As of this morning, 500,000 smallholder maize farmers – mostly women living in Bungoma and Busia – will have access to SupPlant’s sensor-less technology. SupPlant partnered with PlantVillage, which is part of Penn State University, to reach these farmers who represent a small but meaningful portion of the nearly half a billion farmers who grow on less than 2 hectares worldwide. PlanetVillage is working with partners in Kenya like Mediae’s iShamba / Shamba’s Shape Up System reaching 9 million farmers each week. By 2022, Supplant intends to serve at least 2 million smallholders across Africa and India.
Climate change and extreme weather threaten smallholder farmers’ lives and livelihoods. Droughts, unpredictable rainfall, and heatwaves heighten the risk of catastrophic crop failures. Existing solutions are too expensive or too imprecise to help smallholders navigate the climate. Unfortunately, plants are sensitive – even brief moments of extreme stress can kill an entire harvest. SupPlant’s new sensor-less technology collects and analyzes hyperlocal climatic, plant, and irrigation data to help smallholders avoid crop failure. Supplant offers extremely low-cost Irrigation recommendations, weather forecast and crop stress alerts, as well as AI-enabled agronomic guidance to make smallholders more resilient to climate change.
David Hughes, founder of PlantVillage, who is the Dorothy Foeh Huck and J. Lloyd Huck Chair In Global Food Security, explained that “Supplant’s unique dataset, agronomical expertise, and proprietary algorithms offer a very interesting step change for farmers facing the threat of drought. Our initial pilots are successful and we want to see accelerated delivery at scale, and hope to see tremendous results during the upcoming harvest season.”
Supplant, a leading Israeli smart irrigation company, aims to digitally inform every irrigation decision on the planet. Most AgriTech companies only target 2% of the world’s growers, and ignore the 450M smallholder farmers worldwide. SupPlant grew 12X over the past 18 months by serving the traditional AgriTech market of corporate growers and recently announced $10M of growth capital to continue this trajectory. The company’s leadership and investors are focused on serving all types of growers to create a more sustainable world. Jeffrey Swartz, the former CEO of Timberland, and co-founder of Boresight Capital, which led the most recent round, said that “while climate change rages, SupPlant’s solution is a concrete example of how world class technology and driven executive teams can improve our world. Across a variety of critical crops and a wide range of geographies, from small hold farmers to larger scale food producers, we support SupPlant because they help farmers produce more, better food, sustainably.”
