New app diagnoses crop diseases in the field and alerts rural farmers

A team behind a new mobile app that uses artificial intelligence to accurately diagnose crop diseases, recently won a $US100,000 award to help expand their project to help millions of small-scale farmers across Africa.

“The CGIAR Research Program on Roots, Tubers and Bananas team won the grant during big data conference in Colombia on 21 September 2017, as part of the CGIAR Platform for Big Data in Agriculture Inspire Challenges.The app to be used against cassava brown streak disease and the cassava mosaic disease, is expected to be rolled out in 2018.”

“Cassava brown streak disease is spreading westward across the African continent, and together with cassava mosaic disease, threatens the food and income security of over 30 million farmers in East and Central Africa. Likewise, banana is threatened by fungal and bacterial diseases including the devastating Banana bunchy top virus, while late blight still plagues potato farmers. Farmers are often unable to properly identify these diseases, while researchers, plant health authorities and extension organizations lack the data to support them.”

To stop the spread of these pests and diseases, a team under the CGIAR Research Program on Roots, Tubers and Bananas (RTB), has developed a revolutionary app to accurately diagnose diseases in the field, which will be combined with SMS services to send alerts to thousands of rural farmers.

“The app’s conception was in 2012 but got developed in June-September 2017 through a US$300,000 funding from Penn State University (Hughes). The app uses a Google programme called TensorFlow that allows machines to train and learn. What the app does in real-time is to assign a score to a video being captured. That score is the probability that the plant in the video shows symptoms of one of five diseases or pests.”

App for Cassava Disease Diagnosis.

Currently developed for cassava, the grant will allow researchers to expand the app for other root, tuber and banana crops that are critical sources of food, nutrition and income security for millions.

Source: IITA