Where AI Meets Flavor

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

AI’s role in agriculture is still taking shape, with many growers testing how it fits into their operations. At Clayton Farms, early use focused on spotting plant issues before they were visible, but today, it's helping determine products for their salad business based on consumer preferences, says owner Clayton Mooney.

Mooney.. “One of the coolest insights that we had while testing this and, and building some kind of prototype camera systems was we started to notice that the data for deficiencies started to pop up before, let's say a horticulturalist was onsite, able to like look at one of the leaves and say, Hey, something's going on. So we felt like this was being really proactive and getting consistent to where we understood every time we harvested a level of lettuce, how many pounds that was going to be. But we ultimately retired the supervised and unsupervised machine learning in that direction because we could not figure out and actually pinpoint a practical amount of labor it decreased or yield increased by. So flash forward today, how we use AI is much more on the consumer side of understanding, like your flavor profile and then what other food items or menu items we can offer to you that compliment that style.”

Clayton Farms is known for building restaurants with farms inside of them, and they are working on franchising.