Ceres Imaging, the aerial imagery company that builds irrigation management solutions to help farmers improve profitability, is introducing its plant level insights to Australia.
The feature elevates irrigation strategies in tree and vine management, providing growers with the type of data needed to reduce uncertainty, proactively plan, and help improve irrigation performance for healthier crops and higher yield.
“Now growers can measure crop stress at a tree or vine level across their entire operation,” said Ashwin Madgavkar (pictured), chief executive and founder at Ceres Imaging. “Other companies can count plants and show individual plants, but this is the first time high-accuracy water stress data is available to growers through imagery at a plant level.”
The new interface allows growers to quickly quantify patterns of stress and prioritise corrective action. It helps them measure how their irrigation strategy is trending, ensuring that they’re focusing on the right issues and speeding up the process of achieving insights from imagery.
Some of the key benefits provided from the plant level insights include the ability to highlight the most impactful problems, thus being able to prioritise field activities, while also being able to clarify trends by filtering a specific set of criteria such as issues by varietal or by level of stress.
Growers using the technology can also quantify water stress, chlorophyll, and NDVI by tree or vine, as well as establish numerical baselines to benchmark irrigation performance and measure improvements over time.
“Irrigation is complex, and even subtle inefficiencies compound over time to have a big impact on yield and profit,” added Madgavkar. “It’s often difficult to know if your irrigation strategy is achieving the results [expected], so having insights at the plant level provides a cost-effective solution.”
