Sustainability

Robots will move along fields either spraying herbicides through a pen-like nozzle or pulling weeds as soon as 2019 after their makers perfect programming them to distinguish weeds from crops like tomatoes.

What happens when outside factors affect the amount of food people are so used to purchasing? What will food production look like in 20 years?

Morning, 2048: Work is well underway as day breaks on this farm in California’s Central Valley.

On a farm just outside of Sacramento, hundreds of prehistoric-looking fish swim around in 50-foot diameter tanks. These are white sturgeon, the largest freshwater fish in North America.

UC Davis’ sustainability research doesn’t just play out in the classroom — it’s being put into practice on campus and could lead to the university becoming the world’s first zero-carbon college campus.

At UC Davis, a team of professors have kicked off the Smart Farm Initiative. Lead by biological and agricultural engineering professor David Slaughter, the initiative strives to utilize and progress technology in agriculture to increase productivity and transform farm work to a STEM-based industry.

Researchers are looking for ways to make farming a little smarter with robots and drones that could one day revolutionize the way our food is grown.

There are more humans alive on Earth right now than ever before—7.3 billion—and that number is still growing, with UN projections that it will reach 9.7 billion by 2050. A population of this magnitude brings a lot of challenges, food production chief among them.

Tens of thousands of people living in the San Joaquin Valley’s unincorporated, rural, low-income communities have unsafe drinking water pouring from their taps.

Jeff Flynn ’05, general manager of Unitrans, has his eye on the future — in particular, the fuel source for Unitrans buses. Most of the fleet today runs on compressed natural gas.