? How would a mechanistic understanding of the interactions of the soil microbiome with the plant, root, and leaf microbiomes be combined with genetic tools to create more resilient plants?
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From page 167... ...
takes a more holistic approach to modeling sustainability indicators, and can be useful for determining, for instance, the range of the magnitude of life-cycle impacts for a given agriculture activity (e.g., milk production) or set of dietary food choices.
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From page 168... ...
The problem of linking process across scales is not unique to the food system. Overarching questions include • How to bridge across scales, including spatial-temporal scales as well as with the number of processes included in the "system" being studied; and • How to link mechanistic models developed for smaller, better-defined sub systems with large-scale statistical models used to predict macroscopic behaviors such as global carbon storage in soils.
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From page 169... ...
updating of the models with data is necessary, whether the subject is water and nutrient use in crop agriculture, feed efficiency in animal agriculture, or food safety and quality in food processing and distribution. 2.2 Challenge 2: Uncertainty Within and Across Multiple Elements of the System The high degree of uncertainty in the food system is a significant challenge for developing accurate models.
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From page 170... ...
approach to modeling agricultural systems offers great opportunities to improve system efficiency by acknowledging complex interactions. Expanding the existing systems models to include additional societal drivers would enable better predictions of behavior in the food system, and is necessary to invoke meaningful changes to the system.
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(2014) developed an integrated assessment model to determine the impact of different cropland conservation investment decisions in more than 550 agricultural sub watersheds that deliver nutrients into the Gulf of Mexico on the aerial extent of hypoxia.
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The complexity of the food system, the integration of its various systems, including the natural and built environments, and the significant need to increase its resilience and efficiency make the food system and its subsystems an ideal model for developing the capacity to model complex systems in general. Initiatives to study the food system provide the opportunity to determine appropriate boundaries for analysis within and between systems, to identify the key data gaps and missing linkages within systems and at the boundaries of different systems, and to identify and build the required systems analysis and decision support tools for complex agricultural systems.
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From page 173... ...
It also provides opportunities to integrate data into models in real time, and to develop machine-learning and artificial intelligence approaches for managing inputs and outputs along the food value chain. There is a great opportunity to advance systems modeling by developing methods to integrate both public and private data for use in democratized decision support tools (Antle et al., 2017)
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From page 174... ...
. Evaluating the effects of policy-induced changes to incentives for switching to the more efficient irrigation systems requires the development of coupled models that account both for the geospatial component and water usage as well as for human behaviors related to adaptation and induced technological change.
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The community of stakeholders should identify current barriers to successfully applying integrated systems models to the food system. The community should also develop a roadmap to overcome key challenges specific for modeling the food system (e.g., integration of subsystems, standardization and interoperability, data storage and sharing, data infrastructure, simplified decision support tools, crop–crop and crop–livestock interactions, and validating the performance of complex systems models using data)
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From page 176... ...
2018. A comprehensive life cycle assessment of greenhouse gas emissions from U.S.
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2016. The Weather Company Launches "Deep Thunder" -- the World's Most Advanced Hyper-Local Weather Forecasting Model for Businesses.
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