Agronomy: Around the world of AI
Oceania
After our visit to Asia, we are heading towards Oceania. For reference, in 2023, there were 45,562,787 people living on this continent.
We land in southern Australia, specifically in Two Wells, at one of the farms of the Perfection Fresh group (In an Australian tomato farm, drones take the place of bees, Eco-Business, April 4, 2024).
Here, various fruit and vegetable production processes are predominantly assisted by new technologies. All of them? Not quite - there is still one process that resists robotization: the pollination of tomato plants (Note: Perfection Fresh is a major tomato producer in Australia).
As Troy Topp, the director of Perfection Fresh, explains, pollination is a step currently performed manually by workers. While in nature, bees carry out this task, greenhouse production requires either manual pollination or mechanical methods (such as using blowers). However, these methods yield less satisfactory results compared to natural pollination.
Engineers at Perfection Fresh are attempting to develop a new form of mechanical pollination by using drones to pollinate tomato plants. The use of drones for pollination serves two purposes:
To address labor shortages in greenhouse cultivation and;
To compensate for the high mortality rate of bees (due to pesticides, climate change, etc.) in natural environments.
Next destination: America (North & South)