Shaping the future of farming: latest AI tech for accurate citrus yield estimates lands in the USA

After much anticipation, Aerobotics has launched its Citrus Yield Estimation product and is offering a 33% discount to US growers signing up during December (see below for more details). The product was successfully trialled with premium citrus growers in the USA and South Africa during 2019.

Aerobotics is a global precision-agriculture company that uses high-resolution drone imagery and artificial intelligence to assist growers in monitoring their farms, and optimize and estimate their upcoming yields. Aerobotics has a global impact on farm production and is shaping the future of farming through AI and crop monitoring software.


Aerobotics' proprietary machine-learning models up to 95% accurate

Aerobotics serves growers with farms that cover more than 130,000 hectares across 18 countries, including Australia, South Africa, the UK, New Zealand, the US, Chile and Russia. The company is working with partners in Spain, France and Portugal. In Africa Aerobotics has carried out operations on commercial farms in Kenya, Tanzania and Malawi.

Many growers struggle to estimate yields accurately year-on-year. Poor yield estimates pose significant opportunity costs and reputational risks to all parties involved. With Aerobotics, crop yield estimation is up to 95% accurate. Their technology is positioned to provide early-stage accurate estimates, before key business decisions about crop maintenance and sales projections are made.

How Aerobotics tackled yield estimation challenges

During 2019, Aerobotics ran several private trials in South Africa and in the United States of its new Yield Estimation product for citrus, aimed at helping growers, packers and marketers with better yield estimates on their citrus crop.

The Yield Estimation product uses cutting-edge technology to help in many areas of farming and enables its clients to be more competitive in a global market. The product takes the guesswork out of the yield estimation process, giving citrus growers, packhouses and exporters access to actual production rates early in the season.


Increased accuracy early in the season means that growers can lower their costs, boost profits and decrease risks. With a select number of drone flights throughout the season, growers are informed on yield estimates at the early stages of maturation enabling them to make decisions early on about interventions and resource requirements.

Equipped with better crop estimates, growers can gauge the market and optimize their marketing and packhouse strategies, including resource planning, in preparation for harvest.

Precision-agriculture product improve profitability by providing detailed production information at early stages in the season, giving them sufficient time to adjust sales and marketing strategies.

The process

A drone automatically flies to a representative set of trees in the orchard. It drops down to a tree and records a short video. Aerobotics' proprietary machine learning models identify the fruit and estimate its size and color.

In order to make this information more useful to clients, the Aerobotics in-house agronomy team has designed growth curves for different citrus cultivars. The technology relates current production values to historical yield production levels in order to provide accurate estimates of fruit size and color.

The regular drone flights allow growers to track fruit growth and provide this data to packhouses and marketers, and manage fruit size through irrigation and fertilization. Closer to harvest, it enables growers to make harvesting decisions based on color, and to identify the optimal harvesting period.

The Yield Estimation product boosts profitability and reduces costs by offering:

• accurate reports on fruit size distribution to be expected at harvest date
• fruit size distribution charts and fruit color reports from flight dates and throughout the season
• alerts to stressed trees and zones
• tree census and missing tree counts
• pre-tree analytics including chlorophyll index, NDVI, volume, canopy area

How you can sign up

Contact our Head of Business Development USA, Alastair Curtis, if you're interest in signing up for the Yield Estimation tool for the upcoming season.