The world population still grows every year. The amount of arable land is not. This means that farmers have to find paths to use their limited country more efficiently. According to agricultural manager, AI could help.
“Humanity does not have enough food to put on the table for everyone,” said Feroz Sheikh, Chief Information and Digital Officer of the Syngenta Group, at the Fortune Brainstorm Ai Singapore Conference last week. “We need 600 million hectares of additional land by 2050. This is almost four times the agricultural country in Europe.”
Syngenta has built up a network of modern agricultural platform or card centers in China to solve this problem. The centers use digital agricultural systems – technology such as drones, robots and AI – to help the local birds to maximize the potential of their arable land. “Simple advice can really help improve the yield of these farmers,” said Sheikh.
The Agroz Group, based in Malaysia, also uses the AI to help farmers. The company created “Copilot for Landers” by training a AI model for its standard operating processes. Junior breeders can take a picture of a plant that they grow, and Agroz Copilot will determine whether it is healthy or not. Founder and CEO Gerard Lim described it as “a tool that brings the power of most older and experienced producers into their handshake”.
In addition, Lim found that he saw robotics as the next phase for the AGroz group after the Agentic AI was perfected. “Humanoid robots will probably work in our inner companies and in our greenhouses until next year”
The Japanese company Agrist is already using robots to improve the harvest efficiency on farms.
Today’s agricultural robots are still not as efficient in harvesting fruit and vegetables like humans. But the farmers “don’t need a perfect robot,” said Junichi Saito, founder and CEO of Agrist. And the robots of Agrist have the advantage of being cheap to cost around 10,000 US dollars and work 24 hours without sleep or eating.
Robots are needed to solve the problem of workers in agriculture, said Saito. His vision is that “AI and the robot and people (humans) work together to make the world happier.”
