TATA, Syngenta Foundation And SupPlant Provide Climate Adaptive Irrigation Recommendations To Smallholder Indian Farmers

SupPlant, an agriTech company that provides climate adaptive irrigation regimes, insights, actions and practices based on its world-largest plant stress database, announced that it has begun working with AEGF (Agri Entrepreneur Growth Foundation). AEGF is a joint venture between Syngenta Foundation India and Tata Trust in partnership with Start-Up Nation Central Israel, The partnership’s goal is to provide hundreds of thousands of smallholder Indian farmers precise irrigation recommendations to help them use less water to grow grapes, sugar cane, mango and citrus.

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The project aims to eradicate famine and poverty through the implementation of precise irrigation recommendations and empower smallholder farmers to tackle the climate crisis and overcome food insecurity.

Climate change and extreme weather threaten smallholder farmers’ lives and livelihoods.  Droughts, unpredictable rainfall, floods and heatwaves heighten the risk of catastrophic crop failures.  Existing solutions are too expensive or too imprecise to help smallholders navigate the climate challenges. Unfortunately, plants are sensitive – even brief moments of extreme stress can destroy an entire harvest. SupPlant’s precise irrigation recommendations tell the farmers exactly how much water crops require and when it is best to water them to achieve maximum yields of grapes, sugar cane, mango and citrus. SupPlant’s new sensor-less technology collects and analyzes hyperlocal climatic, plant, and irrigation data to help smallholders avoid crop failure. SupPlant offers irrigation recommendations, weather forecast and crop stress alerts, as well as AI-enabled agronomic guidance to make smallholders more resilient to climate change.

SupPlant partnered with AEGF (Agri Entrepreneur Growth Foundation), a joint venture between Syngenta Foundation India, Tata Trust, and Start-Up Nation Central that manages the ongoing roll-out of selecting and training unemployed village youth to provide quality products and services to smallholder farmers. AEGF has developed its own online platform that seeks to serve the needs of Indian smallholder farmers and provide them with tailor-made solutions. Supplant will be featured on the platform to provide the Indian farmers who already use it with irrigation recommendations and weather alerts.

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SupPlant’s technology is already being used by 500,000 maize farmers in Kenya and the company intends to serve at least 2 million smallholders across Africa and India during 2022.

“Climate change vagaries make it difficult for small farmers to schedule their irrigation, especially when they have limited amounts of water for irrigation. Supplant’s unique dataset, agronomical expertise, and climate-smart recommendations optimizes the water usage” said S. Baskar Reddy, India Executive Director, Syngenta Foundation India. “We are excited to partner with Supplant to provide these services to small farmers. We are hoping that small farmers will immensely benefit from the sophisticated advisory system of Supplant.”

“Climate change is completely changing the seasonality we are familiar with.  Farmers’ know-how on how to irrigate their crops is becoming irrelevant due to climate change. The solution is ADAPTIVE irrigation models: SupPlant’s cutting edge technology using AI and the world’s largest plant database is tackling the seasonality problem. This technology enables us to develop irrigation models that are real time and adaptive to extreme weather, thus tackling a global problem of farming in 21st century climatic reality” said Ori Ben Ner, SupPlant’s CEO. “It is important to us to reach the Indian smallholder farmers as that is where our technology can make a huge difference in people’s lives who are most affected by climate change.”

SupPlant, a leading Israeli smart irrigation company, aims to digitally inform every irrigation decision on earth.  Most AgriTech companies only target 2% of the world’s growers, and ignore the 450M smallholder farmers worldwide.  SupPlant grew 12X over the past 18 months by serving the traditional AgriTech market of corporate growers and recently announced $10M of growth capital to continue this trajectory. The company’s leadership and investors are focused on serving all types of growers to create a more sustainable world.

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