Artificial intelligence could soon help watermelon farmers detect harmful diseases in their crops

Watermelon farmers are struggling to control disease in their crops and are constantly on the hunt for ways to fight it.

WINK News talked to a watermelon farmer about diseases and the agriculture engineer who may have the solution.

One such disease, downy mildew, has the nickname ‘wildfire’.

That’s because if left unchecked, it can destroy an entire crop within days. But there is new technology to detect disease before farmers even see it.

Farmers don’t just grow fruits and vegetables, they’ve got to be experts in plant disease.

If they miss the signs they could lose some, most or even all of their crop.

Chad Chastain, JDI farmer in Alva said, “All of a sudden you show up and it’s like, oh, boy, we’ve got an issue.”

Chastain said downy mildew is one of the top threats he faces.

Downy mildew starts as a yellow spot on the watermelon that grows every day until eventually the leaf turns brown, cracks, and dies.

“If you don’t catch it a week and a half, you know, 10 days before that, you’re screwed, you can slow it down and you can try to stop it, but you’re not going to,” Chastain said.

Chastain said early disease detection is a must.

And that’s what drives the Precision Agriculture researcher Dr. Yiannis Ampatzidis of the University of Florida’s Southwest Florida Research and Education Center in Immokalee.

Using artificial intelligence, Ampatzidis can tell whether a watermelon is infected with downy mildew before the naked eye can see it.

Ampatzidis and his team developed A-I “Sensing systems” to create plant “Signatures”.

“Think about it like a fingerprint. So we have these fingerprints, the signatures of the plant diseases, then we will going to be able to identify the disease, and again we’re going to target the early stage,” Ampatzidis said.

This technology can be used in the lab and out on a farm. It is armed with a camera and sensing system, a drone flies over a farmer’s field.

The researchers compare the data to a plant’s “Signature” and then tell a farmer whether the disease is present and exactly where.

“And I welcome that because it’s gonna be a good tool that we can use in the future,” Chastain said.

Chad Chastin is Ross Chastin’s brother. Ross is a two-time winner on the NASCAR circuit this year.

The good news for all farmers is that researchers are working on bringing the cost down of their new technology.

Right now it costs around $50,000.

The hope is to get it to $3,000 to $5,000 so all farmers can use it very soon.