Focus on drones and apps

Using drones to ensure the health of your crop

- Zunel van Eeden

In this article, Zunel van Eeden writes about how drones can be used to improve crop health and yield.

Fresh produce growers play a vital role in food supply safety, but they face their fair share of challenges each season. From managing pests and diseases and optimising irrigation and nutrition to predicting yields and harvest planning, there are numerous decisions to be made before the harvest can be delivered to the packhouse and sold to different markets.

New technologies offer new data sources and platforms, but can also overwhelm the user with information and processes. Aerobotics, a local agritech company celebrating 10 years in the global fruit and nut industry in September, offers a suite of artificial intelligence (AI) solutions tailor-made to help growers, packers and sellers make decisions to improve efficiency and profitability.

Aerobotics was founded in 2014 by South Africans Benji Meltzer and James Paterson, who hold master’s degrees in data science and aeronautical engineering, respectively. Paterson grew up on a citrus farm in Citrusdal, Western Cape, where he learnt first hand the challenges faced by his family and the community of citrus producers. After Paterson studied overseas at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Meltzer at the London Imperial College, they decided to combine their skills in aeronautics and machine learning to find ways to solve farmers’ challenges. They created computer vision software specifically for the fruit and nut industry using AI and imagery collected by drones, and later expanded that to mobile phone imagery.