A leading UK agribusiness estimates savings of greater than US$7.52mn due to AI that predicts crops’ shipment window three times earlier than previously possible
Government and Microsoft backed agri-tech centre promotes opportunity to scale AI to include other crops and supply chains.
Delayed harvests are an expensive problem for international farming. Overseas crops are grown to a specified shipment window, which provides retailers with a constant supply of fresh produce. If windows are missed, growers are generally responsible for making up the shortfall.
Purchasing produce from a third-party supplier or airfreight are the most common ways to do this. Both are expensive. Costs for one of the UK’s leading food and farming business run to US$150.31,000 per week – just for sweetcorn.
However, these costs can be reduced substantially if a grower knows in good time that a shipment will be missed. The more time the grower has to source and negotiate alternatives, the lower the cost will be.
“This was the catalyst for creating our Harvest Timing Prediction AI,” explained Anna Woodley, head of sales at Agrimetrics. “We realised that increasing the notice period by even a couple of weeks would result in huge savings. To put this in perspective, one customer estimates savings of more than US$7.52mn per year. That’s equivalent to a 15 per cent increase in gross profit.”
Agrimetrics are currently predicting the correct shipment window for sweetcorn crops with up to 93 per cent accuracy, which can be done four weeks in advance. They claim that accuracy and timeframes can be increased given access to more data.
Woodley will be presenting a case study and describing the applications and workings of their predictive AI during a webinar on 1 July.
