acres. Once customers are comfortable with using the technology, the amount of acreage estimated can be expanded. AgriData then sets up team members with the web portal and mobile app and ensures that they are trained to access and assess the easy-to-understand data. According to AgriData, growers will earn 25 to 30 percent more in sales if they are able to estimate their crops properly. “What if you don’t know how much produce you have? It would hurt profits, be a logistical nightmare and you’re taking major business risk every time you sell in advance,” said Habis. AgriData believes that by estimating yields, potentially identifying diseases in the field and tracking inputs three months out, growers can exact the following benefits: • Cost Savings: Owners will know how fruitful a crop will be, dictating how much labor is needed to harvest that block ahead of time. Growers will also avoid having to sell the produce at a loss or spend money on storage, in the event that more fruit is grown than expected. • Strengthen Brand Reputation: Grower- shippers can deliver what they promised to retailers 100 percent of the time. • More Efficient Operations: Owners can maximize revenue by remedying low-yield areas and make quantity/ quality tradeoffs by managing their crop load with precision. • Accurately Manage Resources: Users can select customized qualitative attributes—such as maturity, defects, diseases and pests—for inclusion in field scans to better allocate resources. “With our product, you are able to look at environmental conditions and optimize farming in a way that you couldn’t do before,” said Habis. “We are proud of the fact that we honed in on a specific issue growers were facing and built a solution to fix that exact problem. It’s a high-impact solution that has an extremely high ROI [return on investment].” FOUNDATION TO FUTURE Currently, AgriData specializes in orchards, vineyards and bushes—crops including citrus, grapes, berries, and stone fruit. The firm hopes to expand the number of crops served within the next two to three years. Through partners like Western Growers and its Center for Innovation & Technology, AgriData is becoming integrated with growers of all types of specialty crops, learning how to
optimize their product to fit the needs of the industry as a whole. “The exposure, connections and network to the Western Growers’ audience has been invaluable,” said Habis. “The
staff at the center has been great at making introductions with our potential customers, when appropriate. Many of these introductions have led to direct engagement and pilots.”
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JULY | AUGUST 2018
Western Grower & Shipper | www.wga.com
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