FEATURE STORY
TRAVEL
Israel Talpaz (left), SeeTree’s co-founder and CEO, with Guy Morgenstern SeeTree co-founder and CTO. PHOTOS COURTESY SEETREE
THE TECHNOLOGY OF AGRICULTURE REVOLUTIONIZING AGRICULTURE | BY JOSH HASTEN | JNS
A
group of former Israeli intelligence experts are in the midst of revolutionizing the fruit-tree farming industry around the world, utilizing their know-how, along with some of the most advanced agriculture technology (“agtech”) on the planet. With the use of drones, satellite imagery, artificial intelligence and plain-old boots on the ground in countries such as the United States, Brazil, South Africa, Mexico and Greece, the Tel Aviv-based SeeTree company has been retained by some of the world’s biggest fruit-tree farmers in order to analyze and provide important in-depth information on each individual tree’s health and productivity. SeeTree is getting set to celebrate its fourth year in business, collecting data and monitoring some 50 million trees for more than 30 farming customers ... and counting. Co-founder and CEO Israel Talpaz said, “when I retired from Israel’s intelligence community, I hooked up to agriculture 24
L’CHAIM SAN DIEGO MAGAZINE • AUGUST 2021
with the goal of bringing the expertise, technologies and capabilities that I learned in the defense world to the world of agriculture.” He added, “surprisingly, I saw similarities in the challenges agriculture has today with what happened in the defense community about 20 years ago. Both were analog, not digital, especially in the world of trees and permanent crops — crops that live for many years.” Talpaz explained that “most technologies went to row crops — those that you replant every year — livestock and other areas, and I asked experts why that is. I was told that trees are very complicated; they are like people. Every tree varies from one another. Farming trees is complex because of the high level of variability.” On the other hand, he said, “the value of a tree is very high because it lives for decades and produces fruit every year. A farm of trees is like a factory that has production units. Every tree is a production unit. It has [annual] inputs and outputs. And you would not
imagine a factory today that is not digitized. What would you do with a million trees or 25 million trees, and the farmers don’t have the tools to manage these trees at all?” Until now, farmers — some with 100,000plus trees on their property — would physically be unable to obtain accurate information in terms of their trees’ health, how its crops were doing, whether or not the tree was receiving enough water and sunlight, the amount of crop-protection pesticides that are needed and other important data. Talpaz explained that without that information, farmers essentially estimate those figures by examining several trees and calculating averages in all categories. So in comes SeeTree, he said, to “create a digital entity for every single tree. Each one is separated and mapped, and monitored and has a name. And all of the data is connected to that file of that tree like a health file, and that’s what enables us to optimize for the farmers.” With teams on the ground in the above-
