FEATURE
Using Artificial Intelligence to Grow Avocados
Figure 1: SupPlant’s climatic data forecasted a heatwave approaching.
I
n order for South African Avocados to reach their full growth potential they must be irrigated in the right amount: not too much and not too little. For decades, the decision on how to irrigate avocados was done based on the farmer’s intuition, experience and at best on some scattered data. Traditional irrigation approaches limit growers to being reactive, not proactive in protecting their avocados.
Today, technology is taking over this space to help farmers use smarter ways to irrigate and produce more avocados. SupPlant, the leading precision agriculture hardware-software solution is an Israeli technology that has expertise in sensing plant stress. They have converted this expertise into a system that uses agronomic algorithms, sensors, artificial intelligence, big data and cloud-based technology in order to achieve these
goals. They have developed a data model using predictive algorithms based on analyzing 100M avocado data points. SupPlant’s sensors, which measure the stress of the plant, are placed in 5 locations of the plant (deep soil, shallow soil, stem/trunk, leaf, avocado) and monitor Plant and fruit growth patterns, The actual water content in the soil and plant health
Figure 2: Showcases the difference between an avocado plot that used SupPlant before the heatwave and one that didn’t use SupPlant’s technology
24 | January - February 2021
