Finals of the Werner Siemens Foundation "project of the century" competition

TUM agricultural research in the race for CHF 100 million

The TUM researchers' objective is to feed a constantly growing world population without ruining the earth in the process. Asseng, Professor at the TUM School of Life Sciences on the Weihenstephan campus and Director of the Hans Eisenmann-Forum for Agricultural Sciences at TUM, says: "We're tackling one of the largest challenges facing mankind. And mastering this challenge will take no less than a revolution in the mass production of staple foods."

The multi-disciplinary TUM team is pursuing an integrative concept involving energy-efficient, highly-automated and pesticide-free cultivation of agricultural crops, linked with minimal water and space requirements as well as complete independence from the weather. According to the researchers, the greatest hurdles in their project are the modification of agricultural crops to accommodate the controlled environments, the development of efficient and sustainable technologies and processes, infrastructure costs and energy requirements as well as generating societal acceptance of the new plant-based agricultural production. Still, the water needed to produce adequate harvest yields is already scarce in many regions today. The climate crisis is aggravating the situation dramatically, threatening to make existing agricultural production impossible in extensive regions of the earth.

TUM President Prof. Thomas F. Hofmann congratulated the research team on reaching the finals and on the WSS research prize: "A fantastic success for our agricultural sciences. Future agricultural production calls on us to create completely new strategies and to understand agricultural sciences as system sciences which benefit from the interdisciplinary integration of expertise. I'm confident that our team's integrative strategy will make a decisive contribution to ensuring that the world can be fed in the future."