Transfer of new technology among the vegetable farmers

 

Vegetable growers face a variety of challenges, including pests and diseases, labor shortages, and climate change. In the last few decades, several “smart” technologies have been developed for vegetable production and processing. However, growers are confronted with a variety of challenges when considering adopting new technology or adjusting existing technology. Growers are being offered solutions that might not work in their specific production system or might not be economically feasible.

 

SIMPLIFY SURVEYING

 

Field surveys for disease/pest scouting and to assess plant stress are expensive, labor intensive, and time-consuming. Since labor shortage is a major issue in vegetable production, small unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) equipped with various sensors (remote sensing) can simplify surveying procedures, reduce labor costs, decrease data collection time and produce critical and practical information.

 

For example, recently UAVs and remote sensing have allowed growers to constantly monitor crop health status, estimate plant water needs, and even detect diseases. The precision agriculture team (@PrecAgSWFREC) at the University of Florida Institute of Food and Agricultural Sciences (UF/IFAS) Southwest Florida Research and Education Center (SWFREC) developed a cloud-based application called Agroview.

Agroview can process, analyze and visualize data collected from UAVs and other aerial platforms (e.g., small planes and satellites). This technology utilizes machine learning (an application of artificial intelligence) to detect single plants and assess plant size and stress. Agroview and UAVs were initially used to create plant inventories in citrus and to detect specific diseases in vegetables with high accuracy. Early detection and eradication of infected plants are crucial to controlling disease and pest spread throughout the field.

 

 SMART SPRAYERS

 

Most conventional sprayers apply agrochemicals uniformly, even though the distribution of pests and diseases is typically patchy, resulting in waste of valuable compounds, increased costs, crop damage risk, pest resistance to chemicals, environmental pollution, and contamination of products. Contamination can be related to run-off after application, discharge from drainage, and off-target deposition of spray due to the wind (spray drift). This contamination can be significantly reduced through the optimization of spraying technology.

Benefits:

Spray drift of agrochemicals occurs during every application and accounts for a loss of up to 50 percent of the agrochemical used. Minimizing the negative impacts of agrochemicals (and spraying technologies) is a major global challenge.

 

Reduced airborne spray drift by up to 87%; reduced spray loss on the ground by up to 93%; reduced pesticide use by more than 50%; showed the same level of pest control as a conventional sprayer

 

 

One example is the See & Spray machine developed by Blue River Technology for weed control in arable crops. See & Spray utilizes computer vision and AI to detect and identify individual plants (such as cotton) and weeds and then applies herbicide only to the weeds. This machine can reduce the required quantity of herbicide by more than 90 percent compared to traditional broadcast sprayers. However, this technology was designed for arable crops and might not be a cost-effective solution for specific vegetable production systems.

 

 

ROBOTIC HARVESTING

 

Fresh-market vegetables are quickly perishable and virtually 100 percent are hand-harvested. Vegetable growers face increasing shortages of laborers, which in turn, drive up harvest costs. Mechanical and robotic harvesting systems for vegetable growers could simultaneously decrease their dependence on manual labor, reduce harvesting costs and improve overall competitiveness in the market.

In one example, Harvest Croo Robotics, a Florida company, is developing a robotic harvester for strawberries that does not require growers to radically change the way they currently grow crops. This technology successfully harvested berries during the 2019–20 season. It could address the labor shortage problem and increase grower profit.

 

PRECISION AGRICULTURE

 

Agriculture is undergoing an evolution - technology is becoming an indispensable part of every commercial farm. New precision agriculture companies are developing technologies that allow farmers to maximize yields by controlling every variable of crop farming such as moisture levels, pest stress, soil conditions, and micro-climates. By providing more accurate techniques for planting and growing crops, precision agriculture enables farmers to increase efficiency and manage costs.

 

Precision agriculture companies have found a huge opportunity to grow. A recent report by Grand View Research, Inc. predicts the precision agriculture market to reach $43.4 billion by 2025. The emerging new generation of farmers is attracted to faster, more flexible startups that systematically maximize crop yields.