To make a successful return on their investment, growers need to accurately predict how much crop they might grow in a given season. University of Florida researchers are developing web-based tools that incorporate artificial intelligence to help producers with yield predictions.
Such forecasts are critical. In Florida, the production value for strawberries was $714 million and $532 million for tomatoes in 2025, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture National Agricultural Statistics Service. The goal of the web tools is to give growers a fast, accurate estimation and prediction of yields, rather than making economic projections based on manually counting the crops or historic data that can vary greatly.
Kevin Wang, an assistant professor of agricultural and biological engineering at the UF Institute of Food and Agricultural Sciences (UF/IFAS), gave strawberry growers an update on the two-step applications, known as PhenoSeg and PhenoSnap, at the AgriTech conference in Plant City on May 5. Wang is also lead author on this new Ask IFAS document, which details these tools.
PhenoSeg focuses on segmenting individual strawberry plants from drone imagery – essentially isolating each strawberry plant from the background so scientists and growers can count plant-level fruit and flowers more precisely…