South African Agritech Startup, Aerobotics, Launches Aeroview Platform for Farmers
A new yield management platform has been made available by South African Agritech startup Aerobotics, giving growers tools to monitor, control, and safeguard their harvests.
Aerobotics, a company founded in 2014, combines overhead imagery 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.
In 2020, Aerobotics obtained $5.5 million in funding from Naspers Foundry. At the time, James Paterson, Chief Executive Officer (CEO) of Aerobotics, stated that Aerobotics has already shown success in its capacity to gather and analyze tree- and fruit-level data, which are crucial to the agricultural industry.
Aerobotics has now introduced a platform for monitoring and tracking yields as a significant advancement of its instruments for managing nutrition and irrigation. With the use of its mobile app, producers can record yield data on-site, assisting in the development of suggestions and crucial management decisions.
According to James Paterson, assisting farmers in making data-driven decisions and achieving their target yields by providing control of production drivers including irrigation distribution uniformity and nutritional programs is the core of Aerobotics’ service.
“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 labor 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 Paterson.
How the Platform Works
Aerobotics’ platform is a significant advancement in regulating irrigation and nutrition. The platform enables farmers to record yield data on-site, assisting in informing recommendations and crucial management choices to attain goal yields.
The new yield management platform uses measures for the performance of trees, vines, or bushes. Growing crews are led by the app to each geo-referenced tree, vine, or bush in the field, where yield counts and sizes are digitally recorded before being extrapolated into variety and block-level reporting on the platform.
By using the machine data platform and efficient guidance to the most representative places, teams on the field may collect 10x more yield data using the most recent fruit measuring and tracking tool, spending up to 75% less time doing so. Customers are already uploading tens of thousands of photographs each week, and usage has grown 15 times in the previous two months.