The AI telling farmers when to harvest

[Saka19]

The BBC has a nice piece on AI being used to tell farmers when their crops will be ready to pick. Getting the timing of a harvest right is one of the hardest jobs in farming. Pick too early and the fruit is not ripe, pick too late and it spoils, and either way you need the right number of workers lined up at the right time. A handful of companies now think cameras and AI can help

Canadian firm Vivid Machines mounts cameras on tractors to photograph fruit as the machines move through orchards, then uses the images to predict harvest dates. In the UK, FruitCast does something similar using cameras on drones, smartphones or vehicles. The systems count fruit, spot buds and flowers, and forecast when crops will ripen while taking weather and irrigation into account. Universities including Princeton, North Carolina State and the University of Florida are working on similar tools. Most of the systems are still at the pilot stage

The article talks to growers using the technology. Joel Carter of Okanagan Specialty Fruits in Washington State looks after more than 1,250 acres of apple orchards, and UK growers including Angus Soft Fruits and Driscoll's also feature. The crops range from apples to strawberries, raspberries, blackberries, blueberries, tomatoes and grapes. FruitCast claims its predictions are about 90 percent accurate a week ahead and 83 percent accurate three weeks out

FruitCast co-founder Raymond Martin summed it up nicely, saying they do exactly what farmers could do, just on a scale that farmers cannot. A grower can walk a few rows and judge ripeness by eye, but nobody can inspect every plant across hundreds of acres. That is where cameras help. Even so, the piece says adoption is still limited, and many farmers prefer to trust human judgement for the final call

This is the sort of AI story I like, practical and down to earth rather than chatbots and hype. Better forecasts could reduce food waste and help farms plan labour, which has been a real struggle for UK soft fruit growers. Would you trust an AI to tell you when to harvest? And are there other areas of farming where this kind of tech could help?

The AI telling farmers when to harvestwww.bbc.co.uk