AI and Food Industy - The new Agriculture (Part II)

Being a farmer is not only making plants grow. Apart from all the care applied to the plants, they also need to collect what has been produced. The harvesting of agricultural products is one of the most difficult, and delicate stages in the food production chain.

Harvesting strawberries - Photo by Farsai Chaikulngamdee on Unsplash

Millions of people are employed in this process. It is a seasoned process what means temporary jobs. These jobs are mostly available in the summer season, where we reach the harvest phase for the majority of the plants. Many farmers dedicate themselves to fruit growth. In this agriculture's field, we have to take care of plants and then pick the fruits. As you may think, this is a hard and repetitive task. Image a farm with several acres of land. Getting all the fruits from the plants can take months and involve lots of people. Hiring so many people is very expensive for farmers. Besides, people can harvest fruits inappropriately, reducing the fruit's available time for consumption, making them rot earlier. Hence, entrepreneurs in the AI field saw an opportunity here to apply AI-based methods, improving the agriculture's harvest stage.

Some companies are building robotic implements for tractors or whole robots to collect the fruits. Here we see algorithms using image recognition to identify the fruit among the plant's leaves. Moreover, these systems can identify the fruit maturation stage by its colour. Still, the majority of them are slow in their tasks. The time required to identify and harvest the fruit is much more than the time required by humans. However, these robotic devices can operate uninterruptedly for more hours than humans. So it increases the number of products we can get in one day, leaving the human's score behind.  We are in the early stages of this big agricultural revolution, hence, it is expected to have lots of improvements in the AI algorithms and robotic devices, increasing very significantly the productivity of this new machines. 

A threat to the agriculture practice, becoming bigger every year, is climate changes. The climate changes are affecting the productivity and quality of farm products. These problems have been worrying the agriculture sector leaders even more as the years are passing by. Indeed, we have systems to predict the weather, still, we do not have anything to avoid the impact of weather events such as thunderstorms, hurricanes, raining outside of its season, and so on. Every known plant has its survival conditions off course. With such climate events, the production can be totally destroyed or hardly damaged. Some examples are cherries, strawberries, tomatoes, and so on; with too much rain they get rotten, with too much solar radiation exposition they roast. Thus, the agriculture sector is now testing the use of vertical farms monitored by AI.

This is a new concept. We have everything being monitored in a large room with several layers of land. The companies want to have everything being controlled 24/7 using AI algorithms to predict the best conditions to the plants, being either climate or soil conditions, and to give reports for better decision making. The whole space is full of sensors to have real-time data feeding the AI models. Then, as soon as the AI systems alert for something, the best solution is applied. We have robots to plant the seeds, to help them grow, and to harvest them. Humans here are at a higher level of decision making. With these specific conditions, we can yield more quantity of foods, with them having more quality too. Off course the water consumption is way less and with the same land area, we can have ten or more times the usual quantity.

The vertical farms allow us to bring the farms to us instead of we going to a distant land to make it cultivable. With this new concept, we can bring the farms to our cities, hence, avoiding some transportation kilometres either to go work at the farm or to get the food products in the market. Furthermore, using mainly electrical robots, we can have a completely ecological farm using only green energy, such as solar energy. Using these vertical farms can be taken as a "win-win" situation because we can reduce pollution in the farming sector that leads to a healthier planet, and also reduce the climate changes impact. 

What do you reckon about this new vertical farms concept? It will revolutionize farming as we know? It will take too many years to be a real thing? Do you think these new robots can take the people jobs or people will still have their jobs but working differently? Please let me know in the comments section.