The UK produces 120,000 tonnes of strawberries each year, with a retail value of £659 million, and predicting yield is critical for the industry. Lincolnshire-based FruitCast uses AI to combine image data from hand-, vehicle- or robot-mounted cameras with weather forecasts to predict yield six weeks ahead. The company arises from Ceres Agri-Tech – a partnership led by Cambridge Enterprise (the commercialisation arm of the University of Cambridge) between five UK universities and three agricultural research institutes – and is a spinout from the University of Lincoln.
Added 10 November 2022; updated 3 May 2023.