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Each year, plant diseases cost the global economy around $220* billion (by FAO); At least 25% of agricultural land in the EU should be under organic farming by 2030; Climate change significantly impacts crop yields. According to the EU’s Farm to Fork strategy, the amount of chemical pesticides and more hazardous pesticides should be reduced by 50% by 2030, while at least 25% of agricultural land in the EU should be under organic farming. Today’s intensive agriculture requires proactive and constant usage of chemicals to protect the yield and quality from different pests – FAO estimates that annually between 20-40% of global crop production is lost to pests. For this reason, different kinds of pesticides – herbicides, insecticides, fungicides, etc. – are constantly used during the growing season on fields and in horticulture: pesticide usage was between 350.000-400.000 t/year between 2011 and 2019. The amount did not decrease substantially despite the communicated directives of the European Union.  

One reason for this could be that in the case of traditional, non-differentiated spraying, chemicals are not sprayed where their effect is required on the plants, mainly due to technological constraints and since the infected area is unknown. This can result in a huge waste of chemicals, further increasing their negative impact on the environment. 

Growers are under pressure – they need to sustainably meet their own production goals with the resources they have. Mainstream precision agriculture concentrates on fields and zoning, mainly based on satellite imagery and cannot address many agriculture challenges.  

Current solutions for precision farming like drone scouting or NDVI providing not efficient or low-quality data are hard to integrate and require technical knowledge or special equipment.  

Proofminder, on the other hand, brings precision agriculture to the next level, to the plant level.