Agrilyst gets detailed about how AI can help farmers

Agrilyst founder Allison Kopf took to Medium yesterday to cut through the hype. What hype, you ask? The hype surrounding artificial intelligence (there’s lots of it), and specifically, AI in agtech.

By offering up a slew of concrete details, however, Kopf show us why you (and investors) are deservedly excited about AI’s potential to vastly improve entire industries.

How we're using data & AI at @agrilyst. #agtech #data #AI https://t.co/BMXNKSlJBE

— Allison Kopf (@allisonkopf) August 9, 2017

See, Agrilyst is a workflow management system, one that helps farmers make tiny seeds turn into delicious produce. And especially in the hyper-efficient realm of indoor farming, data is the not-so-secret ingredient.

One of the top startups in our 2017 realLIST of the borough’s best, Agrilyst makes software that makes that data do stuff. That’s where Agrilyst’s value lies. And that’s also where AI and predictive analytics come in.

Now comes the fun stuff. At data saturation, roughly a few million harvest data points for us, our algorithms start to look forward to the future. How are crops going to perform? What factors are going to impact performance the most? How is space going to be utilized months out in the future? Do we have enough space to meet sales demands in the winter and summer? All of these questions are able to be answered once a system understands how the plants grow and all of the variables that affect that growth.

If building a far more sustainable food system doesn’t get you hyped, we don’t know what will.

The post also teases some interesting developments for the Brooklyn Bridge Ventures–funded startup. “Over the next few months, we’re going to be introducing the next component of our production management tool, moving from prescription to automation,” Kopf writes. “We’re using machine vision to determine actual growth rates and germination rates.”

And if that weren’t enough: “One of the biggest struggles for indoor farm operators is ensuring stable sales supply. We’re building a data set of market demand by primary buyers to help growers understand real-time demand. We’re focused on creating the marketplace for stable local purchasing.”