Precision farming using AI
Besides being a small country area wise, Netherlands is a leader in agricultural good. This is how Netherlands is producing more food using less resources.
Will we be able to feed the world population by 2050? With an ever increasing rate, it might be very difficult. Agriculture requires land and healthy soil, and believe it or not we are running out of it. With the urban construction and hectares of land dedicated to farming already, it might just be very difficult to try and increase our production. Today, we are looking at one such inspirational example, The Netherlands.
Netherlands is world’s major exporter in terms of agriculture. Last year, they did a total business of exporting agriculture goods worth $111 billion! For a country of such small size, it appears almost impossible. One of the example is Duijvestijn, a company who produced 100 million tomatoes for the world, in an AI automated greenhouse! Most of the farms in Netherlands are automated and run by AI. This is called precision farming. The resources are given exactly what the plant needs for a healthy growth, nothing more nothing less. Everything like indoor temperatures, soil and water quality is also monitored continuously. This minimizes wastage and increases production quality exponentially. Sensors, which are hidden between the plants, constantly generate data which is then monitored by a Machine Learning model to automate the temperature, moisture and other such qualities for the plant. To increase the production further they use, what is known as, vertical farming. Vertical farming is simply a design where samplings are planted one over the another so that maximum crop can be grown in limited amount of area. To make things even more awesome, the harvesting and management of the greenhouse is done by AI robots (an AI tractor shown in the picture below).
For monitoring the plants’ health, they use computer vision. Newly planted saplings are tested by cutting their leaves with a robot arm and then exposing the sample under UV and infrared rays to measure their photosynthesis. The data is then processed using computer vision to calculate their energy generated at the molecular level. Accordingly, the best environment for a certain species of plants are manged so that not even a single sapling goes waste.
This technology is then extended by using a depth perception camera on the automated tractor so that it can identify vegetables hidden in the plants. This tractor is actually using AI model trained on a virtual farm setting on a computer. It can also calculate if the vegetable is ripe enough for harvesting or not.
While all this is super sci-fi and interesting, Duijvestijn takes a lot of care in terms of energy conservation. Besides having a capacity of tons of rainwater harvesting and thousands of kilo watts of solar energy, their greenhouse uses geothermal energy to regulate heating. Due to this, they use almost no natural gas or fossil fuels, saving about 6 to 7 million meter cube annually. The saplings are planted in a substrate made of stone wool. Stone wool material are completely recyclable and can also be used for filling materials for making bricks for buildings! No pesticides are used, instead natural enemies are used like ladybugs, etc. Even when such advanced machines are used, almost the whole greenhouse acts as a natural breeding ground, with bumble bees flying around to pollinate the plants too.
This is an ideal example of what we need in our smart cities for agriculture. Many countries are applying to make such automated greenhouses, like Japan, Canada, etc. I can’t cover all of them in a single article but imagine if half the world is able to adapt to this technology even half way. We would be able to build a massive supply of food and a sustained future!
