The role of fluid mechanics in building a resilient, food secure future

Concepts such as food security and resilience, not traditionally connected to the field of fluid mechanics, fundamentally rely upon flows of information carried in the medium of a fluid to form the basic contextual environment of agroecosystems. According to the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA), a resilient system is one that remains or becomes robust against threat and in this way resilience can be thought of as a measure of a system’s ability to survive, cope, or recover from damage due to disruption. In the ever-expanding domain of threats to food security (i.e. the availability of nutritionally adequate food), one of the first to be encountered in the crop growing cycle is that of pests and disease. Various measurable parameters contribute to this, but it is wind, moisture, temperature (i.e. weather) and its effect on the transport of the so-called ‘chemical landscape’ that would be of particular interest to the fluid dynamicist. Examples of the role of fluid mechanics in determining system-level viability (in vivo at field scale) as well as some specific engineered efforts to better inform robust agricultural practices pertaining to the particular threat of pests will be discussed.