Million Dollar Math Problem to Help Farmers Optimize Travel and Fieldwork
During planting season, every minute of quality weather counts. When the sun is shining and you have multiple fields ready to plant, the last thing you want to do is waste time or fuel moving between fields.
In perfect conditions, with efficiency top-of-mind, farmers constantly navigate routes like the one below, traveling from home to each field, then back home again.
In this example, there are more than 3,628,000 possible routes, but only the fastest one is truly the most efficient during the planting, growing and harvest rush. Plotting the fastest path from home to each field, and back home again is a common computational math problem called the Traveling Salesman Problem.
For 100 years, mathematicians have been searching for an algorithm that solves the Traveling Salesman Problem. The Clay Mathematics Institute has even offered a sizable $1 million reward to anyone who solves it.
Problem Solved
Enter biotech company Heartland, who says it has solved the Traveling Salesman Problem and intends to put the software in an app they’re calling ReMap.
Farmers will open the free platform to upload their GPS coordinates for each field, as well as their home farm. ReMap then produces a route that “saves the farmer fuel and time,” according to Tim Almond, Chairman and Founder of Heartland.
ReMap combines a variety of locations and finds the fastest possible route out of millions of options.
The app is currently in development, but Heartland is offering an early access waitlist on their website ahead of a full launch in roughly 30- to 45-days.
Beyond the Salesman
Heartland also intends to use ReMap to help discover new chemistry that can improve input needs throughout the growing season.
“If you take the 3,628,000 combinations concept and apply it to molecular chemistry, you could look at every possible combination of chemicals, and the output of those chemicals,” he says. “We’re calling this concept ‘regenerative chemistry.”
For example, applying 50 lbs. of nitrogen to a certain field will impact production differently than applying 25 lbs. to the same field. Almond says ReMap will be capable of adjusting and calculating a specific impact and crop needs after applying things like nitrogen before the actual production occurs.
Almond says Heartland’s regenerative chemistry program bases its “nutrient value” on a specific region’s soil needs to help maximize and calculate a crop’s growth potential.
Read more about Heartland:
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