Where’s Daisy? Dutch firm brings AI to the barn yard

developed to estimate crop health using drone footage and parse out weed killer between rows of cotton.

Yasir Khokhar, the former Microsoft employee who is the founder and CEO of Connecterra, said the inspiration for the idea came after living on a dairy farm south of Amsterdam.

“It turns out the technology farmers use is really outdated in many respects,” he says. “What does exist is very cumbersome to use, yet agriculture is one of those areas that desperately needs technology.”

Underlying IDA is Google’s opensource TensorFlow programming framework, which has helped spread AI to many disciplines. It’s a language built on top of the commonly used Python code that helps connect data from text, images, audio or sensors to neural networks — the algorithms that help computers learn. The language has been downloaded millions of times and has about 1,400 people contributing code, only 400 of whom work at Google, according to product manager Sandeep Gupta.

He says TensorFlow can be used by people with only high-school level math and some programming skills.

“We’re continuing this journey making it easier and easier to use,” Gupta says.

TensorFlow has been used to do everything from helping NASA scientists find planets using the Kepler telescope, to assisting a tribe in the Amazon detect the sounds of illegal deforestation, according to Google spokesman Justin Burr.

Google hopes users adapt the open-source code to discover new applications that the company could some day use in its own business.

Even without AI, sensors are helping farmers keep tabs on their herds.

Mary Mackinson Faber, a fifthgeneration farmer at the Mackinson Dairy Farm near Pontiac, Illinois, says a device attached to a cow’s tail developed by Irish company Moocall sends her a text when a cow is ready to give birth, so she can be there to make sure nothing goes wrong. Moocall doesn’t use AI — it simply sends a text when a certain threshold of spinal contractions in the tail are exceeded.

While she calls it a “great tool,” she says it takes human intuition to do what’s right for their animals. “There are certain tasks that it can help with, and it can assist us, but I don’t think it will ever replace the human.”