this is the Agriculture Report.The United Nations says the world's populationwill increase by 34 percent by the year 2050.Scientists and others know it will be difficultto meet the food needs of so many people.A recent study shows that soybean cropsand computers may help deal with the problem.The U.N. predicts food production must increase by 70 percentto meet the needs of a richer population.The U.N. expects more people will live in cities than in rural areas.But today there is little too low increasein the productivity of major crops.Kenneth Quinn is the president of the World Food Prize Foundation.He says the need to increase food productionis the greatest difficulty humanity has ever faced."There's going to be another 2 billion peopleon our planet between now and 2050and how are we going to produce enough food for them to eat?" asked Quinn.Darren Drewry is a scientist at the American Space Agency, NASA.He led a study of soybeanswhich NASA calls the world's most important protein crop.He says researchers using a computerwere surprised to find that they were able to create a soybean plantthat can be both more productive and use less water."We find that there are changes to the architectureof modern soybean cultivars can be madeto help us improve on many of these goals," said Drewry.Researchers were able to increase soybean productivityby 7 percent without using more water.The computer helped researchers do workthat would have taken many years in the field.We spoke to Stephen Long about that. He is a professor at the University of Illinois,and one of the writers of the report on the soybean study.He told us by Skype that researchers used computer program to studywhat would happen if they changed the way the plant grows."One of the things the modeling predictedis that there's too much leaf areaso we're actually removing leavesas the plant's growing to get a lower leaf area.We're also artificially modifying the angle of the leavesas well to reflect what the model predicted," said Long.Professor Long says it is important to find solutionsto the predicted global food shortage before it happens.He says it will be 20 years before farmers can begin growinga more productive soybean once they have developed it.The study on soybeans was published in the journal Global Change Biology.The National Science Foundation, NASAand the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation paid for the study.And that's the VOA Learning English Agriculture Report.