Frisco-based Agricen, a plant health technology company, and Taranis, a precision agriculture company based in Tel Aviv, have received a grant from the Israel-U.S. Binational Industrial Research and Development (BIRD) Foundation, the companies announced Feb. 13.
The grant is to fund collaboration on the advancement and commercialization of a new precision agriculture system for crop abiotic stress detection and prevention.
Abiotic stresses are the environmental or physical impacts on a plant such as drought, salinity, extreme temperatures and nutrient deficiency. Abiotic and other stress factors result in an estimated $220 billion in lost crop value per year, the companies said in a news release.
“The joint project between Agricen and Taranis will focus on the development of the world’s first comprehensive system to identify the early symptoms of abiotic stress using field imaging technology and a proprietary deep learning algorithm,” the news release said. “Based on the collected data, the system will help mitigate the impact of stress on the crop through a precision application of a biostimulant solution formulated specifically for combating abiotic stress.”
The BIRD Foundation was established by the U.S. and Israeli governments in 1977 to generate mutually beneficial cooperation between the private sectors of the U.S. and Israeli high-tech industries. BIRD provides matchmaking services between U.S. and Israeli companies as well as funding covering up to 50 percent of project development and product commercialization costs.
“This collaboration will overcome one of the highest challenges in agriculture by merging the Taranis platform with Agricen’s proven biostimulant technologies to effectively and efficiently address abiotic stress in row crops for fields of any size,” Michael Totora, president and CEO of Agricen, said in the news release. “When complete, it will be able to be replicated across fields in any geography with confidence and speed, saving growers significant time and resources while increasing plant health and total crop yield.”
Ofir Schlam, CEO of Taranis, said the company’s existing platform has shown that it can increase grower profitability by more than 20 percent during the season by optimizing disease management.
“Taranis has built agriculture’s broadest image database with about 2 million tagged symptoms for biotic stress covering weeds, diseases, insects and defoliation types,” Schlam said.
“This database will now be expanded into abiotic stress by leveraging Agricen’s expertise to enable growers to predict the onset of abiotic stress and determine the optimum timing of applications to mitigate the stress and maximize crop yield and return on total program investment,” Schlam said in the news release.
More information:
About BIRD: birdf.com
About Agricen: agricen.com
About Taranis: taranis.ag