ClimateAi Supports Sustainable Farming Practices

A U.S.-based wheat company is using an AI for weather forecasting, allowing it to suggest when to plant and harvest.

• ClimateAi’s dataset includes satellite imagery and rainfall readings, among others.
• The software predicts the weather over a period of an hour and up to 6 months.
• The AI weather prediction allows for proper yield despite the stress of the climate on the plants.

Shepherd’s Grain, a U.S.-based company that grows wheat, is using ClimateAi for AI weather forecasting, helping farmers do their part against climate change.

Reaping What One Sows

Due to humanity’s hyperfocus on expansion, we’ve severely damaged the planet. And now, we’ve reached a point where the weather has become quite unpredictable, swinging between extremes and threatening to erase seasons.

While every sector emits greenhouse gases, the energy, transportation, and agriculture sectors are some of the biggest contributors. The agriculture industry, however, has been experiencing an important shift towards sustainable farming in the last decade. But, on its own, it cannot solve the problem.

We Do What We Can

Many agriculture companies are recruiting the latest tech to fight the consequences of climate change and keep people’s pantries stocked. One of these companies is Shepherd’s Grain.

Unfortunately, plants are taking the brunt of climate change, as they need specific conditions to not only grow but also yield well. A 2022 study, “The impact of weather shocks on crop yields: Evidence from India,” found that a 1°C (33.8°F) deviation above the annual average temperature leads to a 21.3% decline in the annual yield.

Since 2003, Shepherd’s Grain has been using regenerative agriculture methods to grow and harvest wheat, including no-till/direct seed farming (planting without disturbing the soil), cover crops (plants grown to cover and manage the soil), and crop rotation (growing a series of different types of crops in the same area across a sequence of growing seasons), just to name a few.

Over the last year, the grower-owned company has been using ClimateAi, an AI-based weather forecasting technology, to help predict the weather over a specific period, from one hour to six months ahead. The intelligent tech uses both current and past data, including satellite imagery, temperature, and rainfall readings. This dataset allows the AI to give the farmers a weather forecast that is impressively accurate and locally tailored.

Beyond that, the weather forecasting AI also suggests when to plant the seeds and harvest the crops as well as predicts the yield. The company’s CEO, Jeremy Bunch, told BBC, “[the farmers] are beginning to look at ClimateAi to help them plan for crop management decisions in their wheat crops, the primary crop grown in the region.” The weather forecasting AI shows how certain seeds grew and yielded in a specific region or area.

Outside of agriculture, big companies are also doing what they can to combat climate change, although not as actively. Most companies pledged or committed to change, but they are lacking in application. The bigger ones were often forced, for lack of a better word, by the government to make changes to their hardware, making them more eco-friendly. Last year, for example, the EU forced Apple to use the USB-C cables from its at-the-time-new iPhone 15 and onward.

It’s a Collective Effort

Farmers worldwide have been working diligently to figure out how to reduce their industry’s impact on climate change. They even turned to AI for weather forecasting and plant management. However, this burden is not and should not fall solely on their shoulders. There are bigger industries that have degraded the integrity of our ecosystem. And yet, they are not as active as the planet needs them to be in trying to remedy the situation. The power industry alone is behind about 75% of global greenhouse gas emissions. As for transport, according to the International Energy Agency (IEA), it accounts for “more than a third of CO2 emissions from end‐use sectors.”

Both sectors are still largely reliant on fossil fuels, despite increasingly turning to renewable energy sources like wind and solar. But at the rate that they are going, we might miss the 2030 deadline to resuscitate to planet.

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