Agriculture is soon to enjoy the same leapfrog effect that rural areas witnessed in the 90s when mobile networks were invented. Thanks to smart AI-enabled devices that can work anywhere on a farm, without need of a power source and network access.
AI in Agriculture Leapfrogs Traditional Milestones
AI is making its mark on every industry including traditionally labor-intensive ones like agriculture. For centuries, farming has relied on machinery to improve efficiency and performance. But it has not been a major beneficiary of information technology until now. Unlike industries like manufacturing that have tapped into IT for materials management, productivity applications, control systems and more, farming has been largely untouched by the cloud, big data, and AI.
This is about to change.
The Power of AI in Farming
Farmers are on the brink of seeing incredible changes due to new AI capabilities. The big breakthrough stems from the possibility of running AI on small battery powered devices, like cameras connected to the internet over low-power, long range networks. So now you can put smart devices in hen houses, in fields, on tractors and in the air. This was not possible before.
Let’s take chicken farming as an example. Using AI Vision a camera in a chicken coup can recognize a bird and it can be trained to distinguish heathy from sick birds based on how they bob their head, or feed. So, farmers can identify and isolate sick chickens and preventing disease spreading.
Similarly, a tractor equipped with cameras could detect the presence of certain pests, or based on the condition of the crop decide how much fertilize to dispense, while an AI enabled drone might fly over all the fields assess the right time and order in which to harvest the crop.
The possibilities are endless.
Catalysts for Agricultural Innovation.
Two big breakthroughs are making this possible.
- The first, is the ability to run highly optimized AI models on AI-native battery-powered chips that are just becoming available in 2024. This unleashes AI from tethered computers and the cloud and puts it on small devices including inside eyewear and clothing while requiring very little power to operate them.
- The second is the emergence of pre-trained models and model zoos for small devices. The problem is that creating, training and porting models to run on a particular piece of hardware is a costly business requiring rare expertise. The lack of which holds developers back.
By providing a library of working models, model zoos ModelNova remove this barrier, enabling relative AI novices, to quickly prove out new ideas without having to start from scratch. They can leverage existing pre-trained models together with hardware platforms they can already run on and quickly learn if their PoC is viable.
Lucky Farmers enjoy the Leapfrog Effect
The introduction of AI in agriculture parallels the impact of mobile networks in the eastern-block in the 90s. The sparsely populated Baltic region had limited access to landlines due to prohibitive cost of deployment. A village had a phone. Homes did not. But when mobile networks were invented, they were able to deploy cell towers, and leapfrogged 20 years of infrastructure development, gaining widespread phone service and internet services almost overnight.
Agriculture is in for a similar treat with AI.
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