Feast famine or

roads, airports, schools, and hospitals. This trend would slow down if everyone moved into apartments, but it’s unlikely to stop it.

Having less land available may mean we will see massive innovation, with more productive plant species being selectively grown, more robust systems to reduce food waste, and crops grown in hothouses on top of apartment blocks.

An interesting vision is the potential for enormous worm and compost farms that gobble up our cities’ green waste and produce zero organic waste, creating productive soil mediums in the process. Surely there’s an angle there?

However, there is also the battle of the climate, which is likely to be particularly tough on people living near the equator. Droughts and floods are likely to wreak havoc with the huge areas of land that are cropped globally. The ability for the world to equally share food will become increasingly problematic.

This might sound like a stretch, but a changing climate could mean a few positives. Perhaps the vast permafrost regions of Siberia could become warm enough to grow crops; there could be floating glasshouses out at sea; or we could head underground to grow hydroponically?

If you think food costs are high now, the sad fact is that they will only get more expensive, as the costs of seed, fertiliser, labour, fuel, compliance and regulatory costs, and the big one – land – will all go up.

Or will we see smart automation systems reducing labour, and hybridised plant genetics become ‘‘open source’’ and readily shared for free?

Maybe there will be less need for fuel as large drones automatically seed the ground in place of tractors? Perhaps the Government will relax the rules and compliance to allow smaller producers to enter the market with locally harvested seafoods, wild game and foraged produce?

Water is likely to be a commodity that gets ever more fraught with ownership rights. Water issues will most probably lead to vast areas that currently rely on irrigation during the summer months, to become unviable for agriculture use. That is, unless we find a balance between riverbeds not degrading and running dry, while managing pasture and animal health. Perhaps we could use smart AI systems to measure soil moisture and apply water just as it is required by the big pivot systems?

Farming will continue, but tomorrow’s farms will be much bigger. Farm ownership is likely to move from local families to huge corporations.

We suspect sooner rather than later we will see farms taken over by enormous listed companies, many based offshore, horizontally and vertically integrated to own the entire food system.

It will be a death stroke for rural communities, and the rural schools, taverns, rugby teams, and eventually small towns around Aotearoa that rely on the lifeblood of the cashflow roundabout.

Unless, of course, it doesn’t. Perhaps this is where sharing knowledge, resources and government assistance will enable a more competitive and sustainable approach to producing food than we could have imagined, and we will all be better off for it.

The future is as dark and sombre, or as positive and visionary, as we dare to make it. The one thing we can all be certain of is that change is inevitable.

Nadia Lim writes a weekly column for Life about her experiences on her Central Otago farm.