Latest Industry Partnerships Advance Agriculture With AI-Driven Solutions

Agbotic, an automated agricultural-focused company, and industrial automation provider Siemens announced a collaborative venture focusing on developing a new AI-based application for optimizing industrial processes. Application development will build upon Agbotic’s patent-pending Artificially Intelligent Control System Agent. Another AI-based agritech venture involves a partnership between Bayer and Microsoft, which brings farmers solutions to their daily activities in real time with the help of generative AI.  

Companies are developing advanced automation technologies to improve agricultural operations. Image used courtesy of Agbotic

Artificial Intelligence (AI) in Agriculture

Companies are employing AI and machine learning to assist farmers in remotely identifying and tracking crop pests, guiding agricultural machinery and robots in identifying and eradicating weeds, and tracking soil moisture and nutrient levels for specific applications. These are only a few uses that advanced software and AI-powered agricultural equipment are capable of.  

Essentially, AI and generative AI can advance the efficiency of agricultural practices. AI as an agricultural management tool can help mitigate resource input (land, water, natural or synthetic fertilizer) while achieving equal or even increased product output.

The Artificially Intelligent Control System Agent from Agbotic serves as the foundation for developing a novel industrially-focused application. Image used courtesy of Agbotic 

Siemens and Agbotic’s AI Initiative 

The collaboration between Agbotic and Siemens will center on Agbotic’s “Artificially Intelligent Control System Agent.” The unique patent-pending solution will serve as a basis for the joint development of a novel AI application that can link up with any industrial controller, reducing time spent on programming and facilitating repetitive tuning, speedy auto-response, and optimization capabilities across industrial operations and processes. Agbotic will leverage Siemens’s top-tier rugged PLC technologies and global install base of industrial edge devices.

The collaboration is set to advance the efficiency and sustainability of farming practices and herald new automation possibilities within industrial environments. Automated AI systems can help save time, reduce resource inputs (cutting costs on crop production and reducing environmental pollution), and facilitate operational transparency across industrial and agricultural practices. 
 

The MagicTrap identifies and monitors pests using high-resolution camera technology and AI. Image used courtesy of Bayer 

Bayer’s AI-powered Agricultural Solutions

Bayer and Microsoft have launched Azure Data Manager for Agriculture, coupled with cloud-based AgPowered Services. These projects seek to improve data integration, enhance transparency, and spur the development of next-generation agricultural technologies.

One key focus of the collaboration is the launch of a powerful generative AI system that helps agricultural workers with their daily work. Bayer is putting a large language model (LLM) to the test after training it with years of proprietary data. This LLM employs generative AI to provide timely and correct answers to inquiries about agricultural practices, farm management, and Bayer agricultural goods. LLMs are powerful AI systems trained on large text datasets to understand and generate human-like prose. This functionality can significantly optimize the efficiency of agricultural operations by delivering solutions to farmers in the field in real-time.

Another innovative automated agri-tool from Bayer (developed with Thundercomm and Atlantik Elektronic) is the smart insect pest trap, MagicTrap. Designed for oilseed rape fields, the MagicTrap is a water trap with a grid-based system used to capture and identify weevils, pollen beetles, and cabbage stem flea beetles. The trap uses an AI-based vision recognition system for pest identification and sends insect counts to the MagicScout smartphone app, alerting customers if action is needed to mitigate the spread of pests. Such a tool aids decision-making, promoting crop protection to ensure optimum harvests.