Artificial Intelligence is an emerging pervasive integral solution to several industries in the world today; finance, transport, smart homes and now, agriculture. As part of agricultural productivity solutions, how is artificial intelligence used in agriculture, what are the common AI applications that have been used already in farms today?
AI in Agriculture
Agricultural activities in the farm are labour intensive, for example, planting, maintaining and harvesting crops need money, energy for processing and clean space for storage. With all these activities on the farm, what if we can use technology to replace some of the human activities and guarantee effectiveness and efficiency? This activity is where artificial intelligence in agriculture comes in handy.
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What if artificial intelligence can be used to recognize crop disease and pest that can on a massive scale pervert crop production for the year? They are already successful in Tanzania where AI technology is used to identify Cassava disease and promptly provide a solution to stop the spread of disease. And the up-side of this technology is we can use it via our mobile phone.
Why AI in Agriculture
I get it, with AI diversity why agriculture of all places? The answer is simple; AI is unparalleled in its applications. Artificial intelligence is a tool, and with little fine-turning, it can be applied in almost (if not all) fields of life. Nevertheless, given its unprecedented use, why shouldn’t it be tested in agriculture?
Like all fields of life, AI is finding roots in agriculture. And it should be encouraged by sponsoring research, testing and evaluating research data to help create, reshape and reinvent what we know and understand about agriculture activities.
More so, agriculture is a major industry and a huge part of the foundation of the world economy, at such we need to use AI technological innovation in protecting crop yield and encourage crop yield so we can have food security in the world.
Expanding the opportunities of AI in Agriculture
It is a fact that AI can’t eliminate the jobs of human farmers, rather, it will improve their processes and provide them with more efficient ways to increase production, detect disease, weather changes, harvest faster, market crops, fruits and other farm produce with ease, convenience and comfortability. Farmers should be interested in expanding the opportunities of Artificial Intelligence (AI) in agriculture so they can increase farm produce;
image credits: afinancenews
AI frontiers like IBM is providing a global expansion of Watson Decision platform for agriculture, so it can be used to feed a growing population of people worldwide.
Global expansion of IBM Watson Decision Platform for agriculture taps AI, weather and IoT data so growers, food companies and agribusiness can boost production
These processes of global expansion can be aided with the use of other technologies like agricultural robots to help make work faster and effective.
An agriculture robot is a robot that is deployed on the farm for agricultural purpose to make the life of farmers less miserable when performing their farm chores.
Robotics and Artificial Intelligence (AI) automation is part of the key solution to the world projected population of 9.8 Billion by 2050 because agricultural production must double to combat these many mouths to feed. These robotics have found application in;
- Harvesting and picking: Imaging robots using AI technology to select the fruits that have ripped and harvest it. The fact is, you don’t need to imagine it, it's already happening. Watch this youtube video to see how it performs the function of selecting and harvesting.
Furthermore, it runs deeper than just harvesting and picking fruits, although, automation of these systems are not as easy as it may seem. Harvest CROO Robotics is yielding a better result in the use of AI systems to aid crop yield. AI helps the robot to make decisive decision in harvesting and picking ripe fruit from a greenhouse farm or an open field.
Please chat with me via Querlo to find out more about how artificial intelligence is use to boost food production
The demand for food is outpacing available farmland; robots are now becoming popular among farms to increase the full utilization of the available space on the farm for maximum production of crops.
Robotics farming of the future are already running farms as demonstrated by the University of Sydney to improve and provide more food for the growing population of the world. To double food production, for next-generation, radical change in how we see farming must be imbibed. To do this, we need to reinvent farming by imitating Ironox Agriculture modernized farming system where Robots Grow Food without Farmer’s control. That’s the type of farming we need right now!
The Power of AI in Agriculture
AI in agriculture is a powerful force for good and it should be reckoned with from now henceforth in shaping the future of agriculture that will bring a major breakthrough by providing food security.
It is already tested that AI in agriculture is groundbreaking, all that is needed is to fully accept the technology by Harnessing the power of AI to transform agriculture from using crude methods of crop production, harvesting and disinfecting, to using predictive technology like artificial intelligence for increased yield of farm produce in general.
image credits: cambridgeconsultants
Farmers around the world are already embracing innovative technologies to increase farm produce, with now embedded sensors, Geographical Position system (GPS) which detects change in weather conditions, and other environmental factors. These and many other factors are powerful tools used with the help of AI input is contributing to the farm abundant crop yield-and the resulting effect of this is, increase in farm products.
The power of AI in agriculture is boosting agricultural production, and managing available resources to prevent food wastage.
Is AI the future of agriculture?
There are several articles written online about what the future of Artificial Intelligence may look like. Scientist to Hollywood: Artificial intelligence doesn’t work the way you think it does, this, however, begs the questions, is AI the future of agriculture as we hope it to be?
Yes, it is…
Personally as a Nigerian, I’m interested in the future of artificial intelligence in agriculture, because we still use traditional methods of farming, crop yields are not enough to feed homes, because we still practice subsistence agriculture in my country.
image credits: teslarati
Artificial Intelligence is such a technology that shows promises to the digitalizing of the agricultural sector. And it has seen a large scale deployment of state-of-the-art monitoring systems like drones, robots, among others that are revolutionalizing the sector.
Humans have fixed work hours on a farm, but machines do not. It will be unwise and foolish not to harness the growing AI-powered machines to boost food production and reinvent what we know about the agricultural industry in other to meet the demand of the growing population.
Furthermore, in an attempt to reduce labour cost and improving the output of farm produce, AI has proven to be more effective towards a future where more food can be produced and the generation of more profits for commercial farmers.
On A Final Note
The future of farming depends on the adoption of cognitive solutions using artificial intelligence. While large scale research is still on-going to aid farmers to cope with challenges of production and disease control, using AI autonomous decisions and predictive solutions can go a long way in boosting the farming industry.
With the integration of AI into the farming industry, it will be able to handle frequent changes from weather conditions on farm fields, to humidity in storage facilities to give real-time solutions to arising challenges that the farmer may face.
AI in agriculture should be a field that individuals, cooperate bodies, governments of countries and the entire world, in general, should be focused on.
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