Two of the sectors associated with the Israeli economy, high-tech and agriculture, have learned to work together and are enjoying more investments than before, from more parties – from food companies like “Yakhin”, through venture capital funds to giant international corporations. Now a start-up ag-tech company is surprising the USA – will the solution to world hunger come from Israel?
The human population is expected to grow by billions in the coming decades and continue the rate of growth of the past decades. If it weren’t for the three agricultural revolutions that took place, the increase in the world’s population would have stopped early, and civilization, as we know it today, would have looked different.
Despite the revolutions, humanity is in a nutritional crisis. Over 3 billion people are undernourished or malnourished because they do not have the means to purchase healthy food. Since the outbreak of the Corona crisis, the number of people defined as ‘hungry’ has jumped from 618 million to 768 million.
The Israeli ag-tech start-up company Edete Precision Technologies for Agriculture (Edete) from the Samat Tivon Regional Council, completed an experiment that managed to achieve an average increase of 19% in the yield of a pistachio plantation in California, an all-time record year for pistachio harvest in the United States.
Idit has developed a solution of pollination as a service (PPaS – Precision Pollination as a Service) based on a breakthrough technology that improves risk management and the level of resilience of the agriculture industry, while increasing the harvest for the farmer, solving problems of synchronizing flowering, alongside dealing with climate change, and with a shortage of bees and in natural pollinators.
Idit carried out the precise pollination of about 2,000 dunams of pistachios in the Bakersfield California area, for one of the largest agricultural breeding companies in the US. The pollination was carried out during the flowering seasons, during April 2022 and April 2023. The area included three young plots of the Golden Hills variety, which were planted in 2016 and 2017 and have not yet reached commercial yield.
The process was carried out using the autonomous pollinator developed by Idit, which spreads only pure pollen in controlled quantities and with great precision on the trees, in an amount of about 600 dunams per day.
The results of the precise pollination were obtained from a comparison of the crop in the plots pollinated by Eidit with control plots that were adjacent to the pollinated plots and had similar characteristics of size, varieties and year of planting, and did not receive precise pollination.
Eidit’s precise pollination technology increased the pistachio crop by an average of 19% in two of the three pollinated plots. This is despite the fact that the year 2023 was characterized by an abundance of cold rations and marks an all-time record crop year for pistachios estimated at 680 tons.
Results of the crop increase as a result of precise pollination were received in the same plots in 2022 as well. According to Idit’s calculations, the crop increase is expected to yield the farmers an additional income of 254-322 dollars per acre on average.
In 2021, the company demonstrated an average crop growth of 24% in an area of approximately 20 dunams in the Sacramento area, in three plots at different ages of 6, 15 and 24 years.
