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Blue Radix, ecoation to collaborate and optimize autonomous growing

May 20, 2021  By Ecoation & Blue Radix (edited)



Canadian agtech company, Ecoation Innovative Solutions, and Dutch artificial-intelligence specialist, Blue Radix, have announced a new collaboration.

A Canadian developer of automated greenhouse management and crop health monitoring technologies, ecoation’s platforms will collect data used to further support Blue Radix’ algorithms for autonomous growing.

By combining data sets, algorithms, and analytical efforts, states the joint press release, the companies are able to create new insights and applications that help growers worldwide to improve their crop strategy, quality and yield.

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“Collaborating with Blue Radix means pioneering the future of ag more effectively, at a pace that would be difficult to reach if we carried on separately,” said ecoation CEO Dr. Saber Miresmailli. “Both teams are committed to the same goal: to support growers in making the best possible decisions. Working together means unlocking new ways to get the most from the data and providing better insights to our customers that inform their decisions.”

Collaborating across data and algorithms has the potential to create value across many avenues, including optimizing crop strategy, autonomous steering, IPM enhancement, and understanding spatial climate distribution.

“Ecoation offers solutions which are important components in a fully autonomous greenhouse. Optimization and steering with algorithms depends on high quality data and a robust crop strategy. Vision technology and enhanced analytics from ecoation provides this data and the necessary input to improve the grower’s crop strategy even further,” emphasizes Blue Radix CEO Ronald Hoek. 

The first project the duo is working on is enhanced autonomous growing with crop data visualization. ecoation’s OKO collects sensory data and information about climate, integrated pest management, and crop work at every row and post to a SqM granularity.

These insights will contribute to a more complete and accurate view of the state of the crop. The broad range of data points, including fruit count, fruit colouring, and stem density, will be combined with the smart steering algorithms of Blue Radix’ Crop Controller. Crop Controller will actively, continuously and autonomously control the greenhouse conditions with the grower’s crop strategy as its starting point and the optimal crop status as its goal. E.g. by optimizing the plant load, plant stress is reduced avoiding weak plants that are vulnerable to pests and diseases.

In this way they can fix imperfections before they impact yield or crop quality. 

The duo will only work with greenhouse data retrieved from the customers of ecoation and Blue Radix who provide full consent.

Transparency and data security are paramount, and this collaboration will rely on growers who are looking to optimize their greenhouse operations with autonomous processes and are interested in contributing to the future of ag with their facility data and insights.


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