Up to to 500,000 smallholder maize farmers - mostly women living in Bungoma and Busia - will have access to SupPlant’s new sensor-less irrigation technology. This tech will collect and analyze hyperlocal climatic, plant, and irrigation data that will then aid these farmers in water conservation to avoid crop failure.
SupPlant, a leading Israeli smart irrigation company has partnered with Penn State University's PlantVillage project aiming to reach these farmers who represent a portion of the nearly half a billion farmers who grow on less than two hectares worldwide. Kenyan partners in the undertaking will include Mediae’s iShamba / Shamba’s Shape Up System reaching nine million farmers each week.
Supplant aims to revolutionise irrigation through digitisation with a target of serving the largely ignored 450M smallholders who represent 98% of the world's farmers.
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Climate change and extreme weather threaten smallholder farmers’ lives and livelihoods. Droughts, unpredictable rainfall, and heatwaves heighten the risk of catastrophic crop failures. Existing solutions are too expensive or too imprecise to help smallholders navigate the climate. Unfortunately, plants are sensitive - even brief moments of extreme stress can kill an entire harvest. Supplant offers extremely low-cost Irrigation recommendations, weather forecast and crop stress alerts, as well as AI-enabled agronomic guidance to make smallholders more resilient to climate change.
David Hughes, founder of PlantVillage, who is the Dorothy Foeh Huck and J. Lloyd Huck Chair In Global Food Security, explained that “Supplant’s unique dataset, agronomical expertise, and proprietary algorithms offer a very interesting step change for farmers facing the threat of drought. Our initial pilots are successful and we want to see accelerated delivery at scale, and hope to see tremendous results during the upcoming harvest season.”
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SupPlant recently announced it had raised $10M in funding with the company’s leadership and investors focused on serving all types of growers to create a more sustainable world. Jeffrey Swartz, the former CEO of Timberland, and co-founder of Boresight Capital, which led the most recent funding round, said that “while climate change rages, SupPlant’s solution is a concrete example of how world class technology and driven executive teams can improve our world. Across a variety of critical crops and a wide range of geographies, from small hold farmers to larger scale food producers, we support SupPlant because they help farmers produce more, better food, sustainably.”
By 2022 the company intends to serve at least two million smallholders across Africa and India.
For further information contact Mira Marcus | SupPlant PR | This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.
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