I have been thinking about this for a while but have been very hesitant.
My job is on the research side of agriculture and wanted to make a thread where I can talk to others about the science that goes into this industry.
Specifically I work on specialty crops: Strawberries, Leafy Veg, Brassica (broccoli, cabbage, etc.), Cucurbits(pumpkins, melons, cucumbers), tomatoes, and wine grapes.
The other aspect of my business is trying to bring some more precision ag to my territory that utilizes Google Maps as an overlay.
The work I do is both conventional growing methods as well as organic.
If anyone has any questions please feel free to post them and I will reply the best I can or share articles in the effort to educate. I am not here to argue with anyone but discuss the different approaches to growing food.
Please note that I will not respond to hateful or inflammatory responses.
In his profile, it has Seen Nov 30, '20, so that’s probably a no.
I work in agriculture as an agronomist, and my company does a variety of field research and has some interesting projects partnering with other companies involving drones and AI in the works. Like being able to send a drone across a field and quantify vole holes. But nothing is really fully ready to go outside of select customers last I checked.
You can ask me any questions you like, but I am not a coder and definitely don’t have any involvement with the technical development or special insight beyond “You need to grind through an awful amount of man hours to manually verify field conditions and at least tens of thousands of images in order to make sure it’s working”. Which is pretty par for the course with machine learning if you don’t already have a dataset you can leach off of.
I basically monitor and report weed, disease, pest, and crop status, as well as take a very large amount of soil and tissue samples. I put out various herbicide and nutrition trials for about 2 and a half years, before the scope of everything they were piling on finally had increased to the point I had to step away or implode catastrophically. We managed to trick an actual researcher from OSU to take over, haha.
Implementing technology and agriculture research has its limitations ,but its mostly what effort and how much effort a person is willing to expend.
One of my studies is the ancient art of grafting.
Something many people never think of.
In small or lab setting implimenting technical innovations is easier due to small tightly controlled conditions.
In reality however trying to expand to larger uncontrolled conditions increases the difficulty levels exponentially.
That being said great strides are being made in understanding chemical balance and detection using video technology.
But there is an under utilized tech out there.
You just have to find it.
Education is still a paramount tool.
Hi, I havent been on this site in a long while as I have been very busy with work and pursuing a wide variety of other things. Happy to answer anything I can.