The use of artificial intelligence in agriculture has exploded in recent years, but the data being used to feed it has been years in the making.
Computer science professors at Dakota State University say AI is being trained to help in all areas of the field.
“For AI to work, you need a lot of information, a lot of data in order to help create the AI’s themselves. So that’s kind of where we’re, you know, kind of starting out with and so just kind of collecting data, whether that’s crop data from year to year and then also collecting like image data perhaps. So you know, for our AI, some of the things that we’d like them to be able to do is identify plant disease, identifying weeds, pests, things like that, so we can take pictures of the different plants that we have. And so we’re training our AI’s to identify those different kinds of things, and then also kind of the soil samples themselves, kind of the makeup of the soil. And then that way we can do targeted spraying. Things like that,” said Austin O’Brien.
O’Brien hopes AI will allow greater accuracy for areas, such as nutrition requirements in livestock to crop protection products in fields. However, he says AI is an area that requires constant feeding of information and will rely on data from farmers and ranchers.
