By Clint Thompson
A glimpse into agriculture’s future will be on display at the Southeastern Specialty Crop Technology Conference & Show on May 5-6 at the University of Georgia (UGA) Tifton Campus Conference Center in Tifton, Georgia.
Registration remains open for the event which is expected to attract fruit and vegetable growers, university faculty and students, Agtech startups and robotics engineers, precision ag manufacturers and consultants, and government and policy stakeholders.
University of Georgia Assistant Professor and Precision Ag Extension Specialist Luan Oliveira helped coordinate the event and talked about its importance.
“The idea is to bring technologies that the growers don’t actually know yet, so they can see them working live in action,” Oliveira said. “Here in Georgia, the growers do pretty well. But every year they’re getting hammered with inputs, rising costs and also labor wages. The idea with the conference is to showcase the technologies to say, ‘There’s something here to be used, not to just tackle that issue directly but to take something from somewhere else.’
“When you think of high precision sprayers, it is proven and I have research from my lab, we can reduce 60% of chemical applications just by using those spot sprayers.”
Program Specifics
The two-day event will focus partly on presentations from experts and panel discussions, specifically related to the specialty crop industry. They will address artificial intelligence technologies in different facets of agriculture. This includes fruit-harvesting robotics, smart sprayers and sustainable weed management programs. The other half of the event will allow for live field technology demonstrations from different companies.
“We’re going to leave the conference center in the afternoons and then go to the field. Every company will showcase their robots or their technologies,” Oliveira said.
Click here for additional information about the conference.