AgroScout

AgroScout has developed a unique, cost-effective app to battle pests and diseases in agriculture. Farmers continue to lose a huge portion of their crop to disease and pests,that’s enough produce to feed and additional 2 billion people by 2050.

AgroScout’s self-detecting and monitoring app is easy-to-use and can be downloaded from anywhere in the world right from you smartphone or PC.  AI crop protection is a privilege currently enjoyed by a small percentage of farmers that deploy “out of reach equipment”. 

Our main goal was to create a platform that is not only effective, but affordable to farmers of all sizes

The AgroScout Solution

Existing crop monitoring solutions are operated by trained employees and harness cutting-edge hardware, such as “monster” sci-fi drones and aerial photography that was previously only available to government and security organizations. These systems are costly, time consuming to operate and are intangible  for about 95% of the world’s farmers.  

AgroScout provides an affordable and easy-to-use AI solution based solely on user-generated content. To maintain its affordability, the app was designed to rely on equipment that is widely used on farms: smartphones and simple drones. The app offers field protection in under one minute, saving the user time and headache..  Users can simply download the app, press “Sync My Drone,” use the intuitive map wizard to mark the field, press “Protect,” and sit back and relaxfor 20 minutes while the app collects field data results.

The AgroScout team set out to squeeze the maximum out these widely used “toys” to turn them into premium autonomous AI data collectors. This app beats a professional human scout, 100-fold when comparing field coverage, and for significantly less money. Harnessing the users’ free data collection and the power of cumulative data collecting, the app is currently the only affordable individual plant level solution for pest and disease detection. Agroscout’s thin design circumvents high operation costs by relying on the users to use their simple equipment to collect data. The thin design is key to making this solution accessible and affordable to most of the planet’s 500 million farmers. 

The company’s technology

AgroScout developed the first “self-service” AI app for the early discovery of pests and diseases in agriculture by relying purely on user-generated content and user-owned drones. Since agriculture is known as a low-margin sector, AI solutions built on expensive company-owned equipment have seen good technical progress but haven’t been able to offer an affordable solution for 90% of the world’s farmers. The app puts cutting-edge, AI technology in the palms of 80% of the 500 million farmers worldwide, as compared to the current 5%. The app’s main strengths lie in its ability to ensure the quality of data collected from low-cost, off-the-shelf drones, such as DJI’s Mavic and Phantom and the app’s algorithms ability to learn quickly. Farmers can download the free app, sync with their drone and immediately start protecting their crops. The app relies mainly on members of the community to tag pests and diseases. Community contribution comes naturally to farmers, which will help integrate the AgroScout app into the agricultural world, bringing the industry forward and welcoming the next generation of agricultural products.  

product advantages 

AgroScout’s application has several advantages over other agriculture monitoring solutions:

• Infinitesimal incremental operating cost per user – AgroScout does not deploy any field equipment and relies purely on user-generated content and user-owned equipment. AgroScout set out to enable quality data collection based on widely used, equipment that is prevalent on farms: mobile phones and FAA-excluded self-operated drones. By developing smart autopiloting for these relatively cheap user-owned drones, AgroScout opens the door to AI protection to most farmers out of the 500 million farmers worldwide.
• Immediate and continuous availability:AgroScout gives farmers the flexibility, freedeom and control to check their fields as needed, such as between rain showers or for use in remote rural areas or even to check twice a day. Other systems in market require farmers to schedule ground teams that may arrive late and or may only be affordable for cash-rich crops.
• Optimal coverage: The AgroScout app allows average farmers to achieve 100% field coverage instead of the 1% field coverage farmers can afford by hiring a person to sample his fields.
• Pests and disease detection down to the single plant:Plant-level discovery with planes and satellites isn’t usually possible or economical. By relying on the user and the user’s equipment to collect data, the app can offer farmers detection down to the single plant. 
• Early detectionof pests and disease and fast discovery of uncharted infections:Amazingly fast discovery and learning is made possible through user  data collection and tagging, fast-learning AI algorithms and the aggregated information collected from the large community of users. 
• All weather: The app is not sensitive to weather and relies on the users’ simple off-the-shelf drones capable of autonomous low-height flight above crops and not greatly influenced by low clouds and other weather conditions.