Connected Data and the Challenge of Feeding 10 Billion People

A new World Economic Forum piece argues that agriculture already has the tools and most of the data it needs. The missing step is connecting it. Here is what that means for farms and food systems.

At a glance: 

By 2050 the world must feed close to 10 billion people on shrinking land | Agriculture already has most of the data it needs, but it sits in disconnected systems | Connecting it, from lab research to farmer phone apps, could be the key to doing more with less

Agriculture does not have a shortage of data. It has a shortage of connection. That is the central argument of a recent World Economic Forum article by Thomas Jung, Chief Data Officer at Syngenta Group, published on 20 October 2026. As he puts it, "the tools to transform agriculture already exist, so does most of the data." The problem is that the knowledge is scattered across systems that do not talk to each other, from research labs to supply chains to the apps in farmers' hands.

The stakes are familiar but worth repeating. By 2050 the world will need to feed close to 10 billion people, and it will have to do so on shrinking land. Soil equivalent to four football fields is lost to degradation every second. Producing more with less is no longer optional, and the article makes the case that better-connected data is one of the most practical levers available.

From nine months to minutes

The piece offers a telling example from inside Syngenta. Starting a new research project once took up to nine months just to gather the necessary data, partly because some of it was still held in paper lab notebooks. A research data hub called Gaia changed that. By combining molecular screening, greenhouse trials, field observations and privacy-protected farm performance data, it brought access down from months to minutes. The company reports that the number of researchers using it doubled in a year, while the volume of their work quadrupled. Gaia now draws on more than 75 data sources and takes in around 250 million new records every day.

The same logic reaches the field through Cropwise, a digital platform that delivers satellite, soil and weather-based advice in farmers' own languages on their phones. It now spans six AI-powered applications across 69 countries and more than 77 million hectares. Crucially, farm observations such as pest outbreaks and yield anomalies feed back into research in near real time, turning discovery and deployment into one continuous cycle rather than two separate stages.

Why sharing is the next step

No single company's data captures the full complexity of global agriculture. That is why the article argues the next practical move is industry-wide, pre-competitive data sharing, which depends on agreeing shared standards, interoperability and governance. Just as important are the softer foundations: treating data as a maintained, shared product rather than a byproduct, investing in training and governance, and keeping farmers in control of their own data, because trust is what drives adoption, and adoption is what makes the intelligence valuable.

Why it matters

For the more than 500 million smallholder farmers who underpin global food security, connected and accessible data could allow AI to act as an equalizer rather than widening the gap with large operations. That is a goal close to the work we do at Agriventures, where digital farming, data and farmer trust come together in living labs and real field pilots. The message is an encouraging one:

The technology is largely here. The task now is to connect it, govern it well, and keep farmers at the centre.

Source: https://www.weforum.org/stories/food-water-and-clean-air/how-connected-data-can-help-feed-a-planet-of-10-billion-people

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