Using Artificial Intelligence to Grow Avocados

Figure 1: SupPlant’s climatic data forecasted a heatwave approaching.

In 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

data. In addition to this data, SupPlant monitors real-time and forecasted climatic data and forecasted plant growth patterns. All this info is uploaded every 30 minutes to an algorithm in the cloud that provides farmers with precise irrigation recommendations based on the integration of all this data.

One of the greatest challenges for a South African farmer today is the weather. SupPlant uses ClimaCell, the world-leading weather intelligence platform in order to monitor the weather in a precise plot location. Attached are pictures and charts demonstrating what happens with avocados during a heatwave: In picture1 it is visible that SupPlant’s climatic data forecasted a heatwave approaching. Figure 2 showcases the difference between an avocado plot that used SupPlant before the heatwave and one that didn’t use SupPlant’s technology. The plot that didn’t use SupPlant suffered from loss of avocados in the heatwave, as can be seen in figure 3.

In addition, SupPlant’s mobile app allows all partnering farmers to monitor plots and control

The plot that didn’t use SupPlant suffered from loss of avocados in the heatwave

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. In figure 4 it is shown that the app is alerting the farmer regarding increasing plant stress, recommending enhanced irrigation. Farmers that do not use technology will only be able to see the results on the avocado themselves after the stressor created vast damage to the plant. Once upon a time, in order to irrigate farmers needed to go to the field or set a water timer. Now they can know from afar when their avocados are thirsty.

Figure 4:App alerting the farmer regarding increasing plant stress, recommending enhanced irrigation.