Precision Time-to-Harvest Forecasting of Specialty Crops

Specialty Crop production margins are eroded by input costs impacts of weather pests anddiseases and market price fluctuations. Producers routinely overproduce to hedge against lossesfrom environmental impacts and ensure sufficient supply to meet retail account demand furtherreducing their average margins. If they had greater certainty in advance of how much they willproduce and when it will be harvest-ready they could consistently improve the match betweensupply and demand reducing overall losses and increasing margins. This project will developprecision crop maturity forecasting models for a number of key fresh vegetable crops based oncomputer vision analysis of imagery collected over fields during the crop growing cycle weatherand solar irradiance data and knowledge of phenological development stages of each crop.During Phase I we will analyze historical planting harvest and weather data from one of the top- 10 producers in the industry for three representative crops combined with photosyntheticallyactive radiation (PAR) data from satellites to determine the extents to which temperature andPAR history profiles can provide sufficiently accurate predictive models of harvest maturitydates. We will also collect high resolution aerial imagery weather and radiation data over fieldsduring the Phase I period to determine the feasibility of using phenological development stagesas determined from computer vision analysis to improve the forecasting capability. We willcompare forecasted to actual harvest dates and yields for a set of representative crops grown inCalifornia and Arizona.The proposed capability will enable producers to know with high accuracy a field's differentlevels of maturity and when they can expect most of each field to be ready for harvest. Thisintelligence will significantly increase their ability to manage their supply in the face ofenvironmental variabilities ultimately reducing waste and increasing their margins We plan tosell the forecasting capability as a subscription service.