Precision Agriculture Promises More Sustainable Farms, If the Tech Can Deliver

Visual AI and robotics technology are facilitating a fourth agricultural revolution. Precision agriculture, the use of spatial and temporal data to manage crops and resources more efficiently, promises to reduce human labor and more accurately target applications of pesticides and fertilizers. This creates the potential for more sustainable and less expensive cultivation practices.

Enabled by sophisticated imagery capture and machine learning and executed through a variety of automated mechanical devices, precision agriculture would seem to be the perfect example of AI as a net benefit to humanity. Indeed, a range of existing and experimental applications has shown great success. The technology, however, is still in its early days, and a range of practical and ethical problems remain to be sorted.