Ireland lost about 20 percent of its population to starvation and
emigration during the great famine of 1845-1849 because disease
destroyed that nation’s major food source – potato. Today, an
Irish-born professor at Penn State University believes that a similar
situation in other regions, such as sub-Saharan Africa, could be a
thousand times worse.
But there’s hope, he said, because modern food producers have a tool the 19th century Irish did not – smartphones and mobile apps, like PlantVillage.
According to PlantVillage co-creator Dr David Hughes, assistant
professor of entomology and biology at Penn State’s College of
Agricultural Sciences, PlantVillage provides access to a computerized
plant diagnostic system that boasts an algorithm capable of diagnosing
26 diseases in 14 crops with 99 percent accuracy. In essence, computers
have been “taught” to diagnose plant diseases by comparing the images of healthy and diseased leaves.
Hughes developed PlantVillage with Dr. Marcel Salathé, former
assistant professor of biology in Penn State’s Department of Biology
(and now at Switzerland’s Ecole polytechnique federale de Luasanne), to
help reduce food loss by making it easier for knowledge providers to
share critical information to growers around the world. According to
Hughes, as much as 40 percent of the world’s potential food supply is
destroyed by diseases that affect crop plants.
More 2.5 million growers around the world have used the social media
PlantVillage platform to ask questions and post images about their
particular issues and also to help answer the questions of others. Many
forum answers and images come from experienced growers, extension
experts, land-grant scientists, industry professionals, and scientists
at international centers. So far, the expanding A-Z library of plants in the PlantVillage data base ranges from African eggplant to yams.
According to Hughes, the smart phone-based diagnosis is only possible
because of plant pathology research funded by USDA’s National Institute
of Food and Agriculture (NIFA) and other national bodies around the
world, such as the Consultative Group on International Agricultural
Research (CGIAR) centers. The web-based PlantVillage algorithm uses a
dataset of more than 54,300 images to make its diagnoses. More