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Monsanto and Climate Corporation announce innovation pipeline
The Climate Corporation says facial recognition technology will soon allow farmers to identify plant diseases from the field.
Chief Science Officer Sam Eathington says researchers are working to train computers to recognize crop diseases from photos. “We’ll have algorithms that have got 20-30 million different parameters that are in them that are used to determine what pathogen is present.” He says prototypes with nine different corn diagnoses are more than 90 percent accurate and will provide farmers with real-time feedback to manage their crops.
The technology has moved into the company’s third phase of development and is part of 17 advancements moving through Climate’s R & D pipeline to help farmers sustainably increase productivity.
Other data science technologies will provide seed scripting and selection as well as fertility scripting tools for farmers.
The Climate Corporation and Monsanto Company announced their 2017 R & D pipeline to media during a conference call this week.
AUDIO: R & D Pipeline Media Call
What would be just as valuable is to be able to diagnose herbicide injury in plants by the same method.