IBM's Watson agriculture platform predicts crop prices, combats pests, and more

Roughly 2 million farms dot the continental U.S., and the decisions their proprietors make impact the entire food supply chain. According to one study, if just 5 percent of the U.S. broccoli production isn't harvested, over 90 million pounds of broccoli go uneaten. To help stabilize a market often fraught with unpredictability, IBM today launched the Watson Decision Platform for Agriculture, a new platform comprising artificial intelligence (AI), internet of things, and cloud solutions that together generate "evidence-based" insights. It's available as a managed service offering and part of IBM's new collection of prepackaged tools pretrained for customer service, human resources, manufacturing, and marketing use cases. "Farming has always been a complex undertaking that requires growers to manage an interconnected web of pre-season and in-season decisions while at the mercy of mother nature," the Armonk company wrote in a press release.