Our years are punctuated by times that we want to buy flowers, Valentines, birthdays, Christmases. And the chances are, when you look in your bouquet, one of the stems would have been grown here in Kenya.

But like most places, this part of the world is not immune to the problems that climate change is bringing. Rising temperatures, extreme drought, and flash floods are affecting the crop yields. In fact, just a couple of years ago, some Kenyan flower farms reported losses as high as 50 % due to the impact of heavy downpours. So that's where the technology comes in. Artificial intelligence company, Lima Labs, is providing a machine vision system using drones, which they say makes the farming smarter and more predictable.

Use a camera on the We're going to take images of our crops in the farm. And then once we've gotten those images, we send them to the office, and then we're able to process them and give insights to farmers. And insights span all the way from a prediction of the harvest. It spans all the way to a prediction of the stem density, a growth rate, probably in the future, even detection of pesting diseases.

On this farm, some of the flowers are drone inside huge greenhouses. The rest are outside, and that presents some challenges for the drones.

With more gusts of wind, the drone uses actually more battery power and drains a lot of battery power. And also the rain, we cannot fly the drones through the rain.

The AI algorithms being used can help predict the weather patterns through sensors on the farm that detect humidity, temperature, and other environmental conditions. A dashboard on a computer screen displays footage of the plant, providing stem and flower head count and other crucial data like the chance of an insect infestation. This all helps farmers better predict fluctuations in growing and harvesting patterns.

Well, the big issue is climate change and the unpredictable weather patterns. The heavens have opened now, so we're going to head inside into the packing room and do the rest of the interviews. Hi, I'm Shona. Hi, I'm Vasie. Nice to meet you. Nice to meet you, too. Can you show me around?

Sure. Great.

Tell me what's happening here.

This is our grading hall. It's one of the post-hervest sections. For service, that means we process the final product that is from harvesting to packing it and dispatching the final customer.

Can you talk to me about some of the varieties? Because these lovely little red berries are nice.

This, specifically, is hypericum, the red berry. So the beauty of this crop lies with the berries, the red shiny berries.

The quality of these berries and the leaves looks fantastic. Would you say the technology is really helping them be in this condition?

Yes, it is really helping because with the technology, we have been able to come a long way in producing more strong varieties, more resistant once.

How has the technology been received here on the farm? What does everyone think about having drones in place and using the tech?

We didn't believe in it at first, but later on, when we saw the result and benefits, it's now a way of life on our side.

So from there, the farmers conduct weekly farm assessments. Depending on the flower's health, they can change their sales and logistics decisions, meaning they don't waste time or lose money.

Another thing is time management because it takes the shortest time possible and you get more interior resources.

I can imagine people will be pleased about that.

Yeah, yeah.

Could you talk me through how a worker's day might have changed during the 9:00 to 5:00 as a result of having this technology technology implemented.

So what they used to do is get a square meter, manually count how many stems are there in that square meter, and then extrapolate, and assume that the rest of the field is actually similar to that square meter, which obviously is very inaccurate with At Limear, when we come and we monitor these crops using the drones, we're able to, first of all, get accurate numbers because we're seeing each and every stem, and we don't have the human aspect of getting tired, right? To count or losing track of numbers, right? There's that aspect. And then at the end of the day, we're able to get an accurate number for the amount of stems in the whole field. This, of course, saves the four hours that person was doing that every day. At the end of the day, makes their life a lot easier.

And back at the office, they can see the results routes.

Because the reality is here, it's showing you the number of stems that you forecasted and the actual stems, because this is the reality. So very confident with this technology.

Technology is rapidly changing agriculture in many ways, and this farm is certainly taking steps to move beyond the traditional and into a data-driven business.