One of Australia’s largest horticulturist companies, Costa Group, has recently started using an artificial intelligence system to improve its farming decisions with accurate berry yield predictions. The system will help the company better understand and manage the quality and quantity of its berry crops.
Yield Prediction allows gardeners to see what their yields will be across their farm before any harvesting equipment even touches the soil. The system that Costa Group is using, the “Sensing+” system, doesn’t only offer yield predictions but also insights on better labor management and logistics costs.
Harry Debney, the CEO of Costa Group, said:
We have been impressed with the accuracy achieved to date compared with our current manual approach.
The Sydney-based company, The Yield, designed the Sensing+ program to measure fourteen variables of a typical agriculture model such as wind, rain, light, soil moisture, and temperature in real-time. The data is then uploaded into an Internet of Things (IoT) platform and combined with existing data shared by Costa. Artificial intelligence is then applied to make a localized prediction of each berry crop.
Ros Harvey, the founder of Yield and managing director, explained:
We literally describe the system like a math’s robot because it’s effectively crunching through data and selecting the most important feature sets, creating models, putting them into production, measuring the accuracy, feeding that back in, and continually adjusting.
Recently, the system was installed in New South Wales, Queensland, and Tasmania, within the polytunnels of Costa Group’s eight berry farms.
Harvey clarifies:
Those tunnels that Costa grows its berries in create microclimates where the weather service doesn’t work anymore. So, effectively, we’ve created a weather service within the tunnels, and that goes into both web and mobile with a whole range of capabilities around irrigation, feed, planting, protecting, and harvesting.
According to Harvey, while the system is used to predict the yield for the cultivation of grapevines and other vegetables such as spinach and lettuce, it’s particularly vital when predicting the yield of berries. Compared to other crops, berries have a unique nature of how they grow. “It’s been such a difficult problem for berry producers globally because unlike other crops, berries have many growth stages all at the same time,” she added.
Harvey said:
If you look at a berry plant, it’s fruiting, flowering, there are berries that are ready, and there are berries that are half produced because it continually fruits when it’s in season. Whereas other crops go through this linear growth stage where you harvest once at the end of the season.
With the information transferred through Sensing+, the Costa group not only better understands its berry yield but also better manages the cost of its berries in the market.
