About 1,000 farmers in Israel, Brazil, Peru, Colombia, Mexico, Kenya and Thailand are reporting up to 40 percent reduced use of pesticides and improved fieldworker efficiency due to a crowdsourcing platform called AgriTask. It’s like a smart one-stop shop for agricultural technologies and best-practices data. Developed by Israeli startup ScanTask in 2008, AgriTask translates data into simple work protocols for farmers of vegetables, field crops, fruit and ornamental trees, grapes, and greenhouse flowers, and helps them comply with safety and export regulations. Exporters, buyers, food conglomerates, and agriculture financing and insurance companies can reap business intelligence and decision support from ground data, aerial images, and forecast data shared by users across the cloud-based AgriTask platform. All this happens on a simultaneously trilingual platform — English and any two other languages — allowing field workers and managers to use ScanTask in their preferred language. “AgriTask has changed the way I monitor and manage our regional integrated pest management project,” said Avi Goldstein from the regional growers’ association in Israel’s Binyamina region, which encompasses more than 100 growers cultivating dozens of different crops. “After five years of using the system I can watch the seasonal and annual behavior of the pest and disease trends and appearance. Therefore, I can recommend treatments for saving time, effort and money to harvest optimal and safe yields.” AgriTask is meant not only for large, established agricultural enterprises, as ScanTask cofounder and CEO Israel Fraier explained shortly after the company’s on-stage demo at the World Agri-Tech Investment Summit in London in early November 2016. “With annual losses of hundreds of billions of dollars, agriculture can easily earn the title ‘The Largest Unsupervised Production Factory.’ The reason is not the lack of data or smart technologies, but the fact that agriculture managers will hardly use existing technologies unless they become easily accessible, and save the need to deal with multiple technical systems,” Fraier said. Representatives of two major European Union farming corporations that watched the demo have requested pilot projects with ScanTask, Fraier reported. Based in Tel Aviv, ScanTask is now raising capital for rapidly expanding AgriTask globally, and for absorbing and integrating new agriculture technologies and farm systems into AgriTask’s features. “We will soon start pilots in England and we are expected to start business in South Africa, Congo, Bulgaria, Spain and other countries. AgriTask is also preparing its entrance into the U.S. market via a major drone company,” Fraier told ISRAEL21c. Fraier said the AgriTask product boasts two main differentiators: The flexibility to let farmers benefit from precision agriculture from any starting point, for example by just computerizing and correlating existing field data; and the ability to integrate with any relevant agriculture technology, and to introduce the technology to farmers and managers via one easily accessible and user-friendly system. Source - http://www.thetower.org