Banana growers can now use handheld technologies to run their farms more efficiently.
According to the Plant Methods journal, a team of researchers has created a new smartphone tool developed for banana farmers to scan plants for signs of five major diseases that could attack their crops.
In testing in Colombia, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, India, Benin, China and Uganda, the tool provided a 90 percent successful detection rate, reported the German news agency.
This work is a step towards creating a satellite-powered, globally connected network to control disease and pest outbreaks. The tool allows farmers to connect to markets, extension workers, satellite images and climate information.
Michael Selvaraj, the lead author, who developed the tool with colleagues from Bioversity International in Africa, said: "Farmers around the world struggle to defend their crops from pests and diseases. There is very little data on banana pests and diseases for low-income countries, but an AI tool such as this one offers an opportunity to improve crop surveillance, fast-track control and mitigation efforts and help farmers prevent production losses."
The tool is built into an app called Tumaini, which means "hope" in Swahili, and is designed to help smallholder banana growers quickly detect a disease or pest and prevent a wide outbreak from happening.
The app aims to link them to extension workers to quickly stem the outbreak. It can also upload data to a global system for large-scale monitoring, in order to create a deployable response to support banana farmers in need of crop disease control.
Guy Blomme, from Bioversity International, said: "The overall high accuracy rates obtained while testing the beta version of the app show that Tumaini has what it takes to become a very useful early disease and pest detection tool."
