Citrus under protective screen (CUPS) continues to spread across the Florida landscape. The practice is allowing growers to produce high-yielding and high-quality fruit. Roughly 1,500 acres are now planted under screen in Florida.
MEET CUPSchat
Arnold Schumann, University of Florida Institute of Food and Agricultural Sciences (UF/IFAS) professor of soil, water and ecosystems sciences, pioneered CUPS research in Florida. His CUPS studies have generated a lot of information. Schumann has created an AI chatbot to help growers sort through that information.
“Although still ongoing, my CUPS research, which began in 2014, is now substantially complete,” Schumann says. “However, the written knowledge gained from 11 years of CUPS research and Extension efforts was scattered across numerous sources, making it difficult for the public to access.
“To address this issue, I needed a tool to collate and package the knowledge from over 70 electronic documents about CUPS into a modern, streamlined format that could be easily accessed by everyone. The emergence of large language models like Chat-GPT3 in 2020 has led to the exponential growth of chatbots capable of conversing in human language. Consequently, in 2025, chatbots became the logical choice for repackaging this knowledge online. The program is called CUPSchat.”
The CUPSchat library now contains nearly 100 CUPS-related documents and is expanding. Schumann says the accuracy, honesty and integrity of the information contained in these documents are crucial for developing a reliable and trustworthy chatbot.
“Having been personally involved in CUPS research from its inception, I have hands-on experience with various aspects of CUPS, including planting trees, applying daily fertigation, operating sprayer tractors, herbiciding weeds, repairing storm damage to the CUPS structures and harvesting and tasting the fruit,” he says. “This firsthand experience made it easier for me to vet the documents gathered for CUPSchat. Moreover, I have played a key role in disseminating information about CUPS to stakeholders and assisting them in getting started with this technology.”
Read the rest of the article and watch a video on CUPS here.
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