AMMAN (Al Jazeera) – Zeid Sinokrot was an unemployed engineer in 2012 when he decided to join the family business, growing dates on a farm outside Ariha.
But his father’s date palms began dying one by one, consumed from the inside by insects that were impossible to see until the trees began to keel over. Four years later, his father sold the farm.
“I knew I wanted to find a solution to the problem,” Sinokrot told Al Jazeera. “Trees were falling, and farmers were afraid.”
The Sinokrot’s farm was under attack from the red palm weevil, a small insect native to South Asia that attacks more than 40 types of palms and causes more than $1bn in losses in the Middle East, Africa, and North America annually. The pests spend 80 percent of their lives inside trees and are almost invisible until it’s too late, leaving farmers with few defenses aside from drenching their fields in pesticides as a preventive measure.
But smart farming that uses AI for pest detection is helping farmers and the Jordanian government fight back without chemicals, and Sinokrot is leading the charge.
His startup, Palmear, uses acoustic AI to decipher tiny noises within trees and find early signs of infestation. In November, the Jordanian Ministry of Agriculture began partnering with Palmear to monitor, prevent and treat weevil infestations. The ministry now has a dashboard that shows all the trees that have been screened with AI and is gearing up to cover the entire country using a combination of data from farmers and ministry employees.
Sinokrot estimates that 16 percent of date palms in the country are currently being monitored through Palmear, either by private farmers or the ministry. Farmers using Palmear often scan their trees every 45 days, and the information is automatically shared with the ministry to track any spread.
“Early detection and treatment are the most important things to us,” Imad al-Awad, director of Plant Protection and Phytosanitation at the agriculture ministry, told Al Jazeera. “We benefit a lot from this AI to know if there’s a hot spot. We can warn people about it and protect the date industry.”
On a frigid morning in January, Sinokrot visited Hatem Dabash at his small date farm in the Jordan Valley. The burned-out husk of a palm tree lay behind them as they spoke, its hollowed-out trunk a sure sign of the decay left by the red palm weevil.
“The weevils are a dangerous problem,” said Dabash as he strolled through rows of palm trees on his farm. “If left unchecked, it would spread through the entire area. It’s a constant battle.”
Like other farmers under attack from the weevils, Dabash burned the badly infected palm tree last year to prevent further spread. That tree was the worst out of several weevil infestation cases Dabash faced last year. He treated the others with strong insecticides. Although they killed the weevils inside his palms, they also tainted his dates with noxious chemicals, ruining his harvest for the year. Following a full pesticide treatment, trees need several months before they can produce dates that are safe to eat. By then, the harvest window has closed.
To reduce these risks, Dabash welcomed the use of AI to monitor his trees. It allows him to catch any cases early and treat them before the insects can spread to nearby trees.