It's World Water Day!

The Agrifood sector relies heavily on freshwater use throughout the food chain, and so it is of vital importance that we manage the resource as sustainably as possible to ensure its longevity.

The EIT Food Accelerator Network supports some of the most innovative agrifood startups from across Europe every year. Many of the startups have developed innovations that help to conserve or optimise the use of water in agriculture.

Here we highlight a few startups from our 2021 EIT FAN cohort. Read on and discover the EIT FAN alumni helping agrifood use water more sustainably.

Plantae®

Precision agriculture to OPTIMISE irrigation, SAVE water and IMPROVE crop productivity with agricultural sensors

Plantae® is a wireless technology aimed at professional agriculture and gardening that allows the optimisation of crop irrigation in the field, increasing productivity through agricultural humidity, conductivity, and temperature sensors among other devices.

Before joining EIT FAN in 2021 Plantae was selected from 120 companies to be awarded the title of Most Innovative Startup at the Smart Agri Food Summit in Málaga, Spain.

Find out more about Plantae® HERE

ConstellR

Global water monitoring for a growing planet

ConstellR is pioneering the use of thermal infrared microsatellites for global land surface temperature (LST) monitoring. They deliver daily, sub-field, LST imagery optimised for high-precision agriculture, temperature-derived crop health management, yield forecasting and sustainable resource management. ConstellR’s data provides a higher resolution, space-based measure of crop health as the plant experiences stress through evapotranspiration. This gives the farmer days or even weeks’ advance warning to improve water and fertilisation use, take remedial action and therefore reduce crop failure risk / augment yield forecasting ability.

Last month, ConstelleR successfully launched their first thermal infrared earth observation system into space for global water monitoring!

Stay up to date with their latest news HERE

Finapp SRL

Life from cosmos

Finapp produces innovative cosmic ray neutron sensing probes, able to measure soil moisture, biomass water equivalent, and snow water equivalent over large areas with just one instrument. Soil moisture depends strongly on soil type, and the heterogeneity of soil is such that, a few meters away, the water content available for growing crops can vary significantly.

For this reason having a datum averaged over a sufficiently large area to consider the whole spectrum of soil heterogeneity is of fundamental importance. In addition, it is equally important to know the soil moisture not only at a surface level but also in depth, up to where typically the roots of the crops settle.

Finapp’s probe meets both of these requirements, with a single instrument, installed at about 2m above ground level, so as to not interfere with field activities.

Find out more about the benefits of Finapp HERE

Ondo Solutions

A smart solution for precision irrigation

ONDO is an automated system for precise irrigation, fertigation and climate control. Made for owners of greenhouses and open fields of all sizes and crops types. Ondo can help farmers increase yields while decreasing usage of resources like water, fertilizers, electricity, human labour and time.

In fact, Ondo can help reduce water usage by up to 85% thanks to its precise water management and control.

Learn more about ONDO HERE