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The technology from Intel and Dell is helping the farm be proactive instead of reactive, he said, increasing the yields of its crops and reducing its use of power and water. It’s even helping employees have a better work-life balance, he added.
Amid ongoing research into AI’s potential benefits for agriculture, farms like Nature Fresh are on the frontlines of adoption.
Farmers already use an array of technology, with some having adopted high-tech tools such as drones to survey farms and look for information on weeds, pests and disease, said Jacqueline Keena, managing director at industry-led nonprofit Emili. The organization operates Innovation Farms, a “smart farm” where new technologies are tested and demonstrated near Winnipeg.
The next phase of that technology involves AI models using that data to make inferences, predictions and even decisions, said Keena _ and AI enables agriculture to become “hyper-optimized” down to a more specific level than before.
The technology is becoming more sophisticated, moving from simple rules-based systems to large language models, said Rozita Dara, an assistant professor in the University of Guelph’s School of Computer Science and the director of the Artificial Intelligence for Food initiative.
