Existing irrigation and fertigation practices in agriculture are to a large extent based on experience and guess-work instead of hard facts. The consequence is that plants receive too much or too little of either water or nutrients during critical plant growth periods, leading to decreases in production yield, irrational water consumption, disease outbreak, soil destruction and above all production cost increases. Now, the agriculture sector is demanding the use of advance technologies for the improved productivity and healthy crop & field with the effective utilization of resources. The agricultural sector is not traditionally a technology-intensive field, but IoT is set to bring about a massive revolution in the industry.
Expert365 started in November 2015 with a vision to address Internet of Things (IOT) solutions for horticulture farms. With advances in modern IOT, horticulture continues to invest more faith in emerging technologies rather than relying on “experiential farming”.
Expert365 vision is to serve all horticulture farmers with their precision agriculture tools to save water and optimize yield. Team Expert365 think like farmers and act like engineers.
Expert365 addresses important decision support systems for farmers;
- What is the precise amount of water quantity required, per square meter patch of the horticulture farm, for various crops, soil type, and age of the plant for healthy yield?
- How many days left before a farmer can irrigate for broad acre crops with such precise amounts without running out of the readily available water?
- Having identified the precise amount of irrigation water for the patch, ensure that precision is delivered to the farm via advanced and affordable control systems.
These solutions are built via sensors in soils, to monitor real-time soil moisture, electrical conductivity and temperature relayed to Microsoft Azure cloud-based algorithms to provide irrigation recipes. These algorithms use sensory inputs from the soils, weather data including the life cycle of each type of plant with good understanding of readily available water at various depths. This state of the art patented technology uses GSM network around the country to send soil performance characteristics to their cloud where the decision support for farmers is carried out. The app-driven technology assists the farmers with daily irrigation quantities, moisture contents and precise amounts of time to run their motors to address farm irrigation needs. Expert365 has three major products;
QWI365 (Quantitative Water Irrigation) provides farmers with a reference point for facts about the current conditions of their farm production. It is based on real-time measurements against soil, substrate and plant models, taking the guess-work out and enabling timely, precise and efficient irrigation and fertigation.
QWIC365 (Quantitative Water Irrigation Control) is the most cost-effective and feature-rich offering in the market. It provides farmers both quantitative and typical time scheduling approaches to irrigation management; all of which is remotely done from the palm of the hands. It is designed to easily integrate with existing third-party systems, is easily scalable and continually improved.
BA365: An automatic irrigation scheduler and irrigation quantity forecaster for broad acre applications. While the broad acre farmers do not irrigate on daily basis, with BA365 they will know “how many days left before they should irrigate without stressing the crop”.
Planters of Expert365
ProfessorVishy Karri is the Co-Founder, Chairman and Chief Executive Officer of Expert365. He started Expert365 with John Pham, in 2015 with a motto to serve the farmers in Australia and to be the best in precision agriculture.He has a distinguished academic record and worked in the areas of sensor fusion, manufacturing, energy and artificial intelligence. He has taken this role to make a difference to the farmer’s lives while building precision agriculture tools.
Benefits for Client
Currently, available moisture sensors inform farmers on the soil moisture at various depths. However, information on the current moisture content leaves the farmers to exercise their own irrigation decision making without any help on the precise amounts of water to be irrigated. Expert365 secured patent after 4 years of rigorous research, several tests and various crop verticals in identifying the ‘recipes’ for precise irrigation water amounts. This QWI365 and BA365 decision support systems as part of its core technology, arrived through sound mathematical and scientific basis, which is not available in the market to date.
Innovative Work Environment for Bright Future
Expert365 provides an environment for innovation and enthusiasm to their employees. The consequence of such environment is full-hearted commitment and a self of belonging. It also strives to give a clear guidance and the career path for the staff based on their performance. The vision of the company is ‘to be the market leader in the provision of precision agriculture solutions to horticulture industry’. There is a strong commitment to the staff families and flexibility of working conditions where a documented policy outlines the conditions. Expert365 is multi-cultural and has an emphasis on equity with several staff coming from varied ethnic backgrounds.
Services for the Future
Expert365 has a sound team with a specialization in Artificial Intelligence (AI) and have been working on building AI in precision agriculture. In the near future, Expert365 will introduce virtual sensors for measuring Ph and basic soil nutrients like N, P and K in the soil without having to go through expensive laboratory tests. Its current trials on estimating Ph and basic soil nutrients have shown 95% accuracy to the laboratory results making these commercially viable. Expert365 will be launching them towards the end of 2017. Team Expert365 believes in incessant innovation as their company motto and realize that unless a company innovates it cannot compete.