Scientists have revealed the prospects for the use of AI in agriculture in Russia

Artificial intelligence (AI) methods can provide several solutions to the problem of food security in Russia at once.: digital soil twins, mathematical modeling of yields, and the introduction of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs). Vasily Gudko, a senior researcher at the Intelligent Agroecosystems research Laboratory at the Academy of Biology and Biotechnology of the Ivanovo Southern Federal University (SFU), told Izvestia about this on July 4.

"Having a digital version of all agricultural lands — the so—called "digital twins" of soils — in our hands, we can provide timely information about them to farmers and the Ministry of Agriculture, objectively carry out a cadastral assessment of any piece of land, and most importantly, recommend which dose of mineral fertilizers is needed in each specific case," the scientist said.

Yield forecasting is based on ML models, which are a set of quantitative relationships between yield and various indicators of crop growth and development conditions.

"The development of high-quality ML models requires a high—quality set of specialized data — a dataset covering multi-year data series on yields, as well as a number of defining indicators in the region you are interested in," Gudko emphasized.

Crop yields depend on a number of factors. Artificial intelligence can take into account multifactorial dependencies and calculate various scenarios, he noted.

Currently, UAV technologies are also developing quite rapidly in Russia, which can monitor crops in agriculture, as well as conduct environmental monitoring, geophysical research, various measurements and much more, Gudko added.

"AI technologies will be actively used in UAV control systems," the specialist concluded.

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Alexander Shevelev, CEO of PJSC Severstal, said on June 19 that the company is actively implementing AI in its work processes. According to him, projects that are implemented on the basis of artificial intelligence give the company about 2 billion rubles a year in additional profit before taxes. In addition, he added that due to digitalization, the company expects to increase productivity by 10% in the next five years, as well as maximize the capabilities of AI.