AI for Good: How advanced crop intelligence can help solve food production challenges

Farmers spend nearly half of their operational budgets on agrochemicals such as herbicides and pesticides. Unfortunately, they usually apply these to entire fields at a time, which generates high chemical costs and decreases the efficacy of the chemicals. Such widespread application of chemicals harms the environment, endangers human health, and increases the likelihood of chem ical-resistance in weeds, pests, and diseases. And, even with that damaging widespread application, loss to weeds, pests and diseases can range from 20-50%. But manually scouting and sampling to determine the locations of these problems is time-consuming and costly, and cannot easily account for the enormous variety of factors that affect crops.