According to the World Bank, food security is defined as the state where all people, at all times, have access to sufficient, quality and nutritious food for an active and healthy life.(1, 2) Achieving the zero-hunger target of the United Nations Sustainable Development Goal 2 is currently being threatened by the infestation of crops by diseases and pests, causing crop losses, reducing yields, and economic losses. Pests and diseases account for over 40% of crop losses worldwide.(3)
In the face of growing food insecurity in South Africa, which is at its highest in over a decade,(4) technology through the fourth industrial revolution (4IR) offers potential solutions to addressing this trend. These innovations can improve food systems and agricultural supply chains, making them more productive and sustainable.
UJ Blockchain: Engineering a smarter future
The South Africa-Swiss Bilateral Research Chair in Blockchain Technology aims to explore the advantages and barriers of integrating blockchain technology in supply chain management. Two different focus areas of implementation are envisioned within the import/export of goods in South Africa and Switzerland, namely the agri-food and drugs/medical devices supply chains. The Chair, which Prof Nnamdi Nwulu holds, is dedicated to developing 4IR solutions in the agri-food sector, aimed at solving real-world problems.
FloraShield: Where technology nurtures nature
FloraShield has been developed to address the problem of pest and disease infestation. It is an AI detection system trained with over 400 000 open source data (Plant Village Dataset) (5) using deep learning and a fine-tuned LLM for easy, low-cost pest and disease detection of crops. FloraShield can detect pest and disease infection in crops by simply analysing their leaves. It also comes with language support for all South African languages, including Afrikaans, English, isiNdebele, isiXhosa, isiZulu, Sepedi, Sesotho, Setswana, siSwati, Tshivenda and Xitsonga. It supports the detection of diseases in tomato, strawberry, potato, corn and soybean crops, to mention a few.
Experience FloraShield: Real-time detection. Real impact
To operate the FloraShied System, follow the steps:
Step 1: Open the FloraShield link on your mobile device.
Step 2: Start the system and see its functionality in crop disease and pest detection.
Step 3: Select the desired language. FloraShield supports all South African languages.
Step 4: Upload the image of the crop leaf.
Step 5: FloraShield analyses and gives an output with details including the crop type, whether it is infested or healthy, and confidence.
The images below give illustrations of the operation.
FloraShield offers significant benefits through the early detection of infestation. These include the early detection and treatment of infected crops and the early response of farm extension workers to curb the infestation. By improving the response time, crop losses can be mitigated, resulting in increased crop yield and quality produce. It also comes with additional features, such as audio generation, explaining the detection in all South African languages, real-time support linkages with agricultural extension officers, Google map directions to the nearest accredited sellers for recommended pesticides, real-time video generation on how to apply pesticides, real-time report generation, custom data training (training with different dataset) and blockchain integration. It can also be deployed on platforms like Telegram, WhatsApp, web, Android and iOS applications for improved accessibility.
Future update
We are working to explore incentive mechanisms for extension officers and smallholder farmers to engage with the system using token-based alerts or rewards.
What does this mean for farmers?
FloraShield is cost-effective with easy deployment. It comes with multiple deployments to platforms users already know and love, like Telegram and WhatsApp, making it easy to use. Furthermore, it is easily extensible with diverse use cases for different crops, and its use of voice explainer further breaks language barriers, making communication easy in any South African language.
UJ Blockchain innovations
The UJ Blockchain has been at the forefront of innovations in solving challenges in agri-food. FloraShield is just one of the many innovations currently being birthed from the centre. Other innovations include:
- Thato AI: A friendly conversational AI assistant capable of communicating in South African languages.
- Food Trolley: Innovation for meal parcel collection process at the University of Johannesburg.
- Cap'n Trade: A decentralised mobile application that reduces the carbon footprint due to urbanisation and industrialisation activities.
- CertyFile: A file verification system that includes audio, videos and documents using blockchain.
- Pest and disease detection using programmable drones with decentralised storage.
Detect early. Protect more. Feed the world.
References
(2) https://www.worldbank.org/en/topic/agriculture/brief/food-security-update/what-is-food-security
(3) Mafongoya, P et al. Climate Change and Rapidly Evolving Pests and Diseases in Southern Africa. in 41–57 (2019). doi:10.1007/978-3-030-11857-0_4.
(4) Shoprite. South African Food Security Index 2024. (2024).
(5) DP Hughes and M Salathé. 2015. An open access repository of images on plant health to enable the development of mobile disease diagnostics," arXiv preprint arXiv:1511.08060, 2015. The dataset is available at https://plantvillage.psu.edu/ and is licensed under Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported (CC BY-SA 3.0). Link to licence: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/
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