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Agri Business Review | Friday, April 29, 2022
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AI has another disruptive technology that experienced a widespread application in the last decennial Turning away from bringing excellent food is also speculated to be fighting opposing world hunger.
Fremont, CA: Agriculture and farming are believed to be the major professions worldwide. Humanity and its practices have surpassed how agriculture is executed with the integration of diverse technologies. As the world population expands with each minute and second, the availability of farmland becomes scarcer, forcing farmers to provide extra care while making decisions for choosing crop/crop systems. The ultimate goal is to use less land space, produce the most of the crops, and increase productivity.
Agriculture is now a $5 trillion industry across the globe. The industry has partnered with numerous technologies, of which Artificial Intelligence(AI) is the most outstanding, to support smart farming methods. Sustainable and smart farming focuses on producing a more healthy yield of crops, controlling pests, and routine monitoring of the soil. It also keeps the developing conditions, organizes data and information for the farmers, helps in workload reduction, and increases a wide range of farming-related tasks generally in the food supply chain.
• AI to Analyze Farming-Related Data:
Farms manufacture massive amounts of agricultural data points on the ground daily. With the backing of AI, farmers can now analyze an in-depth assortment of things in real-time. However, a few parameters like atmospheric conditions, temperature, usage of water, or conditions of soil gathered from the farmland have been applied to make thought-out and informed decisions. Many cases for AI engaged in the farmland involve enhancement of farming techniques to produce more abundant yields by predicting the crop selection and the best hybrid seed choices, besides resource utilization.
AI systems assist in increasing the worth and accuracy of the harvest.
This technique is called precision agriculture. It uses AI to help the spotting of diseases in plants, control pests, and inadequate plant nutrition on farms. These sensors backed by AI can also detect and target weeds and then decide the type of herbicides to be utilized within a respective buffer zone. It supports the prevention of over-application of herbicides butandops the excessive toxins being stored in food.
It can also help harvesters create seasonal forecasting models to strengthen agricultural precision and increase productivity. This pattern can be applied to decipher and predict the weather form to facilitate the right planning for the farmers. For small farms in underdeveloped countries, seasonal farming will be convenient as their data and knowledge are inadequate. The small farms need to stay working and produce bountiful yields all year long, as they produce nearly 70 percent of the world's total food production.
Additionally, the farmers are capable of monitoring the sky and the ground data of the farm. Computer vision and deep learning algorithms can be applied and captured from drones flying over their fields. With drones, AI-enabled cameras can capture images of the whole farm and analyze the images in near real-time to recognize the problematic areas and the potential improvements. Furthermore, automated drones can cover much more land in less time in comparison with men surveying on foot, allowing regular monitoring.
• AI Solves the Labor Challenge:
Managing the reluctant agrarian manpower is one of the major challenges the farming sector faces at present. The ever-evolving new-age tech and other developments have driven the young generations to cities and created a huge worker deficit on the farms. An answer that is said to assist in tackling this problem is the utilization of AI-driven agricultural bots. These AI-driven bots augment the human labor workforce and are applied in many models over tasks. These bots can kill weeds, harvest better crops, and produce an improved yield.
Farmers can also depend on chatbots when any legal advice is required. The chatbot enlarges helping hands here by answering various frequently asked questions and providing advice and recommendations and suggestions on specific farm trouble or plant quality issues.
With the application of AI and a few other cognitive technologies on farms worldwide, a much more able and efficient system is in place with fewer workers than before. These smart farms all at once produce more food than traditional methods and fulfill the world's food needs more effectively.