Taranis partners with Lanafil to augment precision agriculture offerings in the Americas

The partnership with Uruguay’s most prestigious distributor marks yet another collaboration for Taranis in Latin America, expanding its foothold in the region

Leading precision agriculture intelligence company Taranis last week announced its partnership with Lanafil, a major Uruguayan distributor of fertilizers and plant protection products, bringing precision agriculture to the Uruguayan market. The partnership adds to Taranis’s existing Latin American operations in eight countries, including Argentina, Brazil, and Paraguay, and marks its third regional partnership. Taranis will provide the Uruguayan agriculture industry and Lanafil’s broad customer base of local farmers with access to a comprehensive remote scouting platform that analyzes crop conditions and provides insights to help improve yields and increase farmers’ incomes.

Taranis’s end-to-end platform combines artificial intelligence with submillimeter resolution aerial imagery to help farmers and crop consultants identify and treat crop threats, including pests, diseases, weeds, and nutrient deficiency in real-time. The company’s proprietary AI analyzes three image types – “AI2” 0.5mm per pixel leaf-level drone imagery; ultra-high-resolution full-field imagery from planes; and satellite imagery at 1.2 meter per pixel resolution – and cross-references those images against Taranis’s vast agronomic knowledgebase of over one million crop health issues. The system detects threats early and formulates customized treatment plans based on crop types, regional environmental conditions, and other factors that can be uploaded directly to users’ smartphones or tablets.

Digital solutions such as precision agriculture and artificial intelligence can boost farmers’ profits by up to 40 percent while also serving a wider purpose. In recent years, Uruguay has embarked on a campaign to meet global food demand by increasing local agricultural production to sustain 50 million people, over 15 times the national population. Between 2005 and 2014, the country of three million people tripled their food yields from enough for nine million people to 28 million, all while contending with obstacles such as wheat performance, pests, disease, excess water, soil quality, and climate variability.

“We are thrilled to partner with Lanafil, one of Uruguay’s most prestigious agricultural distributors, to expand access to our precision agriculture technology and insights to farmers across South America,” said Jorge Winiar, GM Latin America, Taranis. “Uruguay is a particularly exciting market, as our platform is especially suitable for growing commodity crops like soybeans, wheat, and corn, as many Uruguayan farmers do. And with the COVID-19 crisis raging, innovative technologies that improve yields and enable remote scouting are more critical than ever before. We are proud that our AI-backed technology can provide the assistance food producers need to meet their goals during this difficult time.”

Taranis targets high volume commodity crops, such as soybeans, wheat, and corn, which together account for 83% of Uruguay’s cereal crop fields. Using drones that scout up to 1,200 hectares per day and planes that scout up to 4,000 hectares per day, Taranis can scout 100 points in six minutes, as opposed to 10 points in more than an hour using human workers, increasing yields. Taranis will be made available to Uruguayan farmers and crop consultants, connecting them to precision agriculture technologies that boost food production and incomes.

“Lanafil is committed to helping our customers meet their goal of increasing local food production to meet global food demand,” said Luis Martínez, Commercial Manager of Lanafil. “This can only be achieved with access to the most cutting-edge products, and we believe our partnership with Taranis will provide Uruguay’s farmers with the groundbreaking precision agriculture solutions needed to step up to the challenge.”

Uruguay will be the 14th country in which Taranis’s products are available to farmers, joining the US, Canada, Brazil, Argentina, Mexico, Russia, Chile, Peru, Paraguay, Ukraine, Bulgaria, Australia, and Israel.