For 2021-22 growing season, innov8.ag was commissioned to expand to a second Smart Orchard site at Washington Fruit Grandview Ranch to focus on Honeycrisp apples, a high value and water sensitive variety. April 22nd marked the official kick-off day as WSU researchers, tech providers, and growers joined together to share their plans and tactics for this exciting project. 

The overarching goal of the 2021 Smart Orchards Project is to enable grower decisioning by tying disparate data sources from various IoT agtech sensors to precisely allocate and manage a growers resources like irrigation, soil, chemicals, labor, and weather while increasing yields and quality to save money.

To obtain this goal, every collaborator has to communicate with the growers to understand their current decision making processes so that we can properly test the viability of each sensor and how agtech can improve their overall decision making processes. The end goal having a more precise allocation of resources, increased yield and fruit quality while saving money on irrigation, chemicals, labor, etc. 

innov8.ag's role is to aggregate data from all of the IoT sensors in order to get a side by side comparison. This will allow us to pin point data accuracy and the viability each sensor for a growers usability and price points. Not only will we be conducting a very similar strategy to the 2020 Smart Orchard, but innov8.ag is also introducing our base crop count imaging capabilities into the project scope - which opens the door to showing cause and effect based on data collected/insights gained.