Hi everyone! My name is Lisa Zaretskaya. I would like to draw your attention to my report related to SMART FARMING.

Taiwan is an agricultural paradox. On the one hand the subtropical island is ideal for growing anything from avocados to zucchini and is indeed largely self-sufficient in some important crops, say rice. It produces some of the most amazing fruit in the world. Big, juicy, delicious, and largely GMO-free. Anyone who's ever visited will tell you that vegetables here taste better than almost anywhere else on Earth.

On the other hand, terrain and climate are anything but ideal for agriculture. Every year heavy flooding and typhoon winds wreak havoc on plantations; vegetable prices spike in the aftermath. Due to the small sizes of plots and often steep terrain especially in orchards, farming is still a labor-intensive process. The climate isn't just fertile for plants, it also attracts a lot of pests, which means that vegetables often end up in supermarkets with significant amounts of pesticide residue. Washed out over centuries of over-cultivation, Taiwanese soil needs more fertilizer than comparable countries in the same latitude.

The future is called SMART FARMING.

What does smart farming need? Whether it is indoors in multi-storey hydroponic farms or small-size plots of land, whether underground cultivation or large-scale warehoused plantations, smart farming needs the following technologies:  solar technology (for energy needs), lighting technology (different plants grow best a different wavelengths), drone technology (modeling of terrain, soil, water, etc.),  IoT (smart sensors), semiconductors (to create those nifty sensors), software, in particular control software and data mining algorithms, and robotics (for planting and harvesting). Guess what? Taiwan is an industry leader in most of these technologies. Agriculture is increasingly becoming a lot more like manufacturing. No country in the world is better equipped for this change than Taiwan. Agriculture of the future is happening today.

Thank you for your attention!