For many years, precision agriculture has largely been compartmentalized with the promise of true integration being just out of reach. Now, through the use of super-computer Watson and artificial intelligence (AI), IBM says it will draw all the disparate bits together into a whole that will usher in a more efficient, easier manner of growing crops and doing business through the agricultural chain.
To explain the company’s vision and what it expects in the near future, Mark Gildersleeve, vice president, Head of Business Solutions Watson Media and Weather, spoke with Delta Farm Press in late November. Among his comments:
On what problems the company is trying to fix…
“As a personal story, I did a startup in precision agriculture in the late 1990s that ended up getting sold. Coming back to agriculture now, I was surprised at how little progress had been made over the last 25 years. Frankly, it’s disappointing.
“The problems that farmers have are still here. It’s an awful lot of work, an awful lot of risk and an awful lot of capital for a farmer to eke out relatively small margins compared to other industries. So, we need to help growers get to a higher level of profitability given the high amount of risk at stake.
“This industry has been made up of ‘silos.’ If you look at the ecosystem between lenders, bankers, input providers, growers and the government, it’s still very ‘siloed.’ Very little progress has been made in connecting up the siloes.
“When you look at the need to improve food quality and how to address sustainability, that silo nature makes it very hard. So, we’re looking at these problems anew and saying: ‘these problems are really big, are global and take a massive effort to fix them, and we believe we have a number of things we can execute to help begin to improve the situation.’”
On what is being done…
“There are things that are driving us to say, ‘why now?’