Edete robotic pollinator boosts pistachio yields by 24%

Edete’s robotic 2BeTM pollinator conducts artificial pollination by dispersing miniscule pollen quantities that are closely controlled and managed during the blooming season.

Pilot

The pilot spanned an over 82-acre pistachio orchard in Sacramento, California, which was divided into three maturity stages: from recently bearing ones to fully matured, through mid-aged. The trial analysed various levels of pollination treatments. The pilot served as the first test of the 2BeTM automated pollinator developed by Edete as a supplement to wind pollination. The use of the company’s novel system led to an average 24% increase in yields compared to the control groups in all of the plots.

Also read: Automating pollination – is it practical or affordable?

Artificial pollination services

Edete is currently preparing to offer artificial pollination services to pistachio growers in California, the service will start with the pistachio blooming season that commences in April 2022. The company plans to use its technology on an area covering several thousand acres in California using its proprietary 2BeTM prototypes.

Keren Mimran, Co-Founder and VP for Business Development and Marketing at Edete noted that “artificial pollination for wind pollinated crops will totally change the market, the economic feasibility for growers, and the ability to feed the world. A 24% increase in agricultural yields will raise farmers’ incomes by hundreds of millions of dollars. The exceptional results serve as a source of optimism at a time when the agricultural sector is struggling with the decline in amount of land under cultivation, the global climate crisis, droughts, increasing water shortages, and natural disasters that put our food supply under stress.”

Decline in yields

According to Mimran there has been a decline in yields in recent years of various orchard crops such as pistachio, hazelnuts and other wind pollinated crops. Wind pollination is carried out by the dissemination of pollen from male to female plants which reproduce the crop, but perhaps due to climate change has led to a growing problem of desynchronization in the blossoming of male and female trees that in turn has resulted in lower yields. “Our technology not only stops this decline but actually increases yields at a rate that in the future will change the prospects of many agricultural sectors.”

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