Preliminary program and first 40 expert speakers announced for The Future of Food Production Summit

How will we feed a planet of 10 billion people by 2050 when we are nowhere close to feeding the population of 2022? And when the world’s food supply is made insecure by climate change, how can we balance the need to produce enough for everyone to eat without deepening the climate crisis in the process? And when will we stop kicking the problem down the road?

These and many other questions will be answered at the inaugural Future of Food Production Summit, taking place virtually on 15/16/17 November 2022.

The first 40 of more than 75 speakers addressing these complex topics and the preliminary agenda have now been announced and, as promised by the organiser, Future-Proof Media Group, what they highlight is that The Future of Food Production Summit isn’t simply another agtech conference, nor is it a collection of greenwashed, marketing messages from the sustainability chiefs from the very brands at the heart of today’s global food insecurity crisis.

The keynote on the first morning, 15 November, from Robert Saik, author of Food 5.0 – which takes the reader on a journey from the ‘muscle era’ of farming to a future where the convergence of new technologies like sensors, robotics, and machine learning make infinite sustainability achievable – sets the tone for the remaining three days perfectly.

We need to produce much more with much less – an ever-present issue – at both global and local level, and future digital agricultural technologies will increasingly become vital facilitators for this change.

Separating the hype from the real value in these technologies is a challenge, though, and during this three-day, high-level conference that is expected to attract more than 1,000 delegates from +50 countries globally, we will separate the wheat from the chaff in this digital agricultural transformation.

On the second day, 16 November, Henry Gordon-Smith, CEO of Agritecture, an acknowledged global thought leader in the vertical and urban agriculture industry, will kick-off proceedings. By 2050, an estimated two thirds of the world’s population will live in cities. Will tomorrow’s cities therefore all be agricultural?

The +75 speakers will be among 10 interactive panel discussions, 50 presentations as well as some exciting start-up pitch symposiums, in which the innovators of tomorrow have a chance to put their ideas before a panel of investors from the VC community. Among the many topics being discussed will be hydroponics, aeroponics, crop resilience, agri biotech, decarbonising agriculture, regenerative agriculture, controlled environment agriculture, insetting/offsetting, circular economy, and much more. A veritable feast of technological, policy and financial innovations to ensure future global food security, resilience and sustainability.

This inaugural Summit – hosted on a platform that replicates as closely as possible the interactive experience of a face-to-face event – is sure to become the must-attend virtual networking conference for any company involved in improving the sustainability, efficiency and resilience of global food supply chains and this C-suite-level, highly focused event will hone in on some of the key issues affecting the future of the global agricultural system, not just in the short term, but in the challenging decades ahead. It is by no means an easy problem to solve.

“Global food systems face challenges of increasing food demand while competing for resources – such as land, water, and energy – that affect food supply. And that will ultimately affect us all,” stated Nina Roldan, Conference Producer at Future-Proof Group Media, the organizer of the Summit.

Roldan has carefully curated the program alongside an Industry Expert Advisory Board including Florian Forster, AVP Investments from Energy Infrastructure Partners, Hermione Dace, Senior Policy Analyst from the Tony Blair Institute for Global Change, John Purcell, CEO & President from Unfold, Peter Lane, Executive Chairman at Vertical Farming Network, and Till Weidner, Postdoctoral researcher at the Sustainable Process Systems Engineering Lab, ETH Zurich.

The final program will be published online at the start of October. Super-early-bird tickets for the Summit are currently available at specially discounted rate of US$295.

The first Future of Food Production Summit will be preceded by the launch of sister publication, The Future of Food Production magazine, within which the key challenges debated at the conference will be addressed in an interactive digital magazine, with independently written articles, columnists, technical features, research pieces and exclusive embedded video content. The free-subscription magazine will be launched to +20,000 readers on 19 October 2022.