UNCOMMON MARKET ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE
Food system at risk of crash?
By Richard Tiffin
Tech company backed by UK Government and Microsoft
claim our food system is at risk. Artificial Intelligence fed
by a Data Marketplace is the solution.
Covid-19 is a reminder of how vulnerable our food system
is. Supermarket shelves are empty. Twelve years earlier, the
financial crash exposed the dangers of a finance system built
on a web of interdependencies – many poorly understood. The
effects of 2008 are still being felt today.
It was this fear of a
systemic crash in our food
system that drove Professor
Richard Tiffin, then Director of
the Centre for Food Security,
to co-found Agrimetrics.
“I wanted us to understand
the hidden risks that could
spark a catastrophic chain of
events,” explains Professor
Tiffin. “Our food system is
incredibly interdependent, but
ironically it’s also incredibly
disconnected. We have no
idea of the long-term consequences
of events like Covid-19. To avoid collapse, we need to
understand these connections.”
1950’s China is an example of why this is so important. The
Four Pests Campaign sought to eliminate rats, flies, mosquitoes
and sparrows. Unfortunately, though sparrows are an agricultural
pest, they also prey on a greater pest: locusts. The ensuing
ecological imbalance fuelled the
Great Chinese Famine, which
killed 45 million people.
The Arab Spring is a more recent
example. Drought and wildfires
decimated crops in Eastern
Europe. Putin halted exports and
World grain prices increased by
40%. Food shortages sparked
revolution. Half a million lives
have been lost in Syria alone.
The refugee crisis has had a lasting
effect on Europe.
“These are extreme examples,
but it’s easy to see how understanding
the connections would
have helped us limited the damage of these crises, or avoid
them all together.”
This was one motivation behind the UK Government’s decision
to provide initial funding for Agrimetrics, who boast Microsoft
as a strategic partner.
Feeding AI
The funding was used to build a Data Marketplace, which houses
information from across the global food system. Agrochemical
giant BASF and consumer goods company Unilever were
early customers. Recently Airbus, the world’s second largest
aerospace company, announced they would use Agrimetrics to
sell satellite imagery that can be used to monitor crop health.
“The Marketplace is a great way to get people sharing
information in the same place, but that’s only the first stage of
the solution,” continues Professor Tiffin. “If we are to answer
complex questions then data needs to be organised in certain
ways. This includes predicting future food shortages, finding
ways of reducing agriculture’s
carbon footprint and
limiting the spread of crop
disease.”
Agrimetrics uses a ‘Knowledge
Graph’ to connect the
data on its Marketplace;
the same technology used
by Google and Amazon. It
works by defining the relationship
between data, which enables
people and machines to
find the information they need
more quickly.
“The current applications of
artificial intelligence are narrow and require human intervention.
The beauty of organising data in this way is that AI will be able
to self-serve. It will be able to explore the connections between
billions of different variables, uncovering links and insights that
we’d never even considered.”
For example, assume you are researching the cause of your
house plant’s recent poor health.
AI could use the knowledge
graph to identify variables influencing
plant health: soil, temperature,
fertilisation, pot, light,
and irrigation. Then automatically
understand the variables
relevant to these variables – and
so on. The answer could be temperature
spikes causes by turning
your oven on, or contamination
in the production of your artificial
fertiliser.
In the real-world, Agrimetrics’s
projects have reduced the
flow of pesticides into waterways
and used predictive models to improve fresh food supply
chains and animal health. However, Agrimetrics and their
partners have grander ambitions for the future.
“Average crop yields are around half of what is theoretically
possible - we call this the yield gap. In theory, if we could better
understand why this gap occurs, then we could increase output
on arable farms with no additional inputs,” concludes Tiffin.
“The best manufacturers have used data and AI to increase
production by 50% and cut waste by 20%; agriculture can
do the same. It is possible to sustainably feed everyone on
our planet for many years to come, but not without AI and not
without data sharing. I believe that this can only be achieved
through a Data Marketplace that rewards those who are willing
to share their data.”
Richard Tiffin is Professor of Applied Economics at the
University of Reading and Agrimetrics’ Chief Scientific Officer -
www.agrimetrics.co.uk
4 News April 2020 @eeNewsEurope www.eenewseurope.com
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