About 75% of the world's food crops rely on insect pollination (mainly bees); the pollination services they provide are a vital input for world food production and nutritional security. Yet, whilst other agricultural inputs such as irrigation, pest and weed control and soil nutrition are highly regulated practices, crop pollination is subject to little or no direct management and is provided almost entirely as an ecosystem service, which reduces the stability of productivity and capacity for production improvement.
This project will bring to market a unique IoT sensor application that will provide real time monitoring of the foraging rate of honeybee colonies used for pollination services. This information will be correlated with hive strength and health data using sophisticated machine learning algorithms to provide a precision pollination service enabling farmers to optimise pollination efficiency and crop yields. Our aim is to enable sustainable increases in crop yields of 30% through improved management of pollination services.
We have an industrial consortium of 3 independent SMEs from three different countries with complementary expertise and knowledge:
• IRIDEON (Spain): IoT applications, electronics and software development, prototyping and contract manufacture
• CANETIS (Italy): Development of tools and systems for analysing bee health and behaviour
• BEE HERO (Israel): Smart pollination services for crop growers.
Our business objectives are to:
• Build a global business providing pollination intelligence services to crop growers across 5 continents
• Generate annual sales of 10million euros through provision of pollination data services
• Create new high-level jobs in IoT and data analytics
• Stimulate additional investment in further R&D
IRIDEON owns the IP of the IoT hardware, firmware and software (IoT server, API, in-hive sensor node and gateway). IRIDEON and CANETIS share in equal parts the IP on the bee foraging sensor, and accessory systems (scales and weather station).
BEEHERO plays the role of the business developer, integrating the iPOLLINATE system in their own proven Pollination as a Service business model, bringing their customer and stakeholder networks as initial commercial routes.
The overall objectives of the Project are:
1. Advanced design and testing of the new Pollination Sensor to collect bee foraging data
2. Integration with Bee Hero system and development of new pollination metrics
3. Design and test User Interface features for effective presentation of foraging and pollination data
4. Field trials to demonstrate performance of the system
5. Deliver iPOLLINATE onto the market and into society
