Just like the plants in our homes, which more often than not meet their demise due to too much water, agricultural crops face a greater risk of being given too much nutrition rather than too little.
When a plant is over fertilized, whatever nutrients it doesn’t need are funneled down into the soil and water, with potentially disastrous results for them and the plants. It is like giving all three – plant, soil and water – an overdose of salt-rich fertilizer.
Israeli company Yevul Info has developed an AI-enhanced solution designed to prevent this overfertilization and ensure optimal plant health, helping to meet the demands of feeding an expanding world population amid changes in our climate.
“We actually can contribute to enhanced yields and promote sustainable farming practices,” Yevul CEO and co-founder Keren Avriel-Sadan tells NoCamels.
“We do it by detecting the early signs of nutritional issues and preventing fertilizers overdose and yield waste.”
The Leaf Guardian platform monitors plants grown with fertigation, the technique of supplying dissolved fertilizer to crops through irrigation. It uses round the clock precision agriculture – improving crop health and yields through the use of cameras, sensors and other advanced technology – to observe changes in the green color of the leaves that could indicate a problem.
This allows the platform to detect almost indiscernible signs of plant deterioration due to overfertilization days before visible symptoms appear.
And this not only prevents a fertilizer overdose that can ultimately lead to yield waste, but also ensures that the precious plants are not starved of food.
Yevul (the Hebrew word for crop) explains that accepted farming protocol is to use more fertilizer than needed, in an effort to boost immunity to hazards like disease, cold or heat stress.
But this is a flawed method, which in the best case scenario results in wasted fertilizer, as the surplus leaches into the ground and pollutes it and the water. In the worst case, excess fertilizing causes salinization, the accumulation of salt in the water, actively poisoning the environment and resulting in lost yield.
Through the use of its patented algorithm and machine learning to track the crops throughout their lifetime, the platform immediately takes action if and when needed.
“It detects early signs of plant deterioration days before visible symptoms appear, and adjusts nutrition [as part of] continuous, dynamic monitoring,” Avriel-Sadan says of Leaf Guardian.
For while a farmer can typically only see the symptoms or the results a week to 10 days after implementing a change, the algorithm runs and analyzes the processes and knows what is going on inside the crop in real time.
“Although we appreciate the farmers’ expertise, we know that [while] he goes out to the field and sees a green, healthy crop, we can know that something is happening inside the crop,” Avriel-Sadan says.
Should it detect any worrying changes, Leaf Guardian sends a simple alert message to the farmer, advising them to increase or decrease the amount of fertilizer in the irrigation water.
It will issue a second alert several days later, informing the farmer that either all is now well or that further steps need to be taken to preserve the plants.
“We provide actions to take at every stage of the crop’s life,” says Avriel-Sadan.
The platform is currently in its prototype phase, so the alerts are for now communicated through the WhatsApp instant messaging platform, a method Avriel-Sadan says works very well for the farmers.
She explains that farmers are generally less interested in statistics and diagrams, and so the company instead provides the information that they need at that moment in order to best manage their crops.
“It’s very important to us, the simplicity of usage for farmers,” she says.
Although Yevul’s focus is on fertigation, the alerts can also be adapted to monitor plants for attacks by pests or an already existing disease.
Yevul was founded in 2022 by Avriel-Sadan, along with its CTO Agronomy Yochai Isack, and CTO Ezer Miller, a data scientist and machine learning developer.
Isack and Miller met at the Hebrew University while pursuing their respective PhDs at the Faculty of Agriculture. They began to explore a solution to the problem of crop overfeeding and its resultant weaker crops and financial losses, which evolved into Leaf Guardian.
“They were searching for a solution and there was great synergy between these two people – a mathematics guy and an agronomist,” Avriel-Sadan says.
Avriel-Sadan joined as an experienced entrepreneur in the field of agricultural technology, bringing deep knowledge of sustainable farming and an understanding of the farming industry’s need for a product like Leaf Guardian.
“My main driver is sustainability,” she says. “A lot of people don’t realize that it can be so easy to save the world from this contamination.”
Yevul is today part of the Galil Ofek Incubator for life science startups, and has so far raised over $1 million, with some investment coming from the Israel Innovation Authority, the brand of the government dedicated to promoting the national high-tech sector.
Avriel-Sadan says most of the interest in the platform has come from countries such as Brazil, China, Germany and South Africa, where farmers are penalized for the overuse of fertilizer.
“Instead of paying a penalty, you can buy this solution,” she says.
And although Yevul has worked extensively with Israeli farmers in the past, she explains that the first customers have come from outside of the country as Israeli farmers have been focused elsewhere due to the terror attack of October 7 and the ongoing war with Hamas in Gaza, which perpetrated it.
The company has also been personally impacted by the war. It had to relocate from the Golan Heights-based Shamir Research Institute, where it had completed most of the R&D on Guardian Leaf, due to the constant bombing of northern Israel by Hezbollah in Lebanon that began on October 8.
Even so, Avriel-Sadan is full of praise for the company’s new home at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem’s Rehovot campus, where they now work with world-renowned molecular physiologist Prof. Menachem Moshelion. This opportunity, she says, is akin to finding the holy grail.
As Yevul reaches the end of its R&D phase, its founders say they are looking forward to new partnerships in their pioneering approach to crop management, which Avriel-Sadan refers to as “fertigation 5.0.”
“I believe in Yevul Info because it represents the future of agriculture, one where technology and data analytics converge to create smarter, more efficient farming practices,” she says.
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