Disease outbreaks are devastating for farmers, who typically don’t realize their crops have been effected until it is too late, turning what might have been a good season into one with significant losses in a matter of seconds.
Now, a new Brown University-born startup is hoping to put the power back into farmers' hands.
Cloud Agronomics is an aerial imaging and analytics company that can detect disease outbreaks earlier than farmers have ever been able to, enabling them to identify and quarantine the disease before it spreads to the rest of the crops.
"We transitioned into a company that collected data from the aircraft, which has only been done by NASA."
Currently, the number one way that farmers detect diseases on crops is by having human testers constantly walk through the fields to see if the color of the crops is changing, a method that is only accurate about 60 percent of the time.
Cloud Agronomics attaches special imaging equipment to manned aircrafts, which fly over fields and collects and maps the light spectrum of crops.
“Instead of looking at the colors of crops like a human tester does, we look at the light spectrum beyond what the human eye can see,” Oleksiy (Alex) Zhuk, co-founder of Cloud Agronomics, told Rhode Island Inno. “When a disease hits the crops, the light of the crop changes. Human eye only can see red, green and blue and different values of those colors. Our instruments pick up finite changes that the human eye cannot detect early enough.”
Zhuk met his other two co-founders, Jack Roswell and Julian Vallyeason, while at Brown. At the time, the three were working on building a solar-powered, unmanned aerial vehicle and were trying to figure out the best application for the plane.
Zhuk, a native of Ukraine, had a background in robotics and drones and had previously built cameras for Hollywood businesses. Vallyeason worked at the World Resources Institute on agroforestry management and Roswell was a United Nations campus ambassador and had performed independent spectral sensing research.
After testing the plane they had built at Brown in Ojai, California, the three quickly realized they were onto something.
“From the data we collected, we recognized the viability of the technology to provide new agricultural insights that didn’t exist today,” said Roswell. “We transitioned into a company that collected data from the aircraft, which has only been done by NASA.”
The company incorporated in March and then the team decided to take a leave of absence from Brown to move out to California to turn their research into a commercially viable company.
Cloud Agronomics initially began with a focus on Citrus plants, but now is pivoting to focus on commodity crops such as soybeans and corn. According to Roswell, there are only 700,000 acres of Citrus plants in the U.S., but 170 million acres of corn and soybeans.
“Disease identification is a more precautionary measure,” said Zhuk. “It’s almost like an insurance policy because it’s less expensive to have your crops imaged weekly than if an outbreak were to occur.”
Thus far, the company has accomplished a lot while out in California.
It has partnered with the largest manned fleet of aircraft carriers that farmers use to survey crops. This company is a huge asset for Cloud Agronomics because it has planes in Brazil that Cloud Agronomics can use to do research during off-season periods in the U.S.
The company also operates as a sales channel for Cloud Agronomics because it has strong relationships with other farm software management companies.
During its time out west, Cloud Agronomics also obtained a provisional patent and is closing in on its first round of funding that it will use to use to build out its team and technology so it can move from proof of concept to a commercial rollout.
