CropX and Finistere Ventures Featured in The Atlantic

In its Possibilities Report covering the growing importance of IoT devices, the The Atlantic delves into how connected sensors and big data are changing the way farmers grow crops for the better. From the article:

“Precision agriculture is morphing into predictive agriculture,” says Arama Kukutai, cofounder of Finistere Ventures. The venture capital firm has invested in a handful of agtech companies, including CropX and Taranis, which uses high-definition imagery to predict crop disease and pest infestations.

“An aircraft equipped with a camera can fly over 10,000 acres an hour and spot a mite or the beginnings of Asian soybean rust on a leaf,” he says. “That’s a massive amount of data to process, far too much for a human. But it lends itself well to AI/machine learning, which can predict the future state of the field and the possible impact of disease on the crop.”

“Machine learning and big data are a significant part of CropX’s solution,” says Tzach.

“When you put a sensor in the ground, it’s able to learn the soil characteristics by itself,” he says. “It knows if it’s in heavy or light soil based on the drying curve after irrigation, because each soil type dries differently after a rain. That’s just one example of many.”

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