As the global population races towards 9.7 billion by 2050, the world’s protein supply – an essential nutrient that builds muscle, enzymes and energy – is under strain. Protein is found in everything from steak and salmon to soybeans and lentils, but producing enough of it sustainably is becoming harder by the year.
Climate change is hitting crops hard. Droughts, floods and unpredictable weather are shrinking yields around the world. And livestock aren’t faring much better. Rising heat reduces fertility, slows growth and cuts milk production in cattle. Meanwhile, our hunger for protein-rich foods and high-protein diets keep climbing. The result? Global food systems are under unprecedented pressure, and simply ‘farming harder’ won’t be enough.
Enter virtual and augmented reality. Tools that were once made for – and still enjoyed by – gamers, are now being repurposed for farmers. From ‘digital twin’ farms, which are exact reproductions of real-life farms, to AR headsets that spot crop disease in seconds, immersive tech is rewriting the rulebook on how we feed ourselves… without ever getting our hands dirty.
Here are five ways that VR and AR are transforming farming and could help secure the future of global protein.
Test-drive your harvest before it happens
Farming is entering its flight-simulator era, a world where you can experiment, adjust and optimise long before a single seed is planted. Imagine test-driving an entire growing season before it begins. No mud, no risk, no wasted resources. That’s the promise of the ‘digital twin farm’ – a hyper-realistic virtual replica of your actual farm built from drone footage, soil sensors and weather data. Slip on your VR headset and you can walk your crops, tweak irrigation schedules or test new fertiliser blends, instantly seeing how those choices might affect crop yields and soil health before a single drop of water falls on the land.
The technology is almost here. At the University of Cambridge, engineers have built a digital twin of an underground hydroponic farm – where plants grow in nutrient-rich water instead of soil – tracking dozens of variables in real-time, including temperature, humidity, CO2, light levels, growth, airflow and power consumption.
Meanwhile, over in the Netherlands, Wageningen University & Research (WUR) is developing Virtual Tomato Crops. Think Animal Crossing but with physics: a 3D simulation that mirrors how tomato plants respond to light, water and nutrients, allowing farmers to fine-tune greenhouse conditions in a virtual space before the real thing.
Health-check the herd in AR
If digital twins let farmers see the future of their fields, augmented reality is helping them keep a closer eye on the animals that feed us.
In livestock management, catching health issues early can mean the difference between a minor hiccup and a herd-wide problem. Enter, the SmartGlove – a wearable that connects RFID (Radio-Frequency Identification) ear tags to smart glasses via Bluetooth. With this, researchers were able to see an individual cow’s vital signs, feeding pattens and movement data overlaid onto the animal in real time, like having X-ray goggles for herd health.
The system’s AR dashboards can pull together patterns across hundreds of animals, flagging problems like respiratory illness or drops in activity long before symptoms progress. For farmers managing sprawling acreage, that’s a lifesaver in waiting.
A Fitbit for photosynthesis
And it’s not just cows getting the AR treatment, crops are joining the smart-tech revolution too. Researchers at the University of Arkansas have developed a new testing protocol that simulates how viruses naturally infect plants. By recreating the way a virus spreads and behaves in real life, the system can tell the difference between simple contamination and genuine infection. It can also do it faster and more accurately than traditional lab tests.
In practice, that means farmers can spot trouble early and act before disease spreads through a field. Combine that with AR overlays showing live data on stress, moisture levels or nutrient uptake and you’ve got a real-time health check for every plant in the field.
Farming from the sofa
After diagnosing the fields and herds in augmented reality, the next step is taking hands-on control, without needing to set foot on the farm.
When rising heat and erratic weather make it harder to tend vast fields, remote operations offer resilience and flexibility. Farmers could soon be able to test, adjust and act, even from miles away. Picture this: steering a harvester or rover with a VR headset and a set of hand controls, your morning coffee still warm beside you. It’s not quite Avatar, but we’re getting close.
In a 2024 study, researchers combined drone mapping, 3D terrain models and VR interfaces to let operators remotely manoeuvre machinery – in this case an unmanned aerial vehicle – with more precision than standard video feeds. And the technology isn’t just for big-budget farms. At Universidad del Cauca in Colombia, scientists built a low-cost quadcopter system for crop monitoring, testing navigation over uneven land and planning flight paths remotely. Another feasibility study found that VR-guided robotic harvesting operators achieved positive results that were up to 90 per cent successful in fruit harvesting practices.
The takeaway from this? When the world gets tougher to farm, being in two places at once might just be a valuable skill.
Designing dinner in virtual reality
After remote-controlled farm vehicles and AR-assisted herds, it’s only fitting that the next frontier of farming happens entirely inside a headset. Designing tomorrow’s farm in virtual reality isn’t sci-fi, it’s how researchers are building greener, smarter food systems right now.
At Seoul National University in Korea, scientists have created a VR simulator that uses Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) to model how air, heat and humidity move through a tomato greenhouse. Think of it like a digital wind tunnel for farms; you can test where to put vents, fans or heaters to keep plants happy and energy use low. By experimenting with roof and side vents, shading screens and thermal curtains, they were able to see exactly how those tweaks affected the greenhouse’s internal climate.
The same idea could transform how we design alternative protein facilities, from vertical farms to cultured-meat labs and microbial vats. In a virtual space, you can adjust lighting, airflow and layouts to spot inefficiencies before building anything physical, making the final facility leaner, greener and far more efficient (and kinder to the planet).
Meanwhile, at the University of Oxford, scientists are zooming in even further, literally stepping inside proteins using VR. Their platform, VisionMol, lets researchers explore molecular structures in 3D, revealing how shape determines function, interaction and even flavour potential. These insights could help design the next generation of sustainable proteins, giving farmers and food innovators like EIT Food new tools to meet global demand without overtaxing land, water or climate.
Because sometimes, innovation doesn’t always require muddy boots. Sometimes, it demands curiosity, data and a good headset strapped to your face. Who needs wellies when you’ve got Wi-Fi?
Find out more about the future of farming from EIT Food here.
EIT Food is Europe’s leading food innovation initiative, supported by the European Institute of Innovation and Technology (EIT), a body of the European Union. Its mission is to transform the way Europe produces, consumes and thinks about food – making the food system healthier, more sustainable and more trusted.
EIT Food Education is the learning and skills arm of EIT Food. Its programmes help to equip current and future generations with the knowledge and capabilities needed to drive systemic change in food and farming.