Precision Ag specialist To Connect Louisiana Producers With Artificial Intelligence, New Technologies

KYLE PEVETO

BATON ROUGE, LOUISIANA

Two-spotted spider mites are a top concern for strawberry farmers. These tiny insects attack plants, causing leaf cells to collapse and die.

The bugs grow less than a millimeter in length, but accurately counting the pests can help farmers decide the optimal method for controlling them.

“Most people – at least me – can’t identify them without a magnifying lens,” said Congliang Zhou, who joined the LSU AgCenter last month as an assistant professor for research and extension.

As a doctoral student at the University of Florida, Zhou used his experience with artificial intelligence and geographic information systems to develop a smartphone application that counts the mites among strawberry plants, helping growers reduce their use of pesticides and save money. 

Zhou joined the AgCenter School of Plant, Environmental and Soil Sciences to focus on precision agriculture, a strategy that uses data collected with technologies such as GPS, drones and autonomous robots to make agricultural operations more efficient. He will work with agricultural producers statewide to improve their use of these technologies and develop new tools based on their needs.

Precision agriculture has increased the efficiency of farms worldwide in the past 40 years, and Zhou sees a greater need for labor-saving technologies in the future.

“The labor shortage is a major issue for the modern farming system,” he said. “We cannot find enough people, especially in the United States.”

Born in a small village in Jiangxi, a province in southern China, his parents grew rice on a small farm. When he was a child, they moved close to Shanghai to find work in factories. There, Zhou excelled in school and found an interest in science and technology, training for academic science competitions. 

When it came time for Zhou to decide where to attend college, he chose Shandong Agricultural University. While engineering and computer science were the popular choices for his generation, he thought often of his family’s small farm and felt drawn to agriculture.

“My family and the living environment had some impact on my decision,” he said. 

By his second year at the university, Zhou had discovered precision agriculture. His undergraduate thesis focused on precision nutrient management that uses remote-sensing technology to estimate the nutrient content of soils. He loved seeing how quickly new methods developed through precision agriculture could make a difference to farmers.

“For this technology, you can see the immediate influence for some people,” Zhou said.

Zhou earned a master’s degree in geography at Texas Tech University, where he deepened his study of precision agriculture by focusing on remote sensing and geographic information systems, or GIS. These computer systems analyze data with geographic reference points. For his thesis, Zhou trained an artificial intelligence model for analyzing remote sensing data. 

In 2019, Zhou began his doctoral studies at the University of Florida Department of Agricultural and Biological Engineering. Working in the department’s precision agriculture laboratory, he used his experience in artificial intelligence and computer vision to develop smartphone apps and portable devices for strawberry farmers. 

Zhou joined the AgCenter in July after completing his postdoctoral research. He envisions many additional uses for the smartphone program and plans to collaborate with entomologists and pathologists to broaden its applications. 

“It can also be adopted for other things in our department, for nutrient estimation, water stress detection, monitoring, these kinds of things,” he said. 

While Zhou has experience with drones using remote sensing technology and has developed smartphone applications, he also sees new frontiers for technology in agriculture. In the past few years, he has begun developing a robot that can crawl through fields and take multiple measurements important to producers. 

At the AgCenter, Zhou will work in an extension role in addition to conducting research. He plans to meet agricultural producers and learn what needs they may have.

“I like to listen to people, talk to people and then bring precision agriculture technology to the people,” he said. “I really like to listen to them, talk to them, communicate with them and then help.”

Contact Zhou at congliangzhou@agcenter.lsu.edu or 225-578-5783. ∆

KYLE PEVETO: LSU AgCenter