A voice for
herbal medicine

We share traditional, scientific and practical insights written by experienced herbalists and health experts from the world of herbal medicine and natural health

← Back to Insights

An introduction to agritech: How smart greenhouses can protect wild plant populations

With declining wild populations of medicinal plants, could alternative technological methods of cultivation with smart greenhouses support a sustainable supply of herbs under threat?

An Introduction To Agritech How Smart Greenhouses Can Protect Wild Plant Populations

Modern-day technology is changing the fundamental way we relate to medicinal plants. Technological innovation is helping to tackle issues surrounding the sustainability, cultivation, processing, and quality assessment of medicinal plants, including how we conduct research into plants and their associated therapeutic properties.

This brief article explores agricultural technology, agritech, and its impact on the sustainability and safety of medicinal plants and associated medical practices. The aim is to enhance dialogue, share ideas and case studies demonstrating how emerging and innovative technology facilitates solutions to resolve common issues threatening the industry associated with medicinal plants. However, ‘herbal medicines’ may be defined and wherever the origins of plant knowledge may come from, whether from Ayurveda, traditional Chinese medicine (TCM) or any other traditions, modern-day tools and technologies offer a novel approach to cultivate, process and understand medicinal plants.

This brief will introduce concepts of smart agriculture and its potential to facilitate the sustainable production of medicinal plants and combat overharvesting of wild populations. Covering how these technologies might ensure safety by reducing contamination and adulteration of botanical products and reducing stress on wild populations via overharvesting. The landscape of botanical knowledge exchange is constantly changing because of how technological inventions affect us and how we understand, learn and process information on medicinal plants.

For example, the internet, smartphones, related devices, cameras, and software such as Google search and social media platforms add new digital aspects to medical and botanical knowledge exchange globally. Other topics not covered here are the use of agricultural tech with satellites, drone technology, robotics, DNA and chemical fingerprinting techniques, blockchain technology and artificial intelligence machine learning (AI-ML) driven approaches across various steps of the medicinal plant supply-chain, data collection and field trials with different cultivars or cultivation experiments.

Sign up to our newsletter

Sign up to our newsletter to receive the very latest in herbal insights.