Title : The Digitalization of Crops & The Future of Agriculture
Abstract:
Growers need to ensure well-timed harvests and successful yields, and thus, constantly attend to their farms - inspecting their crops to predict yield size and quality, as well to protect them from pests and disease. The main inspection method available today to growers like visual human inspection has significant limitations. Where used, drones cannot see below the canopy, which is problematic for specialty crops - where the fruits, leaves, shoots, etc. must be observed directly. Yield estimation is a manual process of visual inspection performed by trained experts which is time consuming, less accurate, not scalable and takes high effort.
Bloomfield solves this problem by providing direct line-of-site pixel-level inspection using RGB imaging and AI to automatically assess the health and performance of each and every plant in a grow, regardless of plant type, location or number. The result is more predictable higher quality yields and an enhanced growth management experience for the grower. AI offers a timely and unique opportunity for far greater accuracy and precision. Inspection at scale and objective sub-millimeter analyses on the health and performance of virtually any plant increases farming efficiency. This level of inspection on a plant level can emerge the phenomenon of ‘digitized crops’ - where fruit and vegetable producing plants become living, dynamic digital artifacts which serve as the basis for monitoring and managing every plant. These digital artifacts will, in turn, allow everyone in the supply chain to know the condition, quality and precise quantity of what is in the supply chain rather than relying upon guesses.
