The United States and China can work together to help address the challenges of food supply and food safety, a US agriculture technology expert has said.
"The demands for solutions to all the problems in food and agriculture industry are so high that everyone has to work on them. So from that point of view, the collaboration between the United States and China is very good," said Larry Taylor, adjunct professor at University of Missouri-St. Louis.
"There are many things that we can work together to take the pressure off existing challenges," he said, adding that bilateral cooperation can also provide a future for new solutions for getting protein and get the highest yield possible.
Taylor first visited China in the 1970s and has since traveled frequently between the United States and China. He has seen a growing interest in partnerships between the two sides in the food-agriculture innovation space.
"When I was at an agri-tech conference in China last October, the interest was very high. There were several hundreds of people. We had separate meetings with the investors who were looking to improve the quality and value of agricultural production," said Taylor.
From the US side, there's also an increasing interest in tapping the manufacturing ability in China to quickly transform technologies into products, said Taylor, also co-founder of The Yield Lab Asia Pacific, an agri-food tech accelerator.
"The reason we have a special focus on Asia is the size of the farms. In China and other countries, the average size of farm is family-sized farm, ...so the new best technologies are for the small-sized farms," said Taylor.
According to Taylor, one of the challenges facing small farms is that many farmers lack access to new technology. Therefore, the digital approach to providing them with the best information is one of the big trends, he said.
The "interesting part" with The Yield Lab, said Taylor, is that many of the technologies developed in Latin America or Asia will work in China and eventually the technologies developed in China will be usable outside the country.
