By Ryan Adams
Scouting is time consuming and requires plenty of knowledge. Knowing what a weed is at the very early stages of emergence or identifying a disease before it spreads too far can have an economic impact on your farm. A new app from xarvio – the Digital Farming Company – which is how BASF refers to this newly acquired business, offers a high-tech way to speed scouting, and make inexperienced scouts more effective.
“The app has artificial intelligence and machine learning algorithms that help identify weeds and disease in the field,” says David Gray, xarvio’s commercial and business development manager. “When you’re in the app you snap a picture of the weed and it tells you with a percentage of confidence what you’re looking at. At over 90% confidence you should consider that accurate.”
The app was officially launched today, Aug. 28, at the 2018 Farm Progress Show.
What sets this weed/disease app apart from others is that the identification is being done by a remote server that has more than 150,000 weed and disease images in a massive database for comparison. In effect, the computer sees your picture and quickly compares it to all other images to find just the right match. And your pictures get added to the database and over time the system gets even better.