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By the year 2050, the world's population is expected to grow to more than 9-billion.
The challenge: how to feed the world with limited resources like water.
CASSMAN: The key point it that business as usual won't cut it.
NARRATOR: University of Nebraska-Lincoln agronomist Ken Cassman says the goal is to increase crop yields on existing farmland.
It's not only a challenge of producing enough food for 9.2 billion by 2050, but it's to produce enough enough food in a way that also protects environmental quality
and natural ecosystems so that the world is not one big parking lot or one big corn field.
NARRATOR: Cassman and an international research team are developing a method to measure the yield gap, the difference between the average yield per acre and the potential crop yield.
It requires all of the modern science and technology that we have today and actually it's a very opportune time to bring these new tools together
in a way that we could create a global atlas of food production potential that's never been produced before.
NARRATOR: The global atlas would be used by policy makers and researchers to identify underperforming areas and figure out how to
efficiently increase yield and still protect precious natural resources.
CASSMAN: When we look at food security, the first constraint that pops up in most places in the world is water.
And so if we talk about yield potential and yield gaps you must also talk about water supply and how efficiently that water supply is being used.
So the global atlas of yield potential and yield gap will also be a global atlas of water productivity.
NARRATOR: Cassman's research is shared on a website and is attracting attention around the world, from Latin America and Europe, to Australia and China.
CASSMAN: My feeling is it could be one of the most important information resources for agriculture globally.
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