The Future of Precision Agriculture Resides in Agricultural Intelligence

Thursday, January 5, 2023

Source | TechZone 360

Veea, a provider of integrated smart edge connectivity, computing, and security technologies for edge and cloud, announced this week it 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.

Opti-Harvest’s patented Opti-Filter agricultural technology and Opti-View precision farming platforms enable commercial growers of high-value specialty crops to better utilize sunlight, the planet’s most fundamental, renewable, and free natural resource. Opti-Filter is a patented light filtration technology that maximizes the sun’s most productive rays, filtering out those that inhibit growth.

Opti-View, a unique 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 and 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.

“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 nutrient 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.”

“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.”

Both companies have been active in the precision agriculture space for years, partnering with several ecosystem players in composing connected systems which are becoming increasingly intelligent and automated, leveraging Machine Learning (ML) and Artificial Intelligence (AI).

Opti-Harvest has put a new spin on AI, branding and trademarking its capabilities as “Agricultural Intelligence.” The trademark statement says, in part, that the company is “providing use of online, non-downloadable computer software using artificial intelligence for use in viewing, compiling, and analyzing data in the field of crop growth and crop production; agricultural research to increase and accelerate crop production and growth by delivering, dispersing and modifying sunlight.”

Opti-Harvest’s version of the term AI is all about “agricultural advice in the field of increasing crop production and accelerating crop growth by collecting, delivering, dispersing, and modifying sunlight; agricultural services, namely, collecting sunlight to modify, deliver, and disperse sunlight for the purposes of increasing crop production and accelerating crop growth.”