10101170Project Insight - Embedding AI into HorticultureClosedCollaborative R&DInnovate UKHorticulture is suffering acute productivity challenges with the running of farms at current scale becoming impossible.The sector is facing a chronic labour crisis, which accounts for over 50% of growing costs for high cropping soft-fruits such as strawberries. A rise in farm-gate strawberry prices of just 23% against minimum wage increases of 77% since 2010 have squeezed grower margins to the limit with a huge mismatch between the much-increased cost of production and the prices growers receive from retailers who are their main customers. Additionally a lack of labour availability due to trends affected by the pandemic, Brexit and the Ukraine war has led to 44% of growers employing seasonal workers reporting a shortfall in 2021\. This has led to high levels of waste and with uncertainty in their operations, growers reducing future cropping areas. Future requirements such as the drive to Net Zero and regulation of pesticides further compound the challenges to fruit growers. Increasing farmland productivity is therefore a critical factor in ensuring the future of UK fruit growing in the wider context of a global growing population and all while minimising additional CO2 emissions, ideally shrinking the ecological footprint of horticulture. AI's capabilities are well suited and pivotal to the future of horticulture- leveraging vast datasets that can transform operations and decision making. Today's practises requires experienced staff to walk the crop and attempt subjective assessments of crop health and yield resulting in sampling small patches as indicators for the entire field, with incomplete/generalised assessments. AI fruit scouting holds immense potential to drive the precision and system-level transformation that will help farmers achieve higher returns with lower resources and unlock new value. Antobot is uniquely placed within the global agriculture industry with the ability to develop software, embedded hardware and robotic platforms to create highly integrated, capable, affordable customer-focused AI systems. The project will build on the foundations and proof-of-concept from IUK Project Insight for an autonomous robotic fruit scouting AI system and embed operationally the next-generation AI data analytics with multiple fruit growers to learn and unlock the next level of on-farm decision making and productivity.