AI to grow the UK's millions of strawberries to perfect ripeness
Added on 21 March 2022
Biting into the perfect strawberry and savouring its sweetness mostly depends on whether it was picked at the right time.
Picking labour accounts for 40% of horticulture production costs, and much of the remaining costs derive from berries being picked at the wrong time, leading to spoilage, or sour under-ripeness.
The Lincoln Institute for Agri-Food Technology (LIAT) at the University of Lincoln partnered with London-based AI data engine V7 to enable robots to analyze millions of strawberries throughout their growth cycle, monitoring weather conditions and berry appearance to predict the perfect harvest date for each plant.
"The UK produces 120,000 tonnes of strawberries each year, with a retail value of Ł659 million," said project founder Raymond Kirk. "Predicting the timing and yield of strawberries is critical for the industry - but extremely difficult to do accurately."
That's the equivalent of roughly 15 billion strawberries picked in the UK alone. A large part of this is picked at the wrong time and goes to waste.
Through this new technology, robots will run through strawberry greenhouses in the north of England, gathering video footage that gets analyzed by AI as the robot moves along. The AI is able to spot each strawberry, including the unripe green ones hidden amongst the foliage, and every berry's location. This has allowed the LIAT team to predict the day of perfect ripeness, and the total number of punnets a greenhouse might create 6 weeks ahead of current forecasting systems.
The technology is about to be rolled out as a commercial spinoff from the university to strengthen the UK's horticulture industry, which is recovering from the impact of leaving the European Union that caused a shortage of skilled pickers.
Photo by duong chung on Unsplash
Source: Agritech Tomorrow
More news
