Taranis will analyse sugarcane fields using its proprietary AI2 imaging technology
Taranis has announced its agreement with UPL Ltd., a multinational agrochemical company and one of the five largest agricultural solutions companies worldwide, for exclusive monitoring of UPL’s sugarcane acreage across Brazil. Through its unique FLY UP program, Taranis will scout and analyse sugarcane fields for UPL customers, using its proprietary AI2 imaging technology. The collaboration between Taranis and UPL will later expand to include monitoring of UPL’s pasture crops.
Brazil is the largest sugarcane market in the world and UPL is one of the main players of agricultural solutions for this market. Unlike many other seasonal commodity crops, sugarcane is a year-round crop, requiring ongoing monitoring throughout the year. Taranis’s AI2 technology, which captures 0.3mm/pixel resolution images of fields at the leaf level from planes and drones and scouts over 7,000 hectares per day at 200 km/hour, will be applied to monitor UPL customers’ sugarcane acreage. With unprecedented monitoring and analysis of crop health throughout the seasons — the combination of Taranis technology with UPL access within the sugarcane market creates a unique project called FLY UP. Taranis’s end-to-end platform can also be applied to other large-scale crops such as soy, corn, and cotton.
“UPL has one of the most robust portfolios in the industry. The combination of AI and aerial images of Taranis has high accuracy and assessment capacity in large areas, which allows for the delivery of strategic information for decision making and rationalization of the use of pesticides with sustainability,” said Fabio Torretta, CEO of UPL in Brazil. “After several tests with the Taranis solution, we are absolutely sure that FLY UP, presents unparalleled results and we are excited about this partnership and we intend to expand this project to other cultures in the future”.
Through the FLY UP project, UPL customers will receive crop intelligence and insights based on AI2 0.3mm/pixel leaf-level imagery, identifying the earliest signs of crop threats, including weeds, diseases, and nutrient deficiency. By cross-referencing images with the Taranis knowledgebase of over 1 million crop health issues, sourced from a team of more than 100 expert agronomists, FLY UP will help reduce the scouting burden by offering human-level precision using fewer resources. Sugarcane mills and customers attended by the project will receive real-time reports on field conditions, indicating the type of threat, its species and severity along with tools for effectively prioritizing treatment decisions.
