Nature Fresh Farms is using AI technology to help develop more sustainable farming to reduce food waste.
They have teamed up with Intel to have AI-enabled technology to track and manage everything from the farm's climate and humidity, to water usage, to the trucks that the produce is shipped on.
This data, which previously took a full day to process, now only takes minutes with over 2,000 sensors monitoring the growth process of produce at Nature Fresh Farms.
This means that Nature Fresh Farms can now optimize factors including heating, cooling, humidity, and irrigation five times more often per day, improving growing results.
Keith Bradley, Vice President of Information Technology and Security with Nature Fresh Farms, says with this technology they can control the greenhouse from almost anywhere.
"You don't have to be right there to make the decision that you need to be. You can be almost anywhere in the world to change your environment within the greenhouse, control it, optimize how it works, and make sure that everything works in a way that is optimal to get that result you want for your crop."
He says they want to optimize the life of the plants.
"We want to optimize the life of that plant, so we want to make sure the plant is getting fed at the right moment, getting enough light, getting everything it got from the day it gets planted in our greenhouse, to the day that they pick that pepper off the vine and it goes out, everything that has to be controlled."
Bradley says this technology tracks data from a number of things.
"Do we open the vents at this time? Is the wind going to change direction? All those options come into play. So the plant basically comes in, it grows, we pick the product, and then the product has to come through the packing line, and then this is where more AI gets involved in it is we're helping us to choose and look - is it a Grade A pepper? Is it Grade B? Is there colour variants?"
Every year $1-trillion in food production is lost to supply chain disruptions.
Nature Fresh Farms is located at 525 Essex Road 14 in Leamington.
They grow berries, peppers, tomatoes, and cucumbers.
-with files from AM800's Live & Local with Kyle Horner