Ag-Tech Company Helps Boost Global Food Production

May 7, 2019

by: Ilse Strauss

According to the World Hunger Index, a staggering 124 million people across the globe suffer acute food shortage. This makes crippling hunger a daily reality for roughly one in every nine people worldwide. Israeli ag-tech start-up Taranis offers a solution to help, employing cutting-edge technologies to boost the possible output of food production.

The Tel Aviv-based group has developed a precision aerial imagery platform for agriculture that enables farmers to foresee potential crop issues on a granular level. The result? Farmers are empowered to make quick, informed decisions to prevent crop loss by tackling threats like insect damage, weeds, nutrient deficiencies and diseases preemptively—leading to a higher crop yield and increased food production.

Taranis’s platform employs deep learning technology from high-speed unmanned and manned aerial vehicles to spot possible issues, combining field imagery from satellite images, plane imagery and drone level imagery.

“The hardware does aerial imagery in very high resolution,” Taranis CEO Ofir Schlam told Israel21c. “We can capture clear images down to the insect and leaf level from planes traveling at 200 kilometers per hour [124 mph] and drones at 55 kilometers per hour [34 mph]. Nobody else can offer that capability…”

The idea for Taranis was born from Schlam’s belief that precise imaging predictive initiatives could go a long way in curtailing mammoth crop losses due to a lack of fertilizer, severe weather conditions, pests and weeds.

Today, some 19,000 farmers growing high volume commodity crops like corn, cotton, potatoes, soybeans, sugarcane and wheat on a cumulative 20 million acres [some 8 million hectares] of fields in Argentina, Australia, the United States, Ukraine and everywhere else in between already reap the benefits of the world’s first “air scouting” capability.

Source: Bridges for Peace

Photo Credit: Matej Kastelic/shutterstock.com