Artificial intelligence will help the developing world streamline agricultural production

Farming today is all about speed and precision. From prediction technology to artificial intelligence (AI), farmers have a range of tools at their disposal.

Over the past decade, precision agriculture has experienced unprecedented growth across the world.

Precision agriculture involves a range of strategies and tools that allow farmers to optimize and increase soil quality and productivity by introducing a series of targeted key interventions.

Based on state-of-the-art tools and technologies, precision agriculture allows farmers to intervene at the right time and choose the right solution for their crop. This saves time and leads to better sustainability, higher productivity and increased profitability for farmers.

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“The greatest challenge for agriculture remains the same for 7,000 years – to produce more with fewer resources,” says Cezar Busato, a Brazilian agronomist.

Busato, who has operated his family farm for more than a decade, says that given advances in technology, today’s farmers can rely on effective forecasting tools for the effective application of chemicals and fertilizers.

“When you combine them with artificial intelligence, working with a database full of high-quality information, you’ll be able to produce more, spend fewer resources, and be more sustainable,” he says. .

He believes robust artificial intelligence will be a game-changer in agriculture.

Farmers make between 100 and 150 decisions in a season – from choosing the right genetic variety for their field to assessing soil conditions and planting the right seed at the right time.

Syngenta, an agricultural science and technology provider, has developed precision farming tools to empower farmers to make those good decisions – using data and AI to increase their overall yield.

“We have a strong presence on the ground through our distribution partners, and we work with them using these technologies and their algorithms and making them suitable for use by farmers,” says Feroz Sheikh, Chief Digital Officer of Syngenta.

Sheikh says one of Syngenta’s most successful digital products is a risk mitigation offering called AgriClime, which is available in several countries. It makes weather forecasts, including “likely heat, frost or cold conditions or the amount of rainfall expected during the season and provides a sort of mitigation guarantee to farmers, much like insurance.”

Syngenta’s digital tools are used to manage approximately 850,000 square kilometers of farmland. The team is now collaborating with Google on an AI project, to help a computer distinguish between a weed and a plant.

It will help farmers detect weed density in their field, help them determine weed species and then help them make informed crop forecasting decisions.

The idea is to allow this technology to grow and make it accessible to farmers and help transform herbicide and weed management globally.

Local knowledge and experience played a central role in their plans.

Sheikh says that when they develop an AI algorithm for a new market, it’s based on local data sets, including local soil and weather conditions, so the recommendations are effective for that environment.

“We need really deep, granular and defined data. Artificial intelligence will help us to manage the big data that we are able to collect through different means and this will allow us to really reduce the input”, explains Ismahane Elouafi, scientist chief. at the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO).

“Agriculture as a sector uses 80% of the water in the world. So if we can have precision agriculture in most agricultural systems, if we have the investment to put it in place, we can easily reduce our irrigation and water consumption by 70 to 80 percent.”

However, accessibility to technology and innovation remains a huge problem.

Elouafi says there is obvious discrimination and a huge difference between the North and the South, “and the main problem is certainly the cost”.

She sees this as a big problem that needs to be tackled as there are several innovations available in the developed world that small producers in the developing world do not have access to. Therefore, they have no way to improve their productivity and efficiency.

“I always give the example of staple crops in Africa, right now most of them are producing around a tonne per hectare. Meanwhile in Europe most of these staple crops are at least 10 tonnes per hectare. There is a difference in the ecosystem, but it is above all the lack of inputs and the functioning of the agricultural system in Africa compared to Europe.

But some countries are at the forefront of investing in technology and innovation and making it available to markets around the world.

The FAO hailed the Chinese agricultural model as a success.

China has pushed hard for scaling up technologies at the farmer level and has done far more than other countries, Elouafi says. Thus, within a few decades, China has increased farmers’ incomes through the adoption of technologies that have boosted their yield.

“There are very strong institutions in China that are working very hard to make many innovations available and put them on the ground with farmers and increase productivity, efficiency and therefore farmers’ incomes,” says the chief scientist.

The FAO also welcomed the investment in China, Russia, Japan and South Korea and hopes these countries will help make the technology accessible to farmers around the world.

Despite all the technological advancements in precision farming, it has been difficult to predict extreme variability and weather patterns like the recent floods in Pakistan and droughts across Europe.

“Unfortunately we don’t have all the tools or all the understanding about it yet and that’s why we’re surprised every year when we have huge disasters…but I expect very soon time, maybe in a year or two, we will have a better understanding of what is happening and hopefully we can intervene before it happens,” says Elouafi.

“But we now have the computer systems that will allow us to juggle a lot more data than before. We have a huge investment in artificial intelligence that will allow us to bring all this information to give a better projection.”

Cover image: Precision agriculture allows farmers to intervene at the right time. /FAO