Artificial intelligence key to Africa's future food security - Farmers Review Africa

The cumulative view provided by the confluence of machine learning and decision making in conjunction with third-party data all hosted in the cloud, has given rise to artificial intelligence (AI) in agriculture. The ability of agricultural equipment to think, predict and even advise farmers presents Africa with an historic opportunity to meet the continent's own food requirements. AI also presents Africa with the capability to integrate its agricultural sector into global agricultural value chains. According to GeoFarm South Africa, farms in the United States are 27% more productive than South African farms compared across the same area, moisture levels and soil types. While, superficially, this is because farms in the United States are more mechanised, a closer examination of what these agricultural machines are doing shows just how fundamentally AI has changed the way humans farm, and how dramatically these changes have increased agricultural yields.