For the third consecutive season, EMILI is working with Agi3 at Innovation Farms powered by AgExpert. EMILI is testing and validating the Crop Sentry system’s ability to provide advanced field-level insights to empower producers to make data-driven decisions on crop growth, health, and yield.
AI-driven platform provides 24/7 crop monitoring
The Crop Sentry platform is unique compared to other technology on Innovation Farms. Its rotating head provides daily 360° imagery, with comprehensive data such as plant height and growth.
The AI-driven platform provides 24/7 non-destructive crop monitoring and analytics throughout the growing season. Equipped with long-range LiDAR (Light Detection and Ranging) and high-resolution multispectral cameras, its Artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) models provide real-time information to predict crop yield and quality outcomes to optimize decision-making, and inform best practice in prairie agriculture.
Crop Sentry images are fused with 3D point clouds that contain crop height data and can be viewed as top-down images showing location-specific plant responses such as lodging detection in oats.
Images generated by Crop Sentry cameras provide top-down view of lodging detection in oats (Images provided by Agi3)
Increasing crop and weather monitoring options
Since the first prototype was deployed on Innovation Farms in 2023, Crop Sentry has become more robust, able to operate seamlessly on solar and battery power when necessary, and engineered to withstand extreme weather conditions.
As the 2025 season approaches, a new iteration of Crop Sentry’s crop monitoring hardware will be tested and validated on Innovation Farms, aiming to increase value for producers seeking different levels of crop and weather monitoring at varied price points.
“The technology being deployed this year unlocks new crop analytics that bring us closer to a market ready-product, demonstrating real value for producers, trial managers, seed breeders, agronomists, and crop input providers,” said Dr. Lysa Porth, Co-founder Agi3, and President and CEO, AIRM Consulting.
EMILI’s Innovation Farms team works closely with Agi3’s engineers and data scientists to gather the precise data needed to inform Crop Sentry’s AI and ML systems including crop observation data not always available with standard farming practices, such as precision agriculture data, and drone surveys of specific fields and experimental zones.
“The only way to develop and test an advanced crop monitoring system like ours is to work side-by-side in a farm field with agronomists and producers who provide the feedback we need to build real value into our technology,” said Elwood Friesen, Director of Hardware Engineering, AIRM Consulting. “Working with EMILI gives us access to the environment we need to support our field trials, but it also connects us to the agricultural stakeholders that we need to collaborate with.”
Growth stage model provides critical insights
Conducting 21 drone flights over 8 fields, EMILI captured a series of multispectral images to provide Agi3’s developers with precise ground truth data at key growth stages throughout the 2024 season. This data, combined with the automated data gathered by the Crop Sentry platform accelerated Agi3’s ability to develop accurate AI and ML models.
“This past year we successfully completed a highly accurate phenological growth stage model that uses the Crop Sentry platforms to actively assess and report every growth stage throughout the growing season,” said Friesen. “This is a critical function for farm management of inputs and applications, and is also a direct crop health indicator.”
By providing daily insights into yield potential, quality, disease risk, and nutrient efficiency, the Crop Sentry system holds the potential to be an essential tool as farms expand in size and scope; providing images, analytics, and crop health reports to farms when daily, in-person field visits aren’t feasible.
A good example of this is a station installed last season in Gypsumville, two hours north of Innovation Farms. This station, which was one of 15 installed across Innovation Farms, provided an opportunity to successfully demonstrate Crop Sentry’s remote monitoring capabilities.
“Once we can measure and observe all the critical variables in the farming system with Crop Sentry, we will enable producers to enhance farm management decisions, both short and long term, to improve crop outcomes,” said Porth.
The Crop Sentry technology is featured in a recent EMILI video, “How is Innovation Farms de-risking agtech?” that highlights the importance of providing space for agtech innovators such as Agi3 to test innovations in a full-scale commercial setting. Save the date for upcoming field tours to learn more about this and other technologies being tested, validated and demonstrated at Innovation Farms during the 2025 season.