Aerial tech helping California battle drought

Wed, 25 May 2022 13:01:09 GMT

Aerial photography and video have grown in the produce industry. California has begun using aerial technology to achieve long-term solutions to the ongoing drought.

The California Department of Water Resources is using innovative airborne technology to map California’s groundwater basins. The information will help prepare for the future fight for water in the state, according to the department’s website.

Helicopter-based technology scans the subsurface of the ground. It’s been likened to taking an MRI of the earth, a news release said.

The technology gathers information about the state’s groundwater aquifer structure to support the implementation of the Sustainable Groundwater Management Act . The act created a statewide framework to help protect groundwater resources over the long term, the website said.

The technology will allow scientists to see beneath the ground’s surface in order to give agencies important information in the fight for water in future droughts. The data collected will be used to create continuous images that allow people to see what the underground aquifers look like.

In the Salinas Valley of California, surveys have been completed, said the release. Surveys will be complete in the San Joaquin and Sacramento valleys in the summer of 2022. And the results will be ready around the end of 2022.

“The data collected during these surveys will provide a better understanding of California’s groundwater systems, and in turn, support more informed and sustainable groundwater management and drought preparedness,” Steven Springhorn, Sustainable Groundwater Management Act technical assistance manager at the California Department of Water Resources, said in the release.

The survey data will create an image of the subsurface to a depth of about 1,000 feet below the ground surface. The image provides information about large-scale aquifer structures and geology, the release added.

AI-based apple grading technology wins big with Northwest apple grower

Fri, 13 Jan 2023 19:35:50 GMT

Sometimes all it takes is fresh eyes to see clearly what has been in front of you all along.

In mid-December, Yakima, Wash.-based grower Apple King updated the Ellips apple grader used to categorize its fruit to a new Ellips “deep learning” sorting model called TrueAI. According to Kyle Mills, Apple King’s operations manager, his team has already seen outstanding results.

“We have always felt that our Ellips grading technology provided us with a competitive advantage based on its overall performance, including the ability to accurately detect both external and internal defects,” Mills said in a news release. “With the TrueAI upgrade, we have significantly enhanced our grading capabilities. We are now able to detect even the most difficult defects, such as stem bowl cracks, at a very high level of accuracy with minimal false positives. During the first three days of operation, we ran Honeycrisps and galas, both of which exhibited a fair amount of stem bowl cracks, and our results were truly impressive.”

Related news: Shorter Washington apple crop brings challenges to marketers

Three years in the making, Ellips’ TrueAI model delivers high-level grading accuracy by detecting complex defects and produce characteristics, according to the release. In 2022, TrueAI was implemented across multiple commodities such as dates, pomegranates, apples and most recently, onions.

New categories that the TrueAI system will incorporate include blueberries, cherries, kiwis and other fresh fruits and vegetables, according to the release. What’s more, as grading performance moves towards 100% detection accuracy and becomes more automated, grading and sorting tasks can be done with less staff.

“From day one, the improvements were immediate and visually apparent. Even apples with difficult-to-detect defects that previously might have ended up in the packing area were correctly sorted,” Ray Keller, owner of Apple King, said in the release. “This improved performance will help in our continual quest to improve productivity while delivering the most consistent pack to our customers. Additionally, we can now more effectively incorporate automated packing technology at the various packing exits since manual intervention can be virtually eliminated.”

The deep learning AI technology can be added to new or existing systems and requires little system operator training or effort, and TrueAI updates, based on targeted defects or specific needs, can be incorporated into the existing system, according to the release.

Remote Imagery

Aerial tech helping California battle drought

AI-based apple grading technology wins big with Northwest apple grower