Field innovations Advances also continue to be made in field operations. Most recently, John Deere and GUSS Automation introduced the autonomous GUSS herbicide sprayer in 2023, with a fully electric version that debuted this summer. Such technologies can help farmers who are limited by environmental regulations on when they can spray, such as midnight to 6 a.m. Some innovators are focusing on robotics, such as the Tortuga AgTech strawberry and table grape harvesting robot—which can also collect data, treat plants with UV-C light and perform trimming—while others are leading the charge with machines that identify weeds and zap them with lasers or herbicide. “Until you see something working in your neighbor’s farm, you may not be willing to buy it,” Pourreza says. “Yes, cleaner, more sustainable farming will benefit farmers and everyone else, but another part is to make the technology affordable. Growers need to see a tangible return on investment to change their management systems and make decisions based on data rather than subjective factors.” For now, the human factor remains king of the fields. “You have to remember, AI is not actually an intelligence. It’s really just hard-working tools that can do a lot of fast calculations,” Pourreza says. Farmers need to make the final call, he notes, but AI can help them avoid bad decisions and implement informed recommendations in an efficient way that makes economic sense.
there’s a lot of other information about plant health outside the visible band,” he says. “Using drones or UAVs and a validated model can generate valuable analytics and provide them to farmers.” Pourreza cites one of the new initiatives that offers promise in the AI realm, the Artificial Intelligence Institute for Next Generation Food Systems (AIFS), which was formed in 2020. More than 40 researchers from six institutions, including UC Davis and UC Berkeley, are working together to bring AI technology to bear throughout the food and agriculture industries. Balancing sustainability and affordability
“Cleaner, more sustainable farming will benefit farmers and everyone else, but another part is to make the technology affordable. Growers need to see a tangible return on investment.” Alireza Pourreza UC Davis Department of Biological and Agricultural Engineering
In the near term, Pourreza sees precision irrigation systems as primary opportunity for California farms and farmers. “The main things we want to manage in a precise manner are fertilizer, which is now being highly regulated, and water, because obviously we don’t have a lot of it,” he says. “We need to find a solution and, right now, that is to implement precision irrigation systems that irrigate and fertigate with variable rates depending on the plant needs.”
In addition to the research taking place at ag departments in universities, Pourreza believes that government incentives are needed to facilitate a further move from conventional uniform farming to site-specific practices. Greater adoption also requires increasing trust between farmers and ag- tech companies. Pourreza cites industry research from earlier this year that concluded many on-farm ag-tech software products have a reputation for overpromising and underdelivering—a problem that may be mitigated by advances in AI.
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IN YOUR CORNER ISSUE 18 | 2024
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