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Israeli ‘Precision Agriculture’ and ‘Smart Farming’ Company to Expand to Morocco
January 17, 2022
The move comes as Morocco continues to boost efforts to adopt state-of-the-art technologies to become economically competitive.
Fez - SupPlant, an Israeli company specializing in “precision agriculture” and “smart farming,” has announced its plans to expand to Morocco.
In the statement announcing its interest in the Moroccan market, SupPlant said it intends to offer Moroccan farmers a new technology called Smart Agriculture.
In partnership with Moroccan company Rahatech, SupPlant’s offer aims to enable farmers to improve their productivity while lowering costs, particularly in terms of water consumption, noted the statement.
The company focuses on “changing the basic concept of irrigation methods and basing itself on the real and instantaneous needs of plants” and its “technology is proven to save water on a global scale while improving productivity and yields,” SupPlant’s management said.
It works through its technology to make it possible to develop a perfectly personalized irrigation protocol in 6 weeks, they added.
SupPlant focuses on its unique Artificial Intelligence-based system that uses an advanced algorithm that analyzes live plant and soil data. The technology translates weather conditions, which it then forecasts into irrigation recommendations before transferring them to the farmer, who can use the data when cultivating their crops.
The Israeli company says it installs very accurate and dependable sensors on the level of the fruit, the leaf, the stem, and the trunk, as well as in the soil at various depths, to collect the plant's real water needs every 10 minutes, based on its growing stage.
SupPlant now has a database of approximately 3 billion data points collected over a 24,000-hectare agricultural region and more than 30 crops. Under the supervision of a team of agricultural engineers, this data, along with data collected in real-time on farms, is fed into the SupPlant algorithm.
This means farmers who use the company’s AI-powered system are given high-precision irrigation information and advice on when, how much, and how to irrigate after the data has been processed and assessed, assuring healthy and vigorous crops with optimal water management.
“Smart farming” is not new on the Moroccan agriculture scene, with the technique having become a darling of Moroccan officials’ statements about the country’s sustainability agenda since the launch of the Green Morocco Plan in 2008.
Recently, Morocco's Head of Government, Aziz Akhannounch, lauded the Green Plan's accomplishments. Fourteen years after the plan’s inception, Morocco is on course to meet its strategic sustainable agriculture targets, he argued.
Ambassador Omar Hilale, Morocco's permanent representative to the United Nations, echoed a similar sentiment in a UN speech on September 30, 2021. The Moroccan diplomat said that artificial intelligence will help agricultural sciences as a critical component of Morocco’s future economic predictions.