“Awareness creates responsibility.” One of my early mentors often used this maxim to point out a recurring theme in life and business: Those who are willing and able to call attention to problems should be just as eager to identify solutions, yet they rarely are. In recent years, this reality has become especially apparent in the context of the global food supply chain.

Thanks to ongoing technological advancement, we now have an abundance of tools enabling us to quickly spot problems pertaining to our food and feed. What we still mostly lack, however, are commercially responsible approaches to solving them.

Consider the grain and feed sector. Historically, it has attempted to minimize the consequences of pervasive issues by simply spreading them out. “Dilution is the solution,” as the saying goes. But rather than resolving problems, this approach magnifies them. In the food industry, the end results we see are waste (the countless tons of food rotting in back-alley dumpsters and landfills), or worse yet, illness and death.

Fortunately, we might finally be on the cusp of real solutions. Just as technology has allowed us to diagnose the issues that lead to these unwanted outcomes, it can also help us eliminate them entirely.