Big Grower January 2023 - 21

TECHNOLOGY
If you're sending teams of people to count plants
on a regular basis, you're wasting time and money.
If you send 10 people out to count your inventory,
you'll likely get four different numbers back. That's
because humans are not the most efficient at
relatively easy, repetitive processes that require
accuracy. We can see up to a 30% error rate every
time we run a counting process.
Your business relies on accurate inventory
counts, which means you're going to overspend in
order to reconcile any error rate. Technology can
solve this problem.
By using cameras to identify every individual plant
and count each one, you can replace the manual
expense of counting altogether. And, you can run
your counts more
frequently than before.
The computer vision
aspect of counting has
been around for a long
time. The challenge for
greenhouse growers
has been getting
imagery of 100% of
the plants. At IUNU,
we've developed a rail
system that allows
cameras to travel long
distances in order to
cover all of your crops.
While still early in
development, drones could potentially be used to
effectively cover large acreage.
of appearing. With some adjustments to the
system, they were able to remediate the issue and
eliminate the potential revenue loss.
Tomato growers right now are being devastated
Data for data's sake is
useless. But collecting
good data and using it
by tomato brown rugose fruit virus (ToBRFV). The
virus presents visually, and work is being done
by companies to determine how early it can be
detected using computer vision. This could save
the industry billions of dollars in losses each year.
Data for data's sake is useless. But collecting
good data and using it to drive better decisionmaking
can be hugely valuable to your business.
Disease and pest management is one of those
areas. By shifting from reactive decisionmaking
to proactive
decision-making,
growers can increase
profits by reducing
the risk of pest and
disease losses.
to drive better decisionmaking
can be hugely
valuable to your business.
PEST AND DISEASE MANAGEMENT
Another major opportunity for automated data
collection is pest and disease management. Like
inventory counting, scouting is a very manual
process today. Whether you send folks out to scout
crops or you use yellow sticky cards/tape to do
quick checks on insects, you're likely running a
reactive process.
With a manual inspection process, you can only
detect an issue when someone physically sees
it. This often is too late. Growers can experience
losses of between 5 and 25% due to disease and
pests. With technology, growers can replace the
manual scouting process, scout more frequently,
and detect issues earlier, leading to lower losses.
One lettuce grower we work with was able to
catch chlorosis in their crop within 24 hours
CROP QUALITY
AND YIELD
Crop steering is
another area that
can be improved
drastically with
more data. Today,
growers are looking
at crop data to make
decisions already.
You may weigh crops to record yield or measure
sample crop data as part of crop registration. All of
this information helps determine what the climate
set points should be, when to open and close vents
or shading, when to turn lights on and off, when to
irrigate, and more.
Crop steering is a good example where new
sources of data can be incredibly valuable. Much
of the day-to-day changes of a plant happen
quietly - they are too small for us to notice.
Technology, however, can identify very small
changes, allowing us more visibility into how
crops are performing in real time.
Germination success is one of the prime
drivers into high quality and high yielding
crops. With computer vision, we can analyze
germination performance. By calculating the
germination success for every plant, we can see
what might be causing failures (and successes).
Is it isolated by a climate zone? Are failures tied
JANUARY 2023 21
Big Grower January 2023

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of Big Grower January 2023
