Artificial Intelligence for Digital Agriculture at Scale: Techniques, Policies, and Challenges

TL;DR

This paper discusses the potential of digital agriculture powered by AI and data engineering to enhance crop productivity, addresses challenges like data ownership, and outlines a comprehensive framework for future agricultural innovations.

Contribution

It provides an integrated overview of AI techniques, policies, and challenges in digital agriculture, highlighting the need for end-to-end solutions and addressing economic and data ownership issues.

Findings

Digital agriculture can significantly increase food production by 2050.

Data engineering is crucial for managing increasing sensor data volumes.

Economic costs and benefits of digital agriculture systems are underexplored.

Abstract

Digital agriculture has the promise to transform agricultural throughput. It can do this by applying data science and engineering for mapping input factors to crop throughput, while bounding the available resources. In addition, as the data volumes and varieties increase with the increase in sensor deployment in agricultural fields, data engineering techniques will also be instrumental in collection of distributed data as well as distributed processing of the data. These have to be done such that the latency requirements of the end users and applications are satisfied. Understanding how farm technology and big data can improve farm productivity can significantly increase the world's food production by 2050 in the face of constrained arable land and with the water levels receding. While much has been written about digital agriculture's potential, little is known about the economic costs and benefits of these emergent systems. In particular, the on-farm decision making processes, both in terms of adoption and optimal implementation, have not been adequately addressed. For example, if some algorithm needs data from multiple data owners to be pooled together, that raises the question of data ownership. This paper is the first one to bring together the important questions that will guide the end-to-end pipeline for the evolution of a new generation of digital agricultural solutions, driving the next revolution in agriculture and sustainability under one umbrella.