State of the World

There's no doubt that we are in a world where automated technology is the standard. As Larry Page said, “Artificial intelligence would be the ultimate version of Google. The ultimate search engine that would understand everything on the web. It would understand exactly what you wanted, and it would give you the right thing. We're nowhere near doing that now. However, we can get incrementally closer to that, and that is basically what we work on.”

If that's the case, however, then why does so much of the world's infrastructure still require improvement? Are we still needing to water plants with hoses and guesswork?

This post will discuss the concept of smart irrigation and how it can potentially save time and money and increase the well-being of those around it.

Food Deserts

Food deserts are rampant and increasing throughout the country. In my home city of Houston, 16.6% of urban residents live at least a mile away from the nearest supermarket. They are labeled “food insecure,” unable to get affordable, nutritious food items. This is already 4% more than the national average. The issue is that supermarkets are scarce in areas that don't have the income and resources to support them, so low-income residents in particular are hit hard. This is a big problem in Houston especially.

Efforts have been made to help erode this problem. The Houston Food Bank has led a “food for change” initiative to help break the cycle of poverty. The Brighter Bites initiative has also led a similar campaign to bring fresh, healthy food to local communities.

Unfortunately, relying on manual charitable efforts is only temporary. Furthermore, just supporting health education or subsidizing markets is not something that solves the issue overnight. We would require extensive social and economic changes to achieve more communities that are able to sustain healthy living.

What do we do?

The power of the boom in technology and AI can be beautifully leveraged to help solve this issue. There are numerous reasons why. First, increases in innovation of irrigation technology can allow for a boosted production of goods locally, which is actually very good for supporting the local economy. Next, AI-based analytics solutions can tell us what areas need more food assistance as well as the best way to position distribution centers / vehicles to provide food to citizens. Plus, the introduction of technologies to the more distant fields of gardening and food harvesting can help promote innovation in other areas as well, like water purification and distribution, thus contributing to a more advanced society.

A way to tackle the first point is Smart Irrigation. The idea is that watering plants can give us data on plant health, and employing a data-driven process, along with environmental science, can bring optimizations to crop health. Having read the beginning of the article, what is the best way we know of so far to perform actions based on large amounts of data? Machine learning! For example, we can determine the best way to water a certain type of crop, and then start to incorporate other parameters as well, like weather. Such a solution is actually a double-edged sword, as it can help reduce water usage as well, a big problem in modern irrigation techniques. Technology is so broad and accessible these days that bringing in such optimizations is easy, achievable, and quite frankly, required.

A positive of smart irrigation is that it can easily be incorporated into already existing drip irrigation systems. That same architecture can be used, all that is needed is to replace the central controller with a smarter system. That would be the first step. In the future, engineering innovations could be brought in as well to reduce human effort and increase plant health at the same time.

I hope you as the reader can join this movement to bring healthy food to everyone. “By giving kids access to fresh, nutritious food and showing them how to make the most of it, we help turn healthy habits into something even better: healthy lifestyles.” — Lisa Helfman, Brighter Bites founder