It’s fall in Indiana, and that means more than falling leaves – and temperatures. When the calendar flips to October and November, it’s time for farmers to harvest their crops. Some farm fields and rural roads are so busy with combines (crop harvesters) and rigs (crop haulers) that they cause mini-traffic jams throughout Indiana’s countrysides.
So, now seems a good time to ponder just how those crops get so robust and what role technology plays in that.
When talking about agricultural technology – or agtech – there’s a relatively new kid on the block: artificial intelligence (AI).
AI may be relatively new, but it sure is becoming invasive – in mostly a good way. AI it seems has its fingerprints on just about everything these days, and farming is no different. AI is being deployed in fascinating ways on the farm, and in addition to helping increase yields and decrease costs for farmers, it’s helping attract a new crop of tech-minded growers.
It’s also allowing smaller farms to compete with their bigger brethren.
The autonomous-farming industry is beginning to boom, with approximately 200 AI-based agricultural start-ups in the U.S. alone. Examples of artificial intelligence on farms include self-driving tractors and combine harvesters, robot swarms for crop inspection and autonomous sprayers.
Indoor farming companies like Plenty and AppHarvest, which is backed by Hoosier investors, are also using AI and computer vision (using AI to cull information from photos and videos) to collect data on crops and adjust the environment for optimal nutrition and flavor. They also utilize robotic arms to harvest the food. Blue River Technology uses AI and computer vision to differentiate crops from weeds, allowing for targeted herbicide application and less human labor.
Traditional farmers are also getting a big AI-assisted boost. New AI-powered tools are helping revolutionize agriculture by giving small farmers access to agronomists, data scientists and algorithms that help them sow, water, fertilize and harvest more efficiently to save money and become more sustainable and competitive.
Indiana farmers and organizations are on the leading edge of the agtech and AI-on-the-farm movement.
For instance, Corteva Agriscience, a global agriculture company based in Indianapolis, this spring announced a breakthrough in plant gene editing that uses proprietary technology to assign several disease-resistant traits to a specific location in the gene.
What’s more, Purdue University’s College of Agriculture has been recognized as the third best in the country, in part because of the number of tech-savvy graduates it produces. According to Karen Plaut, Purdue’s executive vice president for research, 60,000 graduates per year are needed in the agbioscience and agtech space, which means recruiting students who have never considered agriculture as a career path is becoming increasingly important. That strategy is helping usher a new wave of farmers into Hoosier fields.
“New students come in and say, ‘Wow, some of the things we can do in agriculture are exciting, and we can make a difference. We can feed the world,’” Plaut explains.
Additionally, Purdue University has received a five-year, $500,000 grant to play an education and workforce development role in the new $20 million AI Institute for Climate-Land Interactions, Mitigation, Adaptation, Tradeoffs and Economy (AI-CLIMATE). The institute is one of seven new AI institutes, funded by the National Science Foundation and the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s National Institute of Food and Agriculture.
AgriNovus, a nonprofit focused on growing the state’s agtech and agbioscience economy, created an online program called Field Atlas, a resource where young people and students can explore jobs in the agbioscience and agtech space beyond traditional agriculture positions.
“You can be a data scientist or a finance major, software engineer, a software architect, whatever it is – there are jobs for you here,” AgriNovus President and CEO Mitch Frazier states. “There are applications of AI and machine learning. Everything in this economy is critical to life. So, we see this is as much about making students and educators aware of the opportunities here.”
Farmers worldwide are taking note of the agtech revolution as governments try to boost food production to feed growing populations, even as water supplies and farmland shrink and political and economic challenges for farmers rise.
Blue-chip tech companies are jumping into the agtech arena and bringing lots of resources with them.
Microsoft, for example, recently planted seeds in agtech through its Project FarmBeats and Project FarmVibes programs, which use data from sensors, drones, satellites, connected tractors and other equipment on the farm to feed AI-powered tools and algorithms that turn data into intelligence. Microsoft recently rolled out its Azure Data Manager of Agriculture, a commercial solution that is built on the foundation of Project FarmBeats.
Companies like Microsoft are working with smaller tech firms with boots in the local fields. Just one example is Microsoft’s work with Agrobit, a small tech company in Argentina. Agrobit built its AI-enabled software on a Microsoft platform that initially focused on soybeans, corn and wheat and has expanded from there to help manage 50 different crops.
These AI-enabled platforms are designed to constantly improve, helping growers increase yields all the while using less seed, water and fertilizer. Agtech experts say farmers can realize an overall cost savings of 30% or more when using these AI tools.
The applications for AI tools on the farm seem almost limitless. With AI-enabled technology, farmers can run different scenarios for dry or humid years and add in changing government regulations, market valuations and currency exchange rates, combined with all the specific growing and harvesting requirements for each different type of crop, and quickly come up with full plans and budgets to help with decision-making. AI platforms can even suggest a different type of crop that might work better for a certain season based on all the input parameters. And the apps work on connected computers in the office and offline devices out in the field.
So, as you ponder how crops have become more robust and technology’s role in the process… just know that AI is helping agricultural operations of all shapes and sizes and from farm to table.
“It’s going to be interesting to see where all of this goes,” says John Evans, assistant professor of agriculture and biology at Purdue. “There’s already a lot of AI being leveraged in ag, and I think that will only accelerate. I think we’re going to see a lot of really interesting, innovative, and perhaps surprising new ways AI will be used in farming.”
