By Suzanne Vanderhoef
There’s a new technology in the world of agriculture that’s integrating high-tech with age-old method of traditional farming. It’s called “TrueCause” and it was developed by Aker Technologies, based here in St. Louis.
TrueCause uses drones equipped with long tether –essentially a giant selfie-stick– to fly a specially-designed device through rows of crops to evaluate what’s going on in real time as the plants are growing. So, instead of people manually walking the fields, they use robots.
“In between the plants we lower a set of cameras and we take pictures of anything, like the insects when they actually happen, they first occur underneath the leaves, that’s where they kind of like harbor,” explains Orlando Saez, Co-founder and CEO of Aker Technologies. “The same thing with weeds. Where do you have weed pressure that matters the most? It’s actually when the weed is very, very small. So, you have to know that, and you cannot know that from above because you have the canopy of the crop itself, so you have to get inside to know what’s happening underneath.”
The information that is collected by the collects a number of agronomic things: first, it takes pictures and those pictures are translated using machine learning, artificial intelligence to the things that matter to the “doctor,” the agronomist. It also captures environmental information: temperature, humidity, CO2, O2, as well as the variability of the soil, temperature and conditions that are important for farmers to know in order for the plant to thrive.
“We’re applying insecticides or fungicides or different nutrients to different areas of the field that need it, versus areas that don’t,” says Tom Uthell, Farmer and Aker Technology Advisor “And again, having it tagged spatially within that field, we can do a much more efficient job, increasing out return on investment.”
The hope is that, in addition to helping individual farmers, the information gained through the use of this new technology will also give researchers the ability to design new and better crops that will help increase yield in light of changing climates throughout the world.
