Greenhouses Looking More Like Food Computers

This is Tim Hammerich of the Ag Information Network with your Farm of the Future Report.

One obvious advantage to greenhouse agriculture is the ability to influence the number one variable in farming: the weather. With new advancements in artificial intelligence and computer vision, modern greenhouses can look a lot more like food-growing computers. Polybee CEO Siddarth Jadhav says their technology creates a digital phenotype of crops twice per week for farmers to adjust their growing practices accordingly.

Jadhav… “What we are doing is we are collecting video data from a simple smartphone camera. We're turning that video of a row of plants into a highly precise 3D model, which is accurate to a few millimeters in scale. And that is how we are able to extract the most important measurements, such as the number of fruits, the dimensions, the number of clusters, their color. We are collecting these videos on a few rows of plants, and we are turning that into a 3D model in a very short time. And out of that model, we are extracting these measurements which are of very high commercial value, be it for breeders, be it for growers. So essentially that's how we are seeing it. You know, wherein of all the important measurements that can be done on a plant, the most important one is yield in terms of its economic impact, and that's what we're targeting with computer vision.”

Polybee is on a mission to automate digital phenotyping, yield estimation and pollination in controlled environment agriculture.