State Partnership Program

Video by Laurens Vermeire

- U.S. Secretary of Agriculture Tom Vilsack at COP21

U.S. Department of State

Dec. 2, 2015 | 1:58

"Well I think innovation is a broad term and let me be specific in terms of the U.S. and then potentially in a broader context. In the U.S. we have an opportunity to embrace precision agriculture, an opportunity to understand the characteristics of every acre of crop production land in the country and making sure that we tailor our inputs and our focus and our efforts to meet the demands and needs of that particular acre. The more precise we are with inputs, the more precise we are with that information the more productive we will be, we'll be able to produce more with less: less chemicals, less inputs, less expense to the farmer, less water in scarce water resource constrained areas. All of which will add to our ability to increase productivity, make agriculture more resilient and also reduce emissions. Certainly to the extent that we use innovation and technology we can create new seed technologies that will allow us to grow more in a shorter time. Seed technologies that will allow us to respond to drought conditions or intense heat conditions, the opportunity for us to to use technology to forecast more effectively so farmers can make more informed decisions, all of that is designed to increase productivity and allow us to reduce emissions. Globally, it depends on the level of sophistication and agriculture but every country can improve its efficiency, every country can use conventional methods to produce more and as we learn more about water usage, irrigation, livestock grazing, all of that can go into a global effort at increasing productivity making it agriculture more resilient and reducing emissions which is the sort of the frame in which the Global Smart Alliance - Agriculture Alliance is formed, it's designed to allow a sharing of information and technology between countries that can then be used by each country as they deem fit to make their agriculture more productive, more resilient and to reduce emissions related to agriculture."