According to the FAO, the word’s population is believed to reach 10 billion people by 20501, a phenomenon that will determine a significant growth of the overall food demand. This, together with climate change, is putting a lot of pressure on the agriculture industry, which is required to become more efficient in providing food to the whole planet. Fortunately, AI-enabled solutions are being more and more implemented to deal with several problems and tasks related to this industry, such as workforce shortage, crops monitoring, controlling infestations, soil monitoring and precision farming using predictive analytics 2.
Solving workforce shortages using AI and robots. Agriculture has always been a labour-intensive industry, where several seasonal workers were required to perform several tiring and often repetitive tasks2. In recent year, the number of people interested in this kind of works has dramatically reduced, thus increasing the gap between required and available workforce3. At the same time, several of those tasks can now be automated and accomplished by AI-powered robots, which can be faster and more accurate than humans. For instance, the American company Harvest Croo4 is currently developing an automatic strawberry harvester capable of substituting more than 30 human workers, where artificial intelligence is used to locate the strawberries in the field, inspect them to assess whether they are ripe or not and pick them.
An image of the automatic strawberry harvester by Harvest Croo
Soil and crops monitoring using machine learning. Artificial intelligence can also be used to continuously monitor the levels of different nutrients, as well as pollutants, present in the soil5. This is done mainly by the combination of cameras, which are used to collect images, and image recognition software, which is used to assess the health conditions of different plants and detect, from data such as the colours of their leaves, whether they are exposed to harmful chemical substances or whether they require more fertilizer. An interesting application of this technology comes from Vinewiew6, a company that offers monitoring solutions powered by artificial intelligence and drones to keep under control several aspects of vineyards: while drones are used to collect data, the provided software will be able to detect various diseases, make informed irrigation decisions and track the ripening of the grapes, thus allowing the winemakers to be more efficient and save more resources.
An image collected by a drone where AI was able to distinguish between healthy and unhealthy grapevines
To conclude, it is possible to notice how artificial intelligence is currently disrupting agriculture, allowing new firms to enter by developing new business models, improving the overall efficiency within the industry, increasing the supply of food and tackling some of the main issues that it is currently facing, from new diseases to global warming.
References
1) FAO. Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations, 2017, 2017. THE STATE OF
FOOD AND AGRICULTURE LEVERAGING FOOD SYSTEMS FOR INCLUSIVE RURAL
TRANSFORMATION. 978-92-5-109873-8pp. 1–181.
3) https://harvestcroo.com/about/#why-automation
5) https://customerthink.com/the-role-of-artificial-intelligence-in-agriculture-sector/
Hi Jacopo,
Thanks for introducing this interesting topic! I actually was about to write something similar.
Many people are not optimistic about the future of automation and robots replacing manpower. In my opinion, it is not to make people unemployed, but to use machines to fill the current shortage of manpower in agricultural labor. This allows farmers to planting in the suburbs of the city avoids hiring urban labor at a high price. For consumers, they can also obtain more high-quality fresh food that comes to the table without traveling.
Another similar example you might be interested with: Smart Robot Company based in UK, Their robot team has three masters. Tom is responsible for monitoring the health of crops with AI. Dick will use non-chemical methods to remove weeds. Wilma is a witty AI brain that will use the consultations collected by Tom to generate feasible suggestions for planting and execute them by Dick.
Of course, those companies we mentioned that use machine farming, are also facing the same challenge, that is, how to reduce costs so that their products still have an advantage in price compared with traditional products. Only by solving this problem can they carry out market expansion.
Reference:
https://www.smallrobotcompany.com/