August 2020 - 37

MANAGEMENT
the concern of a future pandemic.
Consumers drove the change to
growers employing IPMs. AI will
drive a similar change for three
main reasons: 1) By detecting
infestations sooner, it significantly
reduces the costs of any chemical
inputs. 2) Artificial intelligence
allows growers to shift labor from
repetitive tasks such as crop
walks, to revenue-producing tasks
that generate more production.
3) AI helps growers optimize their
yield forecasts, thus reducing the
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Foertmeyer & Sons, which operates 16
acres of greenhouses in Ohio, switched
to biocontrols four years ago.
at North Creek Nursery, a
wholesale propagation nursery in
Pennsylvania. He addressed the
issue of IPM in his greenhouses.
" The likelihood of me picking up a
small thrips infestation with all the
30 to 40 cards that I am looking at
as I move down the rows, well, more
than likely I'm not going to catch
that one. But, if the cameras are
looking at the cards and catching
the first one, that puts us so far
ahead of the game because we don't
yet have a substantial population to
deal with. If you have a really good
IPM in place and you get an alert
that a thrips problem is evident,
then I have a big jump on that. "
None of the growers I spoke with
suggested that AI would replace all
labor and, in fact, one suggested
he would merely shift people to
getting more product out of the
door - there's a labor shortage. His
rationale was the greenhouse could
finish more plants, pick up more
flats and ship more product.
Rowe offered his assessment of
the value of artificial intelligence in
a greenhouse. " The impact on our
bottom line is if we shrink those
threshold levels for pests through
the use of AI, we get an earlier
detection because at that point the
population of pests is so small, " he
says. " In that case, we definitely are
going to use fewer inputs and we're
going to reduce our production
costs. It would produce an increase
in efficiency and a decrease in our
dump rate, and that would result in
an increase in our profit margin. "
The need for technology both to
increase efficiency and to reduce the
number of touches between hands
is paramount given the financial
impact of the recent shut down and
amount of product that is wasted
or sold below value.
Carl Silverberg is senior vice president
of outreach and public affairs
for iUNU and can be reached at
csilverberg@iunu.com.
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GREENHOUSE PRODUCT NEWS 37
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August 2020

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of August 2020
