SmartBerry - Artificial Intelligence to enhance Strawberry Farming in Developing Countries

SmartBerry: Artificial Intelligence to enhance Strawberry Farming in Developing Countries. This project aims to enhance sustainable farming practices, improve food, nutrition security, and increase economic growth. It also aims to leverage innovative technology to optimise growing conditions, increase yields, and reduce environmental impact in Nigeria's strawberry farming.

We aim to use appropriate intelligent sensors to monitor environmental conditions and soil parameters to detect, optimise growth conditions and request crop watering as and when needed, as opposed to a blanket watering approach. This encapsulates objectives related to saving water and thus enabling crop growers to use land where there is limited access to water. In addition, the data gathered from sensors and AI tools will allow us to analyse conditions for growing and develop an intelligent system to communicate with the farmers and perform knowledge exchange – strawberries are only grown in one of the two seasons in Nigeria currently. In addition to aiming to expand the growth window, we also wish to use conditions to increase productivity. A business partner in Nigeria supporting this project stated the aim of “more production per hectare” as a key issue faced by farmers in the area, leading to another ambition of our work.