You'll never grow alone anymore: Introducing Phytech's reference line, a new feature to help our customers better understand their trees' health by measuring their growth against a benchmark based on millions of the same trees. Now available for: for almond, pistachio, citrus and Hass avocado (for North America and Israel).
Making the invisible - manageable
Before we dive into the new feature, let's examine how growers are already using Phytech to manage, plan and optimize their irrigation.
By connecting growers to their plants, we've given them direct visibility of water demand and growth rate and enabled them to optimize irrigation and maximize production while saving resources.
This is simply done by observing key indicators on the app: plant status and growth graph/MDS graph. In addition, Phytech's irrigation recommendation, which takes into account several variables including expected ET and the history of the block (stress days and growth rate) helps in creating optimized plans. Pressure switches on the irrigation system monitor actual water delivery, trigger low pressure alerts and closes the loop for our customers (from plant demand - to water delivery).
Not just your block, the entire neighborhood
The plant reference is an additional data layer to help make better and quicker decisions. What's unique about it, is the fact that it gives growers access not only to their trees' conditions. By analysing years of data from millions of trees (same variety, same age) and using big-data methodology, we've created a first of its kind growth benchmark.
This is similar to a baby's growth chart. By comparing their trees' growth rate (as measured by our plant-sensors) against the plant reference, growers now have a better understanding of their trees' health. This is especially important when dealing with young trees, when growth problems have a significant effect on tree's health and yield potential.
Data that facilitates action
All these critical data indicators - stress days summary, trees' growth rate, actual irrigation, Phytech's recommendation and the newly added plant reference are simply laid out in one screen for each block.
Let's take for example an Almond growers with young trees at the beginning of the season. Temperatures have risen fast and on the block's 2 weeks summary page our grower notices some stress days, large MDS values and the trees' growth graph taking a deep dive below the reference. Connecting these dots might lead him to consider switching to a higher frequency irrigation plan instead of the longer, large quantities, cycles.
The plant reference is another data dimension derived from Phytech's mission statement: To help growers optimize production by giving them a deeper, yet clearer, understanding of their trees' condition and needs.
The plant reference is now available for almond, pistachio, citrus and Hass avocado (for North America and Israel).