An AI enabled software to diagnose diseases of agricultural plants at the tissue level before they spread and manifest themselves visually reducing yield losses and amount of chemicals used in the field.
TAM - $ 8.4 B SAM - $ 3.8 B SOM - $ 140 M for the first 5 years
Проблема или Возможность
Farmers around the world lose $220 billion worth of crops every year because they treat crops at a late stage of disease. At the same time, farmers’ costs for treating agricultural plants against diseases are estimated at $20 billion and increase by 5% annually.
This problem exists and is progressing because the farmer does not have accessible methods for diagnosing diseases of agricultural plants. Most farmers use a diagnostic method in which the disease is diagnosed by visual symptoms that appear on the plant body at a late stage of infection. This is an accessible method, the symptoms are visible to the naked eye, but at a late stage of the disease, the plant has received physical damage to the body, which ultimately affects the future harvest. If the farmer does not want this, he needs to diagnose crop diseases at an early stage, when the disease has just penetrated the plant’s body and does not visually manifest itself. In this method, the farmer can be helped by phytopathologists in agricultural laboratories who diagnose pathogens in plant tissues. But the effectiveness of this method depends on the number of plant pathologists on the market and the speed of their work.
For example, in the United States in 2023, there will be 290 phytopathologists officially working, of which only 85% work in agricultural laboratories. For reference, one phytopathologist during a working day can diagnose 12-15 plant samples, which is about 200 hectares. This means that in a year US phytopathologists will be able to cover 8.2% of all arable land in the country. But this may not be the case, since this method has a significant drawback: waiting for a response from a phytopathologist takes 1-2 weeks. And during this time, the disease on the plant will move from an early stage to a late one.
Решение (Продукт или Услуга)
The FitoScan team is developing the first software that diagnoses crop diseases at an early stage. The farmer will receive a digital phytopathologist who: - available 24/7 from the farmer's office - diagnoses disease pathogens in plant tissues at early and late stages. Automatically provides treatment recommendations. - Reduce the use of resources for crop spraying (pesticides, water, labor, agricultural machinery, fuel) - Reduce pesticide load on agricultural plants