Summer is finally here, and for those of us living in the southern-most tip of the United States this means that we are in peak tropical fruit season. This is the time when our kitchen counters are perpetually covered with mangos, longans, and lychees. Seldom is the time that we go out to walk our dogs and don’t return home with a bag full of fruit from a neighbor.
Working with farmers these last few years has been a truly humbling experience. Our AI startup has been providing technology for home growers and smallholder farmers to help them improve performance and optimize their operations, including sensors, farm management software, trained AI models for their crops, and most recently predictive models for agriculture across regions. Just like we can predict that a hurricane is coming a week before it gets here, we can start predicting that a disease is about to wipe out a crop before it happens.
Agriculture continues to be one of the least digitized industries around the world. And while advancements in technology have transformed various sectors over the years such as finance, healthcare, media and manufacturing, the agricultural industry has been slower to adopt digital technologies.
There are several reasons why this happens:
- Farmers have deep-rooted traditions and practices that have been passed down through generations. Many of them still rely on traditional methods, things that are not written down in a book or in a blog and therefore cannot be used to train AI models. This is important when we think about training our AI models in the future as most human knowledge is not present in texts. Physical knowledge that we have about everyday life is not necessarily linguistic.
- The agricultural industry consists of numerous small-scale farms, making it more challenging to implement and standardize digital solutions across the sector. Adoption of digital technologies is hindered by the lack of uniformity in farm operations. In fact, 78% of farms around the world (around 500 million farms) are smallholder farms, meaning that they are on average two to three acres in size. And the mass market is the largest market for technology innovation.
- Farming also involves various factors such as weather conditions, soil quality, crop diseases and plant nutritional issues which can be difficult to monitor and predict accurately.
The beauty and abundance of nature when walking down an orchard teaches you the importance of patience, perseverance, conquering setbacks and obstacles, persistence in the face of adversity, and discipline.
“Trust in the process” is a favorite saying from one of my favorite farmers. “Not only at the farm, but with everything you do in life.” I’m taking that lesson to heart.
Wishing you a wonderful Summer!
Dr. Julieta Ross 