The industrial revolution of artificial intelligence (AI) is turning inroads into 6-lane highways in agriculture as equipment makers create “smarter” machinery primed with increasing amounts of background data and digital circuitry patterned after the human brain.

In a recent interview about the use of AI in production agriculture, John Deere’s President of Lifecycle Solutions, Justin Rose, said AI is essential to his company’s goal of helping farmers be more profitable and sustainable while using fewer resources: less land, chemicals and labor.

“Take corn and soybean production as an example. Twelve trillion plants are grown in the U.S. each year. The best farms produce about 200 bushels per acre of corn, but top growers have achieved over 600. If we could optimize each plant individually, we could dramatically increase yields.

“How do you do that at such an enormous scale? That’s where AI comes in,” he explains.

Rose points to Deere’s See & Spray technology and its use of AI to boost productivity through improved crop protection chemical use.

“Traditional sprayers treat entire fields with herbicides, but our system uses 36 cameras and advanced machine learning to identify and spray only the weeds — while moving at 12-15 mph, covering three football field lengths per minute,” he says. He notes the system uses 70% less chemical than traditional…