New Tech Partnership Aims to Automate Greenhouse Decision-Making in the Greenhouse
Blue Radix, an independent Dutch artificial intelligence technology company for the international greenhouse industry, and Ecoation Innovative Solutions Inc. (ecoation), a Canadian developer of automated greenhouse management and crop health monitoring technologies, have signed an agreement.
The collaboration is designed to identify new ways to automate grower decision making and action in the greenhouse, using vision technology and algorithms. ecoation and Blue Radix are using the data collected by ecoation’s OKO platform to enhance the impact of Blue Radix’ algorithms for autonomous growing. By combining data sets, algorithms, and analytical efforts, the companies are able to create new insights and applications that help growers worldwide to improve their crop strategy, quality, and yield.
According to the companies, collaborating across data and algorithms has the potential to create value across many avenues, including optimizing crop strategy, autonomous steering, IPM enhancement, and understanding spatial climate distribution.
The first project the team is working on is enhanced autonomous growing with crop data visualization. ecoation’s OKO collects sensory data and information about climate, integrated pest management, and crop work at every row and post to a SqM granularity. These insights greatly contribute to a complete and accurate view on the state of the crop. The broad range of data points, including fruit count, fruit coloring, and stem density, will be combined with the smart steering algorithms of Blue Radix’ Crop Controller. Crop Controller will actively, continuously, and autonomously control the greenhouse conditions with the grower’s crop strategy as its starting point and the optimal crop status as its goal. For example, by optimizing the plant load, plant stress is reduced avoiding weak plants that are vulnerable to pests and diseases. In this way, ecoation and Blue Radix find and fix imperfections before they impact yield or crop quality.
“Collaborating with Blue Radix means pioneering the future of ag more effectively, at a pace that would be difficult to reach if we carried on separately,” says ecoation CEO Dr. Saber Miresmailli. “Both teams are committed to the same goal: to support growers in making the best possible decisions. Working together means unlocking new ways to get the most from the data and providing better insights to our customers that inform their decisions.”
The duo will only work with greenhouse data retrieved from the customers of ecoation and Blue Radix who provide full consent. Transparency and data security are paramount, and this collaboration will rely on growers who are looking to optimize their greenhouse operations with autonomous processes and are interested in contributing to the future of ag with their facility data and insights.
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