A pioneering R&D project aims to introduce an advanced monitoring system that harnesses AI to enable early detection and management of crop stress.
With funding from DEFRA and Innovate UK, the ‘TomatoGuard: Advanced AI-Driven Pest and Stress Detection for Sustainable Tomato Cultivation’ project aims to revolutionise protected crop production by making it more sustainable and efficient.
This collaborative effort brings together expertise from the UK Agri-Tech Centre, Altered Carbon (AC), Fargro Limited and prominent commercial tomato producer APS Produce. The project focuses on developing machine learning capabilities to detect specific tomato volatiles indicative of stress.
This system is powered by AC’s K9sense chip, a new type of chemical sensor that operates within an AI framework. It identifies unique patterns of volatile organic compounds (VOCs) released by stressed plants, enabling interventions before visible symptoms occur.
To ensure measurable impact, the project focuses on Red Spider Mites (RSM), a significant pest in tomato cultivation. Although biological treatments are available, their effectiveness improves dramatically with early identification. Due to environmental, food safety and commercial concerns, many chemical treatment options have been withdrawn in recent years. TomatoGuard combines supervised learning for RSM detection and unsupervised learning for anomaly detection to address this challenge.
Dr. Andy Evans, Innovation Lead for Crop Health at the UK Agri-Tech Centre, said: “The outcomes from this project will lead to the detection of issues arising within tomato crops at a very early pre-symptomatic stage, allowing interventions to be deployed in the areas where issues are arising. From a grower perspective this would cut down on costs due to unnecessary pesticide use by targeting the areas that need treatments, optimising the nutritional requirements of the crop and maintaining a high quality and yielding product.”