Opti-Harvest Taps Veea to Power "Agricultural Intelligence" Solutions in Vineyards and Fields

Monday, January 9, 2023

Source | Cloud Computing Magazine

As precision agriculture continues to rapidly evolve with connected solutions that address growing climate challenges, Veea, a leader in integrated smart edge connectivity, computing, and security technologies for edge and cloud, has executed a teaming agreement with Opti-Harvest, an agricultural innovation company that develops climate-smart technology and products that help farmers maximize yield, optimize land, and labor resources, and increase water use efficiency.

According to Straits Research, the global Precision Agriculture market was valued at $5.49 billion in 2021 and is projected to reach $19.24 billion by 2030 – a CAGR of 14.95% from 2022 to 2030. North America is the most dominant market for Precision Agriculture globally, according to the report.

Opti-Filter is a patented light filtration technology that maximizes the sun’s most productive rays, filtering out those that inhibit growth.

The companies have implemented, along with other ecosystem partners, a variety of solutions leveraging Opti-Harvest’s patented Opti-Filter agricultural technology. Their platform enables commercial growers of high-value specialty crops to better utilize sunlight, the planet’s most fundamental, renewable, and free natural resource.

Opti-View, a unique (AI) Agricultural Intelligence technology, collects and processes critical environmental, yield, irrigation, and labor data to enable the promise of precision agriculture.

VeeaHubs are key infrastructure components for Opti-View functionality and deployments. The VHH09-4GL VeeaHub model offers a wide range of connectivity and expansion options for enterprise-grade, demanding applications and, in the case of Opti-Harvest, supports LoRaWAN and 4G LTE.

Veea’s vMesh WiFi optimizes performance in the field, picking up signals from LoRa sensors generating important data that will be used to create powerful predictive analytics that farmers can use in real-time.

Typical deployments include various commercial off-the-shelf and proprietary sensors that send data to VeeaHubs wirelessly, which in turn sends data to the cloud over public or private 4G or 5G connections, feeding a variety of cloud systems. The data collected by VeeaHubs makes its way to the Opti-View portal with an intuitive admin experience and ultimately to AI and ML systems for advanced analytics, presentation, and reporting.

“We are thrilled to be partnered with Veea in this important initiative,” said Jodd Readick, CTO of Precision Ag, Opti-Harvest. Working closely with Veea’s highly skilled team, we are excited to create innovative solutions with high ROI to demanding problems. Partnering with Veea enables us to provide a complete, fully managed, and cost-effective solution encompassing powerful edge computing and flexible data connectivity services to major growers around the world.”

“Veea is committed to working with Opti-Harvest to develop this advanced, connected solution to monitor critical data streams for crops in the field and create new value from this digital transformation,” said Mark Tubinis, Chief Commercial Officer, Veea. “Food security is one of the most significant social challenges today, as is the dramatic climate change, which is impacting the ability for farmers to improve yields, assure quality, and operate profitably. With precision agriculture techniques, we can intelligently address everything from water consumption to soil and nutrients management beyond indoor growing facilities, where AgTech has seen its earliest successes. By augmenting Opti-Harvest’s sunlight optimization products with sensors and data collected from those sensors shipped into local and cloud applications, we can change the game and make sustainable contributions to the farming industry, to the communities those farms are part of, and quality of life for millions.”

According to a 2022 market research report by MarketsandMarkets, the precision farming market is expected to grow from $8.5 billion in 2022 to $15.6 billion by 2030, at a CAGR of 7.9%.

The main drivers for this expected growth are a shortage of skilled labor, increasing strain of global food supplies, and growing farm mechanization activities by farming concerns. Also, changing weather patterns combined with increasing government initiatives will increase demand and support for more accurate farming techniques to yield greater crop production.