Automated FruitScout (AFS)

Growers have the potential to unlock an economic benefit of $5,000- $10,000 per acre through optimal crop load management according to the foremost leaders in horticulture. By optimizing yield quantity and improving grade quality, growers can maximize profits.

In the face of economic uncertainty and unprecedented climate events, growers today are now dealing with a host of new challenges, from labor shortages and rising input costs to water scarcity and extreme heat. As a result, growers are looking at technology to help them adapt to these new harsh realities, to increase their productivity and ultimately do more with less.

Crop load management is one of the most impactful but challenging areas of orchard management. Growers run the risk of over or under thinning, leaving a suboptimal amount of fruit on their trees. This not only has negative effects on the size and quality of fruit harvested in the current year but can also cause biennial bearing the following year.

Unfortunately, executing a crop load management program using current techniques is extremely labor intensive, time-consuming, and ineffective if performed inaccurately.

Adding Precision and Process Automation to Agriculture

Automated FruitScout (AFS) puts the power of advanced technology directly in the hands of growers, leveraging its groundbreaking AIpowered computer vision technology in an easyto- use mobile App. FruitScout delivers precision and automates the crop load management process, empowering growers to scientifically determine their optimal crop load and incrementally manage their crop load through pruning, bloom thinning, post bloom thinning and fruit hand thinning to precisely the optimal target. As a result, the tree can focus all its energy into growing the best quality fruit. Producing the optimal yield quantity saves growers from wasting labor and inputs (water, fertilizer) growing suboptimal crops.

"At FruitScout, we specialize in combining technology and agronomy to automate agricultural processes - like precision crop load management. It’s about providing actionable insights that optimize yield quantity and improve grade quality, leading to maximum profits for growers,” says Matthew King, CEO of FruitScout. “We’ve started with precision crop load management and have only just begun to unlock the potential of our platform to automate other agricultural processes and bring valuable solutions to growers.”

FruitScout applies advanced computer vision technology to replace a tedious 10-minute per tree fruit scouting activity with a simple 10 second “tree selfie”. This translates into direct labor savings and more accurate data. More importantly, by automating the crop load management process, growers can optimize their yield quantity while improving their grade quality, maximizing profits for this year's crop value and minimizing biennial bearing for next year.

And their efforts to automate agricultural processes have not gone unnoticed. According to John Skinner, Director of Development at San Clemente, "Everyone else is just trying to sell us tools. FruitScout is a solution."

Backed by Science, Proven in Field

Standing on the shoulders of giants, FruitScout has relationships with key academic research leaders in horticulture at Cornell University, UMass Amherst, Michigan State University and Washington State University. Leading with horticultural and agronomic science, FruitScout helps growers practically apply the science to their operations by delivering automated agricultural processes that they can apply at scale in their fields.
When it comes to spreading the word that FruitScout can help growers maximize their profits by improving their yield and grade, word of mouth carries a lot of weight. Dan Plath, President of Washington Fruit & Produce, one of the leading Apple producers in North America comments that, “FruitScout gives us information in the way we think about it without requiring us to change our existing practices. We can scale our process, and the benefits associated with them, to a whole new level with no capital outlays."

“At the end of the day, our mission is to help growers make better decisions to feed our growing population. We’re doing that by automating processes in agriculture that optimize food production and the supply chain. We’re very proud to be delivering solutions that are demonstrating value to our partners,” adds King.

Focusing on its culture of innovation, Automated FruitScout continues to integrate advanced technology and agronomy to develop cutting-edge solutions automate key agricultural processes to help growers not only survive but thrive.