Sade: Artificial pollination tech must focus on plants, not insects
Tai Sade · Doing the bees’ work with Thai Sade of BloomX · Jan 18, 2024 · at 11:45
Tai Sade, co-founder and CEO of agtech startup BloomX, discusses the conceptual philosophy behind designing biomimetic robotic pollination hardware.
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“We should focus on the plant, not on the insect, in order to understand the mechanism and how we can enhance the activity on the plant.”
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More from Tai Sade
BloomX: Robotic pollination increases crop yield by 10% to 40% over bees
“In compare to any bees, when we apply those, you know, machines, we see a range of between 10 to 40% of yield increase to cause get of using our services.”
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“Avocados and other crops that we are dealing with, pollination is a limiting factor for yield. Okay. So there is a very big gap that we can increase the yield responsibly without taking too much resources from the trees.”
Sade: Around 80% of commercial crops rely on insect pollination
“So around 80% of the commercial growing crops that we use today are pollinated by insects. The other 20% are pollinated by wind.”
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“The number of honeybee hives Has increased from the 19 sixties to today by around 81%, but the number of land that needs pollination globally in the same time grew much more, and that's what created this big gap that you know today”
BloomX uses electrostatic forces and friction to pollinate crops
“Another mechanism that we are applying, for example, is basically electrostatic forces to collect the pollen out of the flowers and then apply them by friction.”
BloomX algorithms forecast optimal crop pollination windows using field data
“We have an algorithm that allows us to understand how environmental conditions affect the flying behavior for every crop that we are working on that give us the right pollination window to pollinate and create a forecast of the pollination season based on real…”