Why Farmers Are Turning to AI to Boost Yields
Environmental author Wendell Berry might shudder at this comparison, but farmers are like data scientists. To make decisions, they ferret out meaning from a sea of data.
That data just happens to be related to environmental conditions like temperature, rainfall, salinity, nitrogen, pests, commodity prices, and other variables.
What that data often shows is trouble: increasingly costly or scarce water supplies, new and more voracious pests, herbicide-resistant weeds, and extreme weather. All of this can result in lower farm yields and higher costs.
At the same time, that trouble has also created an entry point for entrepreneurs and venture capitalists. Between 2012 and 2015, investments in agriculture technology, or agtech, grew by 80 percent.
In recent years, agtech startups have built products focused on saving water, micromanaging fertilizer, and building better sensors to make data collection cheaper. But to find meaning from data and use it to make better decisions, artificial intelligence has begun to play a vital role in agtech.
Less Is More
Farmers face a gargantuan task: trying to feed a world of 7 billion, which will swell to 9 or 10 billion by midcentury. At the same time, due to factors like deforestation, transportation…
