Agriculture is a thirsty industry, consuming 70% of all freshwater used worldwide. In some countries, such as India and Chile, it could be over 90%.
For Mario Bustamante, who lives in Chile, this problem hits close to home. “Water shortages are a big problem here,” he told TechCrunch.
Bustamante bets that AI will help reduce water use on farms around the world. His startup Instacrops was originally established to deploy Internet (IoT) sensors on farms, warning farmers that they would undermine frost conditions on farms, but as the hardware became commoditized, the company challenged software and water use.
Currently, Instacrops is helping 260 farms reduce water use by up to 30%, increasing crop yields by up to 20%. The company is part of the startup battlefield and will be announced later this month at TechCrunch Disrupt in San Francisco.
The switch from hardware to AI allowed the company to turn its head and work while processing less staff and more data.
“We process more or less 15 million data points per hour. Almost 10 years ago, that was a year’s worth,” Bustamante says. “We’re reducing costs, team members and creating more impact with less.”
Instacrops can install new IoT sensors or connect to existing networks on the farm and collect data from them to advise farmers irrigate different areas. The startup’s LLM model ingests more than 80 parameters, including plant productivity metrics derived from satellite images, including soil moisture, humidity, temperature, pressure, crop yield, and NDVI.
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These recommendations are sent to farmers’ mobile phones. Instacrops offers a chatbot app, but is also integrated with WhatsApp. “Next year will be 100% WhatsApp because it’s a universal tool for farmers,” Bustamante says.
On more technologically advanced farms, Instacrops has direct control over the irrigation system, he said.
Instacrops focuses on high-value Latin American crops, including apples, avocados, blueberries, almonds and cherries. Farmers pay an annual fee per hectare of farmland to access startup irrigation insights.
The startup is part of the summer and summer 2021 batch and is invested in by SVG Ventures and Genesis Ventures.
Don’t miss out on dozens of other startups that are directly live and the confusion at TechCrunch, which will take place in San Francisco from October 27th to 29th.
