SupPlant, an Agri-tech company that provides climate-adaptive irrigation regimes, insights, actions and practices based on its world-largest plant stress database, announced that it has begun working with AEGF (Agri Entrepreneur Growth Foundation)
AEGF is a joint venture between Syngenta Foundation India and Tata Trust in partnership with Start-Up Nation Central, Israel. The partnership’s goal is to provide smallholder Indian farmers precise irrigation recommendations to help them use less water to grow grapes, sugar cane, mango and citrus.
The project aims to eradicate famine and poverty through the implementation of precise irrigation recommendations and empower smallholder farmers to tackle the climate crisis and overcome food insecurity.
According to SupPlant, existing solutions are too expensive or too imprecise to help smallholders navigate the climate challenges and crop failures and even brief moments of extreme stress can destroy an entire harvest. SupPlant’s precise irrigation recommends water-usage guidelines and periodic charts to achieve maximum yields of grapes, sugar cane, mango and citrus. SupPlant’s new sensor-less technology collects and analyses hyperlocal climatic, plant and irrigation data to help smallholders avoid crop failure. SupPlant also offers irrigation recommendations, weather forecast and crop stress alerts, as well as AI-enabled agronomic guidance to make smallholders more resilient to climate change.
AEGF has developed its own online platform that seeks to serve the needs of Indian smallholder farmers and provide them with tailor-made solutions. SupPlant will be featured on the platform to provide the Indian farmers who already use it with irrigation recommendations and weather alerts.
SupPlant’s technology is already being used by 500,000 maize farmers in Kenya and the company intends to serve at least 2 million smallholders across Africa and India during 2022.
“Climate change vagaries make it difficult for small farmers to schedule their irrigation, especially when they have limited amounts of water for irrigation. SupPlant’s unique dataset, agronomical expertise, and climate-smart recommendations optimises the water usage." said S Baskar Reddy, executive director, Syngenta Foundation India.
“We are excited to partner with Supplant to provide these services to small farmers. We are hoping that small farmers will immensely benefit from the sophisticated advisory system of SupPlant,” he added.
Ori Ben Ner, SupPlant’s CEO said, “Climate change is completely changing the seasonality we are familiar with. Farmers’ know-how on how to irrigate their crops is becoming irrelevant due to climate change. The solution is Adaptive irrigation models: SupPlant’s cutting edge technology using AI and the world’s largest plant database is tackling the seasonality problem. This technology enables us to develop irrigation models that are real time and adaptive to extreme weather, thus tackling a global problem of farming in 21st century climatic reality. It is important to us to reach the Indian smallholder farmers as that is where our technology can make a huge difference in people’s lives who are most affected by climate change.”
