A Review of the Applications of Artificial Intelligence in Agriculture: Prospects and Challenges in Nigeria
The agriculture sector faces numerous challenges including disease and pest infestation, insufficient available water, inadequate drainage, declining labour availability and knowledge gap between farmers and technology, leading to low outputs. More and more farmers are starting to adopt new techniques to boost productivity and increase revenue. This paper reviews the applications of artificial intelligence (AI) to agriculture and explores ways that the Nigerian farmers can benefit from this technology. AI-powered solutions have been applied in areas such as farm, crops and animal monitoring, diseases and pest detection, intelligent farm chemicals application, automatic weeding, aerial survey and mapping, smart irrigation, intelligent produce grading and sorting, among others. These will not only enable farmers to do more with less, but will also improve quality. Obstacles of inadequate technology infrastructure such as broadband internet access, and paucity of a workforce with the right skills exist in Nigeria, but with continuous efforts currently being made, they will be overcome. It is concluded that the application of AI holds great promise for improved productivity and better utilisation of resources.