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Drones Good Scenarios Ag Scenario
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- Famine is coming now and will cause terror, prolif, and war unless we boost output
- 2NC – Internal Link
- Drones boost ag yields – growth and photography
- Food production crunch is coming now – new techniques are key
- 2NC – AT: Bees
Drones Good ScenariosAg Scenario1NCDrone tech is the key to improving yieldsBlake, 15 Cary Blake, associate editor with Western Farm Press, has 32 years experience as an agricultural journalist. Blake covered Midwest agriculture for 25 years on a statewide farm radio network and through television stories that blanketed the nation, “Agriculture to farm two-thirds of UAV-drone market,” Western Farm Press, 5/1/15, http://westernfarmpress.com/miscellaneous/agriculture-farm-two-thirds-uav-drone-market // IS He says, “We can improve yields with this technology.” UAVs will help growers improve water-use efficiency, says Colby, locate pest and disease threats in fields and orchards earlier leading to more timely treatments, plus more efficiently utilize farm chemicals. At the end of the day, placing more green in producers’ wallets would be icing on the cake. UAV sales revenue could eclipse the $82-billion level in the next 10 years, forecasts Colby. So far, more than 70,000 jobs have been created in the UAV industry. Colby shared his UAV experience, foresight, and predictions during a hands-on event at the 2015 American Society of Farm Managers and Rural Appraisers’ California chapter’s Outlook Conference in Paso Robles, Calif. in April. He is convinced that UAVs will improve how producers farm. In the walnut industry, for example, Colby says a UAV could search for a specific light wavelength associated with walnut blight disease, allowing the grower or pest manager to react faster to the issue, reduce crop damage, and improve productivity. UAVs are easy to fly, says Colby and several of the class participants, with a hand-held, video game-like controller. Different UAV models and options can produce photos and video with varying quality featuring bird’s eye images of fields, orchards, and livestock operations with far greater resolution than the human eye.
Richard G. Lugar, a US Senator from Indiana, is Chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, and a member and former chairman of the Senate Agriculture Committee, ”Plant power,” 2004, http://www.ourplanet.com/imgversn/143/lugar.html // IS In a world confronted by global terrorism, turmoil in the Middle East, burgeoning nuclear threats and other crises, it is easy to lose sight of the long-range challenges. But we do so at our peril. One of the most daunting of them is meeting the world’s need for food and energy in this century. At stake is not only preventing starvation and saving the environment, but also world peace and security. History tells us that states may go to war over access to resources, and that poverty and famine have often bred fanaticism and terrorism. Working to feed the world will minimize factors that contribute to global instability and the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction. With the world population expected to grow from 6 billion people today to 9 billion by mid-century, the demand for affordable food will increase well beyond current international production levels. People in rapidly developing nations will have the means greatly to improve their standard of living and caloric intake. Inevitably, that means eating more meat. This will raise demand for feed grain at the same time that the growing world population will need vastly more basic food to eat. Complicating a solution to this problem is a dynamic that must be better understood in the West: developing countries often use limited arable land to expand cities to house their growing populations. As good land disappears, people destroy timber resources and even rainforests as they try to create more arable land to feed themselves. The long-term environmental consequences could be disastrous for the entire globe. Productivity revolution To meet the expected demand for food over the next 50 years, we in the United States will have to grow roughly three times more food on the land we have. That’s a tall order. My farm in Marion County, Indiana, for example, yields on average 8.3 to 8.6 tonnes of corn per hectare – typical for a farm in central Indiana. To triple our production by 2050, we will have to produce an annual average of 25 tonnes per hectare. Can we possibly boost output that much? Well, it’s been done before. Advances in the use of fertilizer and water, improved machinery and better tilling techniques combined to generate a threefold increase in yields since 1935 – on our farm back then, my dad produced 2.8 to 3 tonnes per hectare. Much US agriculture has seen similar increases. 2NC – Internal LinkDrones boost ag – work allocation and pesticide reductionKennedy, 15 Douglas Kennedy, correspondent for FOX, citing farmers in the field, “Farmers eye drones as key to future of agriculture,” Fox News, 2/27/15, http://www.foxnews.com/tech/2015/02/27/farmers-eye-drones-as-key-to-future-agriculture/ // IS The drone could be ready to take its place alongside the tractor and combine harvester, as the next indispensable piece of farming equipment. The Federal Aviation Administration recently released new rules governing the use of drones, and farmers, who see drones as a way to get a birds-eye view of their fields and monitor crops, to precisely deliver fertilizer and pesticides were watching carefully. Commercial use of drones is still widely banned in the U.S., but many farmers are using them over their property anyway, daring federal regulators to put a stop to it. An eye in the sky can help a farmer know what his or her crops need, and what might be afflicting them. “I know that I have aphids in the chard, and I know that I have aphids in the kale,” said Steve Sprinkel, an organic farmer in Ojai, Calif., as he inspected rows of crops recently. As an organic farmer, Sprinkel spends much of his time looking for disease and insects. "We are always out there watching," he said. "We are constantly observing." Sprinkel looks forward to the time when he can use drones to monitor his crops. Experts say it is a matter of time until drones revolutionize agriculture. "The future of farming certainly involves technologies like drones,” said Brandon Basso recently, as he demonstrated the X8M, one of the latest innovations in drone technology for farms. “[They] really gain us an additional perspective from the air on what's going on both on a micro-scale and a macro-scale." Basso runs research and development for 3D Robotics, a San Francisco-based company that is leading the way in farm drones. He says the mechanized remote control flying machines can use infared imaging to check crops for infestations as well as proper water irrigation. He says they'll even make non-organic farms more healthy. The X8M, for instance, can fly over a large area and detect discoloration that might elude the human eye. "So we can, through the use of drones, understand how pesticides are working, understand pest problems better and potentially eliminate the need for pesticides in areas where it actually was a fungal problem and not a pest problem," Basso said. That's good news to Sprinkel, who believes technology can mean less chemicals in the world. "I think it's a great opportunity to diminish chemicals,” says Sprinkel, as he takes a break from examining his beets, “and [for] a farmer to focus on the more important things." Drones boost ag yields – growth and photographyAtherson, 15 Kelsey D. Atherson, technology writer based in Washington, DC. He primarily covers defense technology and unmanned vehicles, “Farmers Eye Drones for the Future,” Popular Science, 2/20/15, http://www.popsci.com/farmers-eye-drones-future // IS Even though humans have been farming for thousands of years, there’s always a new trick to learn or a new technology to try. In modern times, these tricks often come attached to small flying aircraft, a fact evidenced by the continued and growing presence of drones at agricultural expositions. Successful drone use might lead to better yields in the future, with an emphasis on the future: while the FAA just proposed new drone rules, it’ll likely be 18 months to two years before they come into effect. That's 18 months until farmers can fly drones in a legally unambiguous way. Here’s what drones promise: cheap aerial photography, with regular and infrared cameras, combined with programs that stitch together and analyze the photos, to give farmers information that was previously unattainable or too costly. In 2013, a vineyard in California used drone photography to find a section of vines that was ripening sooner than expected, prompting an earlier harvest of that area. Last year, the U.S. Department of Agriculture looked into acquiring and testing a drone for farming purposes. Drones can do more for farming than just photographing crops. Sugar alternative giant Stevia considered flying drones with lights over its crops at night to spur extra growth. And a student contest in Maryland last summer considered drone designs to protect corn from insect predators, including a design that landed on corn stalks and picked grubs off of it with mechanical arms.
2NC – ! UQFood production crunch is coming now – new techniques are keyConnor, 11 Steven Connor, Science Editor of The Independent, five-times winner of the prestigious British science writers’ award; the David Perlman Award of the American Geophysical Union; four times highly commended as specialist journalist of the year in the UK Press Awards; UK health journalist of the year and a special merit award of the European School of Oncology for his investigations into the tobacco industry. He has a degree in zoology from the University of Oxford, “2.4 billion extra people, no more land: how will we feed the world in 2050?” 1/22/11, The Independent, http://www.independent.co.uk/news/science/24-billion-extra-people-no-more-land-how-will-we-feed-the-world-in-2050-2191260.html // IS The finite resources of the Earth will be be stretched as never before in the coming 40 years because of the unprecedented challenge of feeding the world in 2050, leading scientists have concluded in a report to be published next week. Food production will have to increase by between 70 and 100 per cent, while the area of land given over to agriculture will remain static, or even decrease as a result of land degradation and climate change. Meanwhile the global population is expected to rise from 6.8 billion at present to about 9.2 billion by mid-century. The Government-appointed advisers are expected to warn that "business as usual" in terms of food production is not an option if mass famine is to be avoided, and to refer to the need for a second "green revolution", following the one that helped to feed the extra 3 billion people who have been added to the global population over the past 50 years. In the hard-hitting report, commissioned by the Department of Business, Innovation and Skills, the scientists will warn that the era of cheap food is over, and that governments around the world must prepare to follow the leads of China and Brazil by investing heavily in research and the development of new agricultural techniques and practices. 2NC – AT: BeesCHILL OUT DUSTIN – EVERYTHING WILL BEE ALRIGHTDokoupil, 7/9 Tony Dokoupil, M.A. in American Studies from Columbia University, and I earned a fellowship towards a PhD in media studies, “Why we can stop panicking about the honeybees,” msnbc, 7/9/15, http://www.msnbc.com/msnbc/why-we-can-stop-panicking-about-the-honeybees // IS Bees are not going extinct: Honeybees aren’t native to United States. They were brought here by European settlers, and today they are our tiniest livestock, trucked around the country to pollinate every kind of food we grow. These are the bees that have been dying in huge numbers. About half of the estimated 2.7 million colonies in this country have collapsed at least once in the last decade. But dire predictions about a drop in bee population, leading to a food crisis, have been way overblown. Bee keepers simply replace their dead hives — for the price of a movie ticket you can buy a queen online right now — so there are just as many commercial bees in America today as there were in 2006. Dennis vanEngelsdorp, a leader of the federal effort to understand bee health, told The New York Times exactly what this means: “We are not worried at all that bees are going to go extinct in this country, or the world.” We know why some bees are dying: It sucks to be a bee. Jerry Seinfeld and Pixar made it look fun “Bee Movie,” but in reality commercial bees live grinding, miserable lives of nonstop work in often toxic conditions. Oddly, these conditions didn’t come up much in the early coverage of the great bee die offs. It was like we wanted the answer to the mystery to be simple and singular: It’s climate change, or flu vaccines, or wireless internet, or cellphone towers, or GMO food, or some dastardly new breed of agro-terrorists. To be fair, scientists were indeed stumped about the cause. None of the usual suspects could account for the mortality rate. That is, until the scientists began to look at how the usual suspects seemed to be reinforcing one another, driving up the death toll. In a review published in Science this February, researchers concluded that the great bee decline was caused by the “combined stress” of parasites, pesticides, and habitat loss. They concluded, in essence, that bees were dying because of overwork and illness. The likely culprit of both? Modern farming practices. Bees used to have it good. They pollinated smaller, more diverse fields. They contacted plants with fewer pesticides. They did their buzzing in abundant pasture land. That’s no longer the case, and a lot of them have been dying. But at least now we seem to get why. In May, the Obama administration unveiled the first “National Strategy to Promote the Health of Honey Bees and Other Pollinators.” It’s a bureaucratic title, but a simple plan: More pasture land, less pesticide, and better remedies for disease. Problem solved. Directory: file -> view view -> Western Europe after wwii view -> Author study: paul fleischman view -> Qpa1 7ela study Guide view -> Arctic Oil/Gas Neg view -> November 1970 Approximately 150,000-500,000 deaths Bhola Cyclone Bangladesh view -> Grade Level: 6 Unit of Study: Caribbean glce view -> Citation: Duffield, Katy view -> Table of Contents Lesson # view -> Chinese Wind Energy Disad Download 0.65 Mb. Share with your friends:
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