AN Israeli technology company is using artificial intelligence to grow better fruit.
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But it's still up to the farmer to turn on the tap, more or less.
SupPlant, a precision agriculture hardware-software company has built a reputation for being able to sense and monitor plant stress.
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Now, the company has converted this expertise into a system that uses agronomic algorithms, sensors, artificial intelligence, big data and cloud-based technology in order to advance crops.
SupPlant has developed a data model using predictive algorithms based on analysing 100 million avocado data points.
SupPlant's sensors, which measure the stress of the plant, are placed in five locations of the plant (deep soil, shallow soil, stem/trunk, leaf, avocado) and monitor plant and fruit growth patterns, actual water content in the soil, and plant health data.
In addition to this, SupPlant monitors real-time and forecasted climatic data and forecasted plant growth patterns.
All this info is uploaded every 30 minutes to a cloud-based algorithm that provides farmers with precise irrigation recommendations based on the integration of all this data.
SupPlant uses ClimaCell, a weather intelligence platform in order to monitor the weather in a precise plot location.
In addition, SupPlant's mobile app allows all partnering farmers to monitor plots and control their water budget from anywhere.
With the app, each farmer is able to see the information of each plot, graphic displays of the past and future irrigation plans, hyper-local current and forecasted climatic data specific to each plot, agronomic insights, growth patterns of trunk and fruit, irrigation recommendations for today and a week ahead and more.
It can even alert the farmer regarding increasing plant stress, recommending enhanced irrigation.
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