By Judith Sudilovsky, NoCamels -
In the expansive corn and soybean fields of the American Midwest, farmers have begun their first cycle of herbicide spraying of the season, which will continue on just until the first days of July.
While some of those farmers will still be using the wasteful process of broadcast spraying of pesticides to stamp out weeds, several dozens of others have made the transition to the artificial intelligence and deep learning technology of the Israeli-developed Greeneye Technology precision spraying system, which allows them to use less herbicide by precisely targeting weeds.
Now in its third upgraded generation, the precision spraying system has already saved its customers an average of 88% on the cost of herbicides, Nadav Bocher, CEO and co-founder of Greeneye Technology, tells NoCamels.
The use of herbicides, he notes, is one of the greatest threats for crop production globally.
But yet currently the most common way of dealing with weeds is to blanket-spray herbicides throughout the entire field, several times per season, year after year, even though the actual weed infestation may be as low as 10 percent.
“What our technology enables is for farmers to be very, very precise and spray only the weeds,” says Bocher.
“It’s a challenging situation to be a corn or soybean farmer and being able to save such a magnitude of chemicals…creates multiple benefits.”
By reducing the amount of chemical herbicides farmers use, he explains, the system also has a significant environmental and health impact in addition to the financial savings to the farmers who are struggling to remain profitable.
According to Greeneye, farmers spend more than $30 billion on herbicides each year—with the on-line farm journal Ag Web predicting that the cost of herbicides could climb up to $100 per acre in the next year—and many weeds have developed a resistance to herbicides as a result of broadcast spraying which can lead to a global epidemic and create a real threat to food production.
In addition, the millions of unneeded gallons of herbicides sprayed every year cause severe soil and water contamination and exposes both consumers and farmers to health risks.
The Greeneye precision spraying system, which can be retrofitted on any brand sprayer machinery already owned by farmers, allows for the green precision technology to be used in real-time field decision making.
It is currently being used by farmers with mid-to-large sized operations across seven Midwest states including Nebraska, Iowa and Oklahoma, says Bocher.
The system differentiates weeds from crops, spraying only the weeds and reducing the usage of herbicides by up to 90 percent, he says, identifying weeds down to the species level to fight herbicide resistance weeds. It can also apply precision spraying on pre-planting and post-harvest spraying applications.
Initially farmers have been “excited” with the new system, which Greeneye introduced into the market in 2022 following five years of intensive development, but with the natural built-in skepticism involved in bringing innovative product technology to market, they needed to see that the system actually worked, says Bocher.
“Just seeing with their own eyes that it actually works built the conviction,” he says.
“Once [the farmer] sees it, it’s kind of a no-brainer because the financial benefits are so, so significant. Our interaction is with very innovative farmers who are adopting technology on a regular basis, farmers who keep trying to push the boundary of the yield they can get out of their farm. They are very intelligent customers who understand technology.”
This was precisely the focus market Bocher and his two co-founders—CPO Dr. Itzhak Khait and CTO Alon Klein Orbach—had in mind in 2017 when they set out to reduce chemical usage while increasing productivity and profitability for farmers. With their combined backgrounds in plant science and AI data they knew they wanted to make a significant impact in the agriculture arena, says Bocher.
To date they have raised $40 million for their venture from a combination of financial investors such as JVP and strategic investors like the leading agrichemical company Syngenta, he says.
“Agrichemical companies have come to the basic understanding that this [new green tech] is disrupting their business in a way that is inevitable at this point so they may as well figure out a solution to modify their business,” he says.
“Obviously they would prefer us not to exist, but they understand that this technology is coming and it is changing and they need to adjust accordingly to remain relevant.”
At the moment TeL Aviv-based Greeneye Technology is concentrating on using the core technology it developed for the first commercial application in the Midwest.
But, says Bocher, it can be used outside of herbicides in the future, such as for detecting diseases, warding off insects and providing proper plant nutrition.
He says that the problem the company is solving isn’t unique to American corn and soybean farmers, explaining that every farmer around the globe sprays in the same wasteful way, regardless of whether they grow tomatoes, corn or broccoli.
“The core technology we developed is the ability to see what happens in the field and to make real time decisions,” he says.
“So there is definitely endless potential with expanding to other markets globally and other crops in addition to expanding the technology to other uses other than chemicals.”
