Optimizing Orchard Yields with Benji Meltzer from Aerobotics

As the agricultural industry expands to meet increased population growth and food demand, food security becomes a matter of global importance, which is why today’s guest is using AI to help farmers optimize the health of their farms.

Benji Meltzer is the Co-founder and CTO of Aerobotics, a South African Ag-Tech startup focused on providing crop protection to farmers through early problem detection and alerts. Combining satellite data, drone imagery, and scout information, Aerobotics tracks farm performance on a tree-by-tree basis and uses machine learning (ML) to identify early-stage problems, automatically detect pests and diseases, guide farmers to these locations, and suggest solutions.

In this episode, Benji offers some deeper insight into what Aerobotics does and how they can help farmers optimize the yield of their orchards. We also discuss how they use ML to process vast amounts of complex data, the challenges they encounter in the field, and Benji’s advice for other AI startups who hope to solve real-world problems, plus so much more. For a fascinating conversation about the applications of AI in agriculture, tune in today!

Key Points:

• An overview of Benji’s interests, formal education, and what led him to co-found Aerobotics.
• What Aerobotics does and how it contributes to more sustainable agriculture.
• The role that ML plays in Aerobotics’ technology.
• How they gather and annotate the data needed to train different models.
• Challenges they have encountered, from connectivity issues to weather conditions.
• Ensuring that Aerobotics’ models can generalize to many different variations.
• Why there is no one-size-fits-all approach to developing these models.
• Steps to planning and developing new ML products or features.
• How the seasonal nature of agriculture impacts Aerobotics’ ML development.
• Benji’s advice for leaders of AI-powered startups: keep it simple!
• What the future holds for Aerobotics and how they hope to expand within their niche.

Quotes:

“We're using the performance of the crop to inform how we farm and becoming more responsive and reactive rather than farming completely preventatively.” — Benji Meltzer

“The role that Aerobotics is playing is building that layer of insight and understanding into how the crop is performing to enable people to make these decisions.” — Benji Meltzer

“At its core – this product wouldn't exist without machine learning.” — Benji Meltzer

“Where AI can add the most value is in using technology to reduce that complexity and to downsample and simplify information into patterns and decisions that people can actually consume. It's almost too easy to compound that complexity and not actually solve the underlying problems.” — Benji Meltzer

Links:

Aerobotics

Benji Meltzer on LinkedIn

Benji Meltzer on X

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