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Zero Hunger

Enough food, grown well. Hunger ended, and the fields kept living.

26Insights tagged

The UN page for Goal 2

Tagged with Goal 2

Technology · Agriculture

Ecorobotix ARA: the Swiss sprayer that looks at every plant before it sprays

Most crop sprayers treat a field like a single surface. ARA, built by Ecorobotix in the Swiss town of Yverdon-les-Bains, photographs the ground as it moves, decides in a fraction of a second which plants are crop and which are weeds, and fires a dose onto a square about 6 centimetres wide. Five years after launch, 1,000 machines are working in Europe, the Americas and Australia, and the company is now assembling them in Kansas.

6 min read

Technology · Agriculture

Ecozen Ecofrost: the battery-free solar cold room built for India's smallholders

Three IIT Kharagpur graduates asked why a farmer should sell tomatoes cheap just because there is nowhere cool to keep them. Their answer, Ecofrost, is a farm-gate cold room that runs on sunlight and stores cold rather than electricity, so it needs neither a grid connection nor a battery. Twelve years on, the Pune company behind it has grown into a profitable climate-tech business with revenue above Rs 1,000 crore.

6 min read

Technology · Agriculture

FarmDroid FD20: the Danish solar robot that remembers every seed it sows

Weeds hit hardest in the first weeks after sowing, when sugar beet and onion seedlings are tiny. Conventional farms answer with herbicide, organic farms with crews of hand weeders. FarmDroid, from Vejen in Denmark, built a slow, light, solar-powered robot that records the GPS position of every seed it plants and then comes back to hoe around each one. More than 500 now work in 26 countries, and a bigger sibling arrives in January 2027.

6 min read

Technology · Agriculture

John Deere See & Spray: cameras that let a giant sprayer aim at single weeds

The world's best-known farm machinery brand taught its big sprayers to spot a weed at 15 miles an hour and fire only the nozzle above it. In 2025 farmers used See & Spray on more than five million acres and cut non-residual herbicide by nearly half. For model year 2027 Deere has merged its three versions into one, added wheat, barley, canola and sugar beet, and says factory orders are nearly doubling.

6 min read

Technology · Agriculture

Lely Sphere: the Dutch barn system that turns cow-shed ammonia into fertiliser

In a dairy barn, ammonia starts forming within hours once urine meets dung. In the Netherlands, that gas settles on protected nature and has frozen farm permits since 2019. Lely, the family firm best known for milking robots, built a barn system that keeps urine and dung apart, pulls the gas out of the manure pit and binds it into a liquid fertiliser. In February 2026 a Dutch province granted the first final nature permit based on it.

6 min read

Technology · Biology

Protix: the Dutch insect protein pioneer rethinking where to grow

In a factory in Bergen op Zoom, billions of black soldier fly larvae eat food-industry by-products and become protein and fat for pets, fish and farm animals. Protix proved insect protein can be made at industrial scale in Europe. In 2026 it decided its next factories belong in Asia, faced the world's first protest against insect farming, and defended its green claims before the Dutch advertising watchdog.

5 min read

Technology · Biology

Solar Foods Solein: Finnish protein grown from air and electricity

A Finnish company feeds one naturally occurring bacterium with carbon dioxide and hydrogen and harvests a yellow, protein-rich powder. Solein is already on sale in the United States inside a sports protein powder, and Factory 02, forty times bigger than today's plant, is in final design. What it still lacks is approval in its home market: the EU novel food decision has now been pending for five years.

6 min read

Technology · Biology

String Bio PRO-DG: the Indian protein for animal feed that is made from methane

Methane leaks from landfills, farms and gas pipes and warms the planet far faster than CO2. A Bengaluru biotech firm feeds it to bacteria and harvests a protein ingredient for shrimp, fish, poultry, pig and pet diets. PRO-DG cleared a US safety milestone in 2024, and in September 2026 the Gates Foundation backed the same platform's crop products for smallholders in Asia and Africa.

5 min read

Green architecture · Urban eco innovation

Click & Grow Smart Garden 9: a self-watering herb and salad farm for the kitchen counter

Big vertical farms promised to grow salad in city warehouses, and several of them ran out of money. Click & Grow took the idea down to the size of a toaster: a white tub, a lamp on a stalk and nine little seed pods that sprout basil, lettuce or tomatoes on a flat's windowless counter.

5 min read

Advanced technology · NanoTech

Borregaard Exilva: the wood-based nanofibres replacing microplastics in seed coatings

Farmers sow billions of seeds coated in thin films that hold pesticides, nutrients and colour in place. Many of those films are made with synthetic polymers that end up as microplastics in soil. At its biorefinery in Sarpsborg, Norway, Borregaard breaks wood cellulose down into fibrils with nanometre-scale diameters and sells them as Exilva, a biodegradable alternative.

5 min read