Will Artificial Intelligence Replace Grower Know-How?
January 20, 2020 One of the hottest debated tech topics in all of agriculture is whether artificial intelligence (AI) is going to enable or displace grower knowledge in the coming years and decades.
Where you make your hay in this industry — in plant production, as an input supplier, or for a technology provider — will largely determine where you come down on this issue. The growers mostly all agree there are just too many variables to manage for artificial intelligence to ever truly replace grower knowledge, while the tech suppliers and algorithm wizards warn that this technology is already more accurate in its recommendations than many longtime growers, and its adoption is inevitable.
Chris Higgins, Owner and Founder at Hort Americas, has his own thoughts on the subject.
“It’s one of the hot topics we’re hearing about, but I would say that the majority of people don’t understand how it is going to apply (to production),” he says. “For me, AI is definitely something we need to figure out how to utilize in the greenhouse.
“If we’re talking about a monocrop scenario in the greenhouse, where we’re essentially mass producing something, then the path to implementing AI is really kind of easy, and it makes a tremendous amount of sense,” he says. “But what happens when we’re not mono-cropping? What happens when we have a wide variety of variables we’re trying to manage? How do we make an investment work for us then?”
One way to make it work, in Higgins’ opinion, is to ensure a trained horticulturist is the one monitoring and interacting with the data.
“If there’s a horticulturist on the (data) team that can help the growers understand how to use the data, then the tech and AI is going to win every time,” he says.
“A lot of the people selling tech do not have experience on the farm, so they’re not speaking the same language as these growers,” Higgins says. “These programmers need a grower to teach them so they can program the tech in a way that makes sense quickly.”
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