Apples to All: Growing an AI-Enabled Agricultural Data Platform
Transforming the crop sector to help farmers optimize yields, efficiency and sustainability with AI.
Project Overview
Updated April 9, 2025
The Problem
Agriculture, specifically for specialty crops, is becoming increasingly challenging due to climate events, labour shortages and the prohibitive cost and limited availability of land. Permanent crops like apples, grapes and blueberries that are cultivated for years or even decades can require substantial investment to replace damaged plants or outdated varieties. Crucial tasks, such as thinning or scouting for pests/diseases, can involve growers having to manually assess their crops and estimate the inputs required to address issues or optimize yield.
With permanent crop growers shifting to two-dimensional and systematic planning for better production efficiency over the past fifteen years, there is now another significant transformational opportunity for the introduction of artificial intelligence (AI).
How We Are Solving It
Led by Vivid Machines in collaboration with the IDEAS Research Center and global brands in fruits production, this project aims to reshape the specialty crop sector by deploying an AI-enabled agricultural data platform. Through a combination of computer vision systems and machine learning (ML) algorithms, the platform will assist farmers and global food producers in making informed decisions to optimize crop health, maximize yields, increase efficiency and reduce environmental impacts.
Vivid’s proprietary hardware is easily mountable onto any tractor, sprayer or farm equipment to geolocate and captures images of every tree and provide real-time predictions in the field. They’re able to capture tree count, blossom cluster count, and fruit count and sizing from blossom to harvest for apple production to enable informed thinning and providing precise real time per plant data. Vivid’s advanced yield forecasting also allows for improved supply chain visibility, helping packhouses determine cold storage strategies to maximize fruit longevity, and to help marketers align sales with retailer demand to reduce food loss.
From their commercial success in apples, this project will develop a prototype to extend Vivid’s commercialized apple computer vision system into various permanent crops, subsequently expanding to specialty and general agricultural applications. Farmers and global food producers will be able to optimize inputs, such as labour, fertilizers and spray chemicals, through to crop prediction, pest and disease control, with the project aiming to not only develop and refine Vivid’s technology but allow for its integration into everyday agricultural operations.
The Result
This project successfully developed a prototype for Vivid to extend its commercialized apple computer vision system into a versatile product offering that has potential to be used for various permanent crops, specialty crops and general agricultural applications through equipment integrations with its technology. Support from DIGITAL enabled Vivid to work with academic partners to collect and test data for these new use cases. These academic partnerships included Penn State University and Washington State University, and various international research centers.
By working with DIGITAL, Vivid was able to understand the importance of focusing on other sectors beyond traditional producers and expand to target import/exporters and agricultural equipment manufacturers for integration with Vivid’s technology. From this, it was able to secure a subcontractor agreement with an agricultural equipment supplier that will unlock Vivid’s ability to sell and support their product into northern Europe including the Netherlands, Belgium and Denmark.
From these various agreements, Vivid was able to secure new customers in Europe and Australia, as well as new strategic partners in Europe, South America and the U.S. as results of expanding their commercial offerings potential during its project with DIGITAL.
