Sounds similar to what I read a long time ago about a big tomato farm in the Netherlands... Have you tried talking to actual farmers of that produce? Universities? Agricultural faculties do a lot of research in that direction.

Expensive, quickly perishable produce might be able to compete, otherwise I guess free water and energy from above in the "remote" classical farming will be hard to beat.

And then my naive guess would be that to generate enough data for a "ml" approach not only by name might be somewhat expensive.

This sounds so negative, but this is not my intention... I wish you all the best and hopefully will stumble upon a success story in the future :-)