Agriculture: One of the Most Fertile Industries for AI-powered Research

Agriculture has been a vital industry for the world’s population and is now at the forefront of AI-powered research, with growing demands for food and increasing environmental concerns. With the world's population predicted to reach over 9 billion by 2050, the need to improve agriculture productivity while reducing farming operational costs has become increasingly critical.

Crop management is one of the critical pillars in agriculture, with the potential for sophisticated growing techniques that restore soil fertility and increase productivity. As it can significantly affect biodiversity, crop growth is a complex process that depends on various endogenous and exogenous factors, and it requires careful monitoring and management. Recent breakthroughs in advanced analytics and big data technology can provide farmers with valuable information, including soil and weather monitoring and prediction, weed and pest monitoring, crop yield dynamic predictions, and more.

Nevertheless, this assists farmers on an individual level – and these technologies and gained knowledge can only be fully exploited if it’s widely disseminated. An accumulated knowledge exchange on a global scale can help strengthen local agriculture, while preparing decision-makers for future challenges, such as the drought resilience.

Data collected in crop management is usually large, complex, and heterogeneous, drawn from a variety of sources including sensors, weather stations, satellite imagery, and drone imagery. Yet, there is no common standard for data integration, consolidation, or analysis, making sophisticated decision-making laborious and sometimes beyond reach.

By transforming farming practices from intuition-based decision-making to informed-based decision-making, advanced AI research leverages vast amounts of agricultural data to help farmers, agronomists, and professionals better understand farming tasks and make better decisions in their crop management. 

It’s with this in mind that Israel’s Ministry of Agriculture leverages SparkBeyond's Collective Intelligence Platform to shape its agricultural policy and innovation, extracting context-specific knowledge from the entire web to produce solutions that help increase yield output and reduce water consumption. 

SparkBeyond's Collective Intelligence Platform is an AI-powered research engine that distills the universe of online knowledge to generate contextual, serendipitous insights in minutes. It provides practical and creative solutions, as well as verifies each solution based on global research. The extracted knowledge is combined with the expertise of farmers and agronomists, farming constraints, and regulations to derive new management processes with the goal of improving productivity, reducing environmental impact, and ensuring product quality.

This type of AI-research technology offers farmers advanced management methods against climate change and other environmental challenges. It can provide prediction and assistance to farmers against adverse weather, disasters, and market instability, allowing them to assess the loss at the farm level. Furthermore, its granular risk assessment helps farmers and agricultural professionals minimize microbiological or disaster-related risks.

The use of AI research by Israel’s Ministry of Agriculture to shape its policies is a new and innovative approach to agriculture management. By leveraging the vast amounts of knowledge available, the Ministry is able to make informed decisions based on scientific evidence and global research. 

In particular, the Ministry’s use of SparkBeyond's Collective Intelligence Platform to review and test the use of pesticides in agriculture, with a focus on the use and frequency of each approved pesticide and its environmental impact, shows a commitment to reducing the negative impact of farming practices on the environment and public health. 

Similarly, by extracting knowledge from the web to reduce water consumption, the Ministry is addressing the challenges of drought resilience and water pollution, ensuring that the agriculture industry remains sustainable for future generations. Chief scientist at Israel’s Ministry of Agriculture, Dr. Michal Levy, said: "Through the use of such innovative technological systems, we can accelerate the discovery of original and ground-breaking solutions for better-informed decisions. The platform will make it possible to strengthen local agriculture and prepare as required for the challenges of the future climate crisis.” 

This approach sets a precedent for other countries to follow, as it demonstrates the potential for AI research to play a crucial role in shaping agricultural policies, promoting sustainability and food security.