MicaSense and FluroSat Partner to Offer Science-Based Imagery and Agronomic Analytics to Commodity Crop Growers

FluroSat and MicaSense today announced their partnership to offer high-quality imagery and analytics products to growers and crop advisors. The collaboration is built upon a strong belief that the collective capability of this agronomic solution will provide timely insights for optimising plant nutrition management.

Users will benefit from MicaSense and FluroSat’s shared focus on bringing scientifically validated agronomic solutions to the market. Such solutions will aid their production decision-making with the added value of imagery-guided proactive recommendations for crop management.

Growers and advisors can skip the time-consuming tasks such as imagery analysis, separating plant signal from soil “noise” and monitoring crops by getting straight to detection of potential yield-robbing issues.

Using FluroSense, crop growers can combine MicaSense sensor imagery with integrated weather information and crop models to map crop nitrogen levels, making fertility recommendations and benchmarking their crop performance. Enabled by the MicaSense Altum’s thermal sensor, users can also utilize FluroSense analytics for early detection of water stress and waterlogging, which can cause significant yield loss if left undetected.

“At MicaSense, we pride ourselves on being sensor experts, yet we know sensors are just one piece in the overall puzzle of crop management. We see FluroSense as the analytics engine that provides added value to our customers because its models are science-based and integrate multiple information layers with sensor data to form a prediction. Through this partnership, we hope to better align quality software with quality hardware and thus help our customers unleash the full potential of their sensor data,” said Dr. Manal Elarab, Director of Enterprise Solutions, MicaSense.

“As we’ve built our agronomic models, we have come to rely on chlorophyll and water stress indicators as early indicators of crop stress allowing the growers and agronomists to tackle issues as they arise, before the damage becomes irreversible. The information captured by red edge and thermal bands of MicaSense cameras is exactly what is needed to estimate the crop chlorophyll and water levels used in our predictive models in agriculture. As FluroSat and MicaSense both continue to develop our technologies, we look forward to delivering value to the growers and advisors, as well as creating the “easy button” in the form of an integrated workflow, which everyone in the industry is looking for,” commented Dr. Anastasia Volkova, CEO & Founder, FluroSat.

Collaboration between FluroSat and MicaSense started in the 2017/18 growing season when the two companies partnered on a trial to analyze 14,000 acres of cotton grown on 71 irrigated and dryland farms. Results from the trial showed that site-specific application of nutrients and chemicals driven by accurate nutrient and crop health mapping can improve yields by up to 20 percent and reduce fertilizer cost by 30 to 35 percent.

The partnership will see a pipeline of further initiatives which aim to develop advanced sensor and software capabilities and provide actionable information to farmers, growers and agronomists.