Smart agriculture upgraded again: AI light technology precisely analyzes crop conditions to help prevent disasters
The Tainan Research, Development and Evaluation Commission is promoting smart agriculture through the Smart City and Living Application Subsidy Program of the Industrial Development Bureau, Ministry of Economic Affairs, and is cooperating with Geosat Aerospace & Technology to use drones for crop spraying and disease image recognition, effectively reducing agricultural disaster losses.
Through the resources of the Smart City and Living Application Subsidy Program of the Industrial Development Bureau, Ministry of Economic Affairs, the Tainan Research, Development and Evaluation Commission and the Smart Development Center have joined forces with local businesses to fully promote smart agriculture. In cooperation with Geosat Aerospace & Technology, they have developed "AI Agriculture Light Technology - Mobile Cloud Service Platform - Precise Analysis of Crop Conditions, Disaster Assessment, and Disease Data," using photographs to collect images of 10 types of crops including rice, corn, and tomatoes as well as disease images for AI recognition, helping farmers build a safer protective net, effectively reducing agricultural disaster losses, and adding another powerful tool for the development of smart agriculture.
Tainan Mayor Huang Wei-che stated that Tainan is a smart technology ancient capital and also a major agricultural center. With population aging, declining birth rates, and shortages of agricultural labor, agricultural development faces enormous challenges. Cross-domain integration of innovative technology and traditional agriculture has gradually changed traditional farming patterns. The city government continues to work with the central government and industry to introduce new technological elements, using industrial creativity and energy to solve local agricultural development problems and bring new value for industrial upgrading to technology-based agriculture.
Geosat Aerospace & Technology Chairman Lo Cheng-fang said that the APP developed in combination with the mobile cloud platform can instantly transmit and identify current farmland condition information, establish a popularized crop disease investigation operation model, provide farmers with planting references and response measures, and achieve twice the result with half the effort. In recent years, in addition to assisting farmers in Houbi, Xinying, and other places to use drone agricultural spraying on grain crops such as rice and corn, it has also actively pursued research and development toward fruit tree crops, carefully designing flight conditions in accordance with fruit tree cultivation patterns to achieve maximum pest and disease control effects and provide new options for agricultural operation management.
Research, Development and Evaluation Commission Chairman Tai Wei-chun pointed out that Tainan's use of smart technology in agriculture is becoming broader and broader. Following the 2018 drone agricultural spraying application pilot project in cooperation with Geosat Aerospace & Technology, the city government joined hands again in 2021 to upgrade and develop AI automatic identification of disease types, providing farmers with prevention and control suggestions and creating a new model of safety and efficiency for agricultural development.
Tai Wei-chun emphasized that the city government also continues to cooperate with businesses to develop living applications of smart technology. In the 2021 Smart City and Living Application Subsidy Program handled by the Ministry of Economic Affairs, all 6 cases proposed by Tainan were approved, the highest number of approved subsidies among all counties and cities, including advanced driver assistance for buses, an English smart city co-creation platform, establishment of a digital smart aquaculture industry ecosystem, AI precision health shared care, and dengue fever prevention.