Measuring Crop Health Using Deep Learning – Notes From Tiger Analytics

Agrochemical companies manufacture a range of offerings for yield maximisation, pest resistance, hardiness, water quality and availability and other challenges facing farmers. These companies need to measure the efficacy of their products in real-world conditions, not just controlled experimental environments. Single-crop farms are divided into plots and a specific intervention performed in each. For example, hybrid seeds are sown in one plot while another is treated with fertilisers, and so on. The relative performance of each treatment is assessed by tracking the plants’ health in the plot where that treatment was administered. The industry-standard measure of plant health is the Leaf Area Index (LAI), which serves as a measure in thousands of studies of vegetation (cultivated and n