Global climate change has drastically affected agricultural production. Moreover, pandemics, wars, and rapid decreases in natural resources point to the emerging need for famine prevention by increasing smart agriculture and food production and decreasing food loss and waste. To achieve this, plant and food diseases should be detected early and rapidly treated. From this perspective, we focus on recent, simple, and instrument-free, nucleic acid extraction techniques, which are capable of isolating high-quality nucleic acids from plant tissues, to be either easily used in the field or simply integrated into various nucleic acid detection platforms or sensors.