MintzTech Connect Industry News: Spotlight on GroGuru, Inc.
GroGuru’s mission is to help farmers make more money by increasing crop yield and more efficiently using water and other scarce resources like labor, energy, and fertilizer in a more sustainable way. GroGuru does this by providing superior decision support tools to farmers and agronomic consultants for strategic irrigation management. The GroGuru solution is a potent combination of hardware and software offerings as a service – pioneering technology combined with the applied intelligence of machine learning, artificial intelligence, and Internet of Things.
Optimal irrigation has the single biggest impact on both crop yield and crop quality because it creates a robust crop root system. For decades, soil moisture sensors have been used to optimize irrigation management – with significant caveats. Only one in ten farmers utilizes soil moisture sensor technologies due to their high total ownership costs, annual installation and removal logistics and costs, limited scalability, suboptimal actual yield improvement, and insufficient data continuity for artificial intelligence applications.
GroGuru’s founders realized that the tools and technologies available to strategically manage irrigation decisions were only a partial answer to a massive problem that left 90% of farmers in the dark. Fast forward to 2021: GroGuru has deployed over 2,500 sensors serving over 100 customers in the U.S.A. across over 20 crop types. The GroGuru solution is cost-effective – paying for itself in one growing season, 30X more scalable than competitors, and labor-saving – and increases crop yield by 10-20% while reducing input costs by 10-20%. It is easy to install and intuitive to use while incorporating proprietary technology with four issued patents and five patents pending.
GroGuru’s system is a unique mix of hardware and software offerings that includes soil sensors, communications telemetry, cloud-based software, and an intuitive, farmer-friendly user interface that growers can access on their computer, tablet, or mobile device.
The GroGuru’s hardware offering is its proprietary artificial intelligence–based soil monitoring: the Wireless Underground System for Permanent Installation of Soil Sensors (GroGuru ® WUGS). GroGuru WUGS is a 100% wireless underground system that can be buried below the till depth and communicates through several feet of soil wirelessly. Ideal for broad-acre row crops like corn, cotton, and soybeans, WUGS has a five-year underground unit battery life and therefore does not require annual installation or removal from the field. This in-field telemetry takes less than one minute to install or remove, making it 30X more scalable than traditional systems, with a drastically lower total cost of ownership. WUGS functions by firstly monitoring soil moisture in the crop root zone remotely and in real time. WUGS then transmits data to the cloud where machine learning, artificial intelligence, and agronomic principles are applied to generate valuable strategic irrigation insights and recommendations. WUGS also provides an enhanced “root zone” data set with information regarding rainfall, applied irrigation, and DTN weather forecasts and crop models.
GroGuru’s standalone Software as a Service solution – GroGuru ® InSites – is a powerful platform for farmers that is hardware-neutral by design. It works equally with GroGuru’s own telemetry solutions, including WUGS, and third-party sensors, which include Sentek and other market-leader partners in the precision agriculture space. InSites also integrates with both wired and wireless telemetry configurations commonly used in perennial, tree, and vine crops. In all cases, the GroGuru ® InSites approach delivers nuanced and comprehensive real-time data that is instantly actionable for farmers. This includes a GPS-based “Farm Scale” view, an “irrigate-by-pictures” interface to visualize the root zone and soil profile, crop-specific irrigation templates that guide users before and during the growing season to manage soil moisture conditions in the field, and more.
The combination of GroGuru ® WUGS and GroGuru ® InSites is an example of innovation in hardware technologies fully unleashing the power of artificial intelligence to pave the way to sustainability and efficiency. It is a prototype of thorough industry experience combined with innovative engineering to bring the cloud to the roots, or roots to cloud. GroGuru aspires to be the industry leader in bringing immediately actionable agronomic artificial intelligence to farmers around the world – empowering them to be both more productive and more sustainable.
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