Agriculture is a thirsty industry, consuming 70% of all fresh water used worldwide. In some countries, like India or Chile, it can be more than 90%.
For Mario Bustamante, who lives in Chile, the problem hits close to home. “Lack of water is a big issue here,” he told TechCrunch.
Bustamante is betting that AI can help slash water use in farms across the world. His startup, Instacrops, was originally founded to deploy internet-of-things (IoT) sensors on farms to warn farmers about damaging frost conditions, but as the hardware became commoditized, the company pivoted to software and water use.
Now, Instacrops is helping 260 farms cut their water use up to 30% while also increasing crop yields by as much as 20%. The company is part of Startup Battlefield, and it will be presenting at TechCrunch Disrupt later this month in San Francisco.
The switch from hardware to AI turned the company on its head, allowing it to operate with fewer staff and while processing more data.
“We are processing — more or less — 15 million data points per hour. Almost 10 years ago, that was the amount for a year,” Bustamante said. “We’re reducing cost, team members, and generating more impact with less.”
Instacrops can install new IoT sensors or connect to a farm’s existing network and collect data from them to advise farmers when to irrigate different areas. The startup’s LLM models ingest more than 80 parameters, including soil moisture, humidity, temperature, pressure, crop yield, and NDVI, a plant productivity metric derived from satellite imagery.
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Those advisories are sent to farmers’ mobile phones. Instacrops offers a chatbot app, but it also integrates with WhatsApp. “I think in the next year, we will be 100% WhatsApp because it’s a universal tool for any farmer,” Bustamante said
On farms that are more technologically advanced, Instacrops can control irrigation systems directly, he said.
Instacrops is focused on high-value crops in Latin America, including apples, avocados, blueberries, almonds, and cherries. Farmers pay an annual fee per hectare of farmland to gain access to the startup’s irrigation insights.
The startup was a part of the Y Combinator summer 2021 batch, and it has received investments from SVG Ventures and Genesis Ventures.
If you want to learn more about Instacrops, and dozens of other startups, live and in person, don’t miss TechCrunch Disrupt, taking place October 27 to 29 in San Francisco.