Helping Farmers Predict the Future

When major international companies came to talk at Israel’s Agrivest conference in Tel Aviv, better predictive software to minimize farmers’ risks was the most requested “dream technology” from Israel, according to panel speakers.

While no company can ever predict everything that Mother Nature has in store, one Israeli startup company, ScanTask, may have the answer to helping farmers understand the complexity of weather, climate change and pest patterns. ScanTask’s AgriTask solution can help farmers detect, identify and treat their crops earlier, letting them use less chemicals in the field.

Minimizing chemical fertilizers, fungicides and pesticides—not only for the cost savings to the farmer, but also for environmental responsibility—is one of the goals that ScanTask’s founder and CEO Israel Fraier has built into the system with his team. “In agriculture, if your neighbor has a problem it will pass to you, so it’s worth addressing the problem as soon as possible to avoid bigger problems,” he says.

“One must have control over all the parameters, including pests and disease, and have a regional view while knowing what stage you are in,” Fraier continues. “…We help farmers with decision support information so they can make an educated decision.”

AgriTask, which is licensed month-by-month based on the size of plots, collects data from a range of open-source locations like geographic information system (GIS) and weather services. On top of that, it adds a layer of data that the participating farmers supply to the system.

AgriTask is currently being used on 22,000 farming plots in Israel to help decision-makers better optimize crop yields and minimize supplies and chemicals used on the farm.

The system can be accessed anywhere there is Internet or the 2.5G mobile network. It has multilingual and cross-language support so farmers can communicate in different languages. ScanTask was founded in 2008 in Holon, Israel, and employs 10 people. It boasts a $650 million no-strings grant from an EU program called Galileo.