Recognizing that a data-driven approach could improve both water management and crop yield, SupPlant built a real-time database that synthesizes crop and weather data to create a proactive management perspective every 30 minutes. This database provides critical early warning to farmers, individualized to their farm, fields, and plants, which can save farmers an average 30% on water usage and  improve crop quantity by 5-10%.

“Our mission is to help every farmer grow healthier plants through AI-powered irrigation, backed by real-time data using DataStax Astra DB,” says Revital Kremer, SupPlant chief technology officer.

The Challenge

Managing water is one of the most critical aspects of successful farming. All plants need water to grow. Controlling water delivery so that each plant has just the right amount of water is difficult, particularly at scale. Yet the worldwide need to increase food supply while conserving water requires a precision approach.

Data is the starting point for precision agriculture. Water uptake by plants depends on variables like temperature, humidity, wind, sunlight, and soil moisture. Water needs vary by crop and growth phase, with corn requiring more water during early stages, for example, while water stress at the right time can be beneficial to wine grapes. So, feedback from plants—water content, plant growth, fruit growth—is important.

The big challenge then is to synthesize all this data to formulate specific recommendations that optimize growth and mitigate stress from heat events, heavy rainfall, and other outside forces. There are 540 million farmers worldwide, all dependent on water. Any delay in their ability to make informed decisions about this precious resource could spell disaster. Astra DB ensures high availability with no disruptions, outages, or performance impacts.

“Data is only useful if it’s timely,” says Kremer. “We rely on DataStax Astra DB to manage our huge database of real-time plant data to ensure that farmers always have the insight they need.”

The Solution

Real-time data is the keystone of SupPlant precision agriculture. With it, farmers can monitor individual plant health and proactively manage their crops. Collected from many sources, data is synthesized and managed using DataStax Astra DB.

SupPlant’s Astra DB environment includes 1.5 billion data points collected from sensors placed on plants and in the soil, collecting and transmitting measurements in real time. Adding to that, other layers of data sources such as satellite imagery, weather forecast, and user feedback. The resulting database covers thousands of growing seasons across every weather condition and drives real-time recommendations that help farmers optimize plant health.

This proactive and data-driven approach helps farmers prevent plant stress, reduce fruit loss, improve production, and maximize crop potential. SupPlant can even initiate irrigation changes automatically.

SupPlant chose DataStax Astra DB on AWS as its primary data store for all data sources, among are time-series IoT data, satellite imagery, weather forecast, soil evolving characteristics, and much more. A managed service for Apache Cassandra, Astra DB provides all the benefits of Cassandra as a service (DBaaS) while sparing SupPlant from managing the high-availability system.

With this cost-effective solution, SupPlant can focus on applying the data to improve farming practices.

"With the help of DataStax Astra DB on AWS, we’re enabling farmers to better listen to their plants, and manage their precious water resources in a climate-adaptive manner," says Kremer.

The Results

SupPlant helps farmers make informed decisions as they manage their crops by providing an additional real-time data source—the plants themselves. Farmers have access to accumulations, statistics, and SupPlant’s own AI-powered  unique insights created daily. The data is processed in near real time and stored again. With irrigation planner systems, farmers can adjust irrigation based on predicted plant behavior as needed across the farm and around the clock, which can be a huge advantage for farmers.

Data from each farmer’s crops is gathered and sent to the cloud, where artificial intelligence turns the data into real-time insights that support proactive farming, irrigation planning, and crop success. Even the smallest farmer without sensors in the field can benefit from access to insights from SupPlant.

“Real-time data is the key to unlocking the potential of precision agriculture,” says Kremer. “With DataStax Astra DB we know our data is always available for synthesis and analysis, driving value for farmers everywhere.”