German company BASF is establishing its presence in the rice sector of Japan by offering an AI tool that helps farmers make up for a labor shortage, according to a report by Nikkei. This year, Yamazaki Rice, a company with five employees and around 100 hectares of land in Saitama prefecture, started utilizing the Xarvio Field Manager system from BASF. Real-time analysis for satellite and weather is offered by Xarvio. The amount of fertilizer advised for each farm area is also customized by automated maps. The data is then transmitted to farm machinery with GPS.

As I noted recently, organizations often find the biggest success through small steps with artificial intelligence. There are many examples of this at work, but Linux offers a great one. Linux started out as a student desktop experiment before it creeped slowly into companies as a reliable print server before eventually taking over the data center and the cloud (and Mars--it's on both the Chinese and U.S. rovers there). Incremental steps can add up to big things. In the area of food production, it needs to.