IBM - Earth Day

With nearly 160 million hectares, India is home to the second largest concentration of agricultural land in the world -- which means inefficiencies in pesticide applications can quickly escalate into significant environmental issues. Farmers often pump a cocktail of chemicals into crops in hopes of warding off pests and diseases. But this comes at a cost to them, as well as the ecosystem. Enter Plant Pathologist, an IoT-based project devised by IBM's India Research Lab designed to help small-scale farmers better care for their crops. In a 2017 pilot program, farmers sent cell phone pictures of ailing plants to an AI model that used machine vision to identify the hallmarks of disease. Researchers paired these insights with forecasted Weather Company data to predict when certain pest or disease attacks might occur.