A new yield management platform has been made available by South African agri-tech firm Aerobotics, giving producers tools to monitor, control, and safeguard their harvests.
Aerobotics, a company founded in Cape Town in 2014, combines overhead images from drones and satellites along with machine learning algorithms to help tree and wine producers identify problems early and improve crop performance.
The startup’s cloud-based Aeroview platform gives farmers knowledge, scout mapping, and other tools to lessen pest and disease damage to tree and vine harvests.
Aerobotics, which obtained a Series B investment in 2020, has gathered perennial crop imaging from over one million acres with over 200 producers to identify over 195 million plants during the previous seven years.
In a significant development of its tools for regulating irrigation and nutrition, Aerobotics has now included a platform for monitoring and assessing yields. By allowing growers to record yield data on the spot, our smartphone app helps growers make crucial management decisions and recommendations that will help them reach desired yields.
In order to build up representative sample sites on the new yield management platform, the most recent yield product employs measurements for the performance of trees, vines, or bushes. Through the use of the app, producers and their teams are directed to each geo-referenced tree, vine, or bush where yield counts and sizes are digitally recorded before being extrapolated into a variety and block-level data on the platform.
By being effectively directed to the most representative sites and utilizing the computer vision-enabled mobile application, workers on the ground using the most recent fruit measuring and tracking technology spend up to 75% less time gathering 10 times more yield data. Users are now uploading tens of thousands of photographs each week, and usage has surged 15-fold over the past two months.
“One of our founding principles at Aerobotics is ‘farmers first’ and we’re very excited by the interest customers are showing in our approach to managing yield. As more and more growers look to agricultural technology to solve labour and input efficiency challenges, we’re helping our customers do more with less by understanding the impact of their limiting factors. By enabling control of production drivers like irrigation distribution uniformity and nutritional programs, we’re helping growers make data-driven decisions and achieve their target yields,” said James Paterson, CEO and co-founder at Aerobotics.
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