Sonny Perdue: COVID-19 pushing ag toward innovation

Supply chain challenges associated with COVID-19 highlighted the importance of innovation and new technologies in food production, the U.S. Secretary of Agriculture Sonny Perdue said this week.

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Sonny Perdue | U.S. Navy
Sonny Perdue | U.S. Navy

Supply chain challenges associated with COVID-19 highlighted the importance of innovation and new technologies in food production, the U.S. Secretary of Agriculture Sonny Perdue said this week.

“COVID-19 highlighted the need for ag innovator interrupters in the marketplace. Silicon Valley and other forward-thinking investors are now thinking about how to make the food production system more reliable and minimize disruptions to the supply chain,” he explained in a virtual fireside chat hosted by SVG Ventures.

Perdue said that he expects robotics, sensors, optics and other emerging digital technologies will result in quantum leaps in agricultural and food production.

“Hopefully this doesn’t happen again, but we do need to be prepared for the future,” he added.

The COVID-19 pandemic is representative of a wider trend of human diseases that arise from animals, according to a representative from the World Organisation for Animal Health (OIE). Future pandemics could result in additional disruptions to the food supply chain and trade.

Agriculture Innovation Agenda

Earlier this year, Perdue unveiled the Agriculture Innovation Agenda, an initiative to increase agricultural and food production by 40% while cutting the environmental footprint of U.S. agriculture in half by 2050.

“Innovation is really the key. The world’s population is growing,” Perdue said during the chat.  “Basic and applied research is key. We need to do more, not less, in the food supply chain to encourage collaboration between the public and private sector to innovate better ways to feed more people with less land,”

To learn more about the transition of innovative technologies from researchers and entrepreneurs into commercial applications for the benefit of the poultry industry, make plans to attend the annual Poultry Tech Summit, presented by WATT Global Media. The conference is a global collaboration networking event where biology, engineering and business converge.

Kudos to the industry

Perdue made sure to highlight the great job everyone involved in the meat and poultry production supply chain did during COVID-19.

“We had some real challenges in the meat production supply chain where we had to work very carefully to protect workers. The good news is that we’re back up to 90-95% production capacity,” he said.

“I’m so proud of our industry – from producers to processors – for how well they did throughout COVID-19.”

View our continuing coverage of the coronavirus/COVID-19 pandemic.

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