Agriculture is a thirsty industry, Consuming 70% of all fresh water used worldwideIn some countries, such as India or Chile, it can be more than 90%.
For Mario Bastamanta, who lives in Chile, the problem gets closer to the house. “Water shortage is a big issue here,” he told Techcrunch.
Bastamante is betting that AI can help reduce water use in fields around the world. Their startups, instactions, originally were established to deploy the Internet-off-Things (IOT) sensors on the fields so that farmers could be warned about damaging the frost situation, but as the hardware commoditized, the company poured for software and water use.
Now, Instagrops are helping 260 fields to cut the use of their water up to 30%, while increasing crop yield by 20%. The company is part of the Startup Battlefield, and it will be introduced in San Francisco later this month in Techcrunch Disruption.
The switch from hardware to AI transformed the company to its head, allowing it to work with less employees and process more data.
“We are processing – more or less – 15 million data points per hour. About 10 years ago, it was the amount for a year,” said the Bastament. “We are reduced cost, team members, and produce more effects with low.”
Instacrops can install new IOT sensors or connect to the existing network of a farm and collect data from them to advise farmers to irrigate various areas. The LLM models of the startups are swallowed over 80 parameters, including soil moisture, humidity, temperature, pressure, crop yield, and NDVI, which is a plant productivity metric from satellite imagery.
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Those advice is sent on farmers’ mobile phones. Instacrops offers a chatbot app, but it also integrates with WhatsApp. “I think in the following year, we will be 100% WhatsApp because it is a universal tool for any farmer,” Bastamanta said
He said that instacrops can control irrigation systems directly on those fields which are more technically advanced, he said.
Instacrops focuses on high-value crops in Latin America, including apples, avocado, blueberry, almonds and cherries. Farmers pay annual fees per hectare farm to achieve access to irrigation insights of startups.
Startup was a part of Y Combinator Summer 2021 batchAnd it has received investment from SVG Ventures and Genesis Ventures.
If you want to know more about instagrops, and do not remember the Techchunch to be held on October 29 in San Francisco from 27 to 29 October in San Francisco.
