18 October 2019 10:00
The 2019 approval period has just ended and is proof of a solid partnership between Nataïs and Telespazio France, two companies that are fully committed to the development of their business, committed to sustainable agriculture, placing innovation and quality at the heart of their concerns.
Over the past two months, Telespazio France has deployed 8 UAVs to fly over the 7,000 hectares of Nataïs popcorn crops to detect and locate datura plants. The solution developed by Telespazio France, called GEOADVENTICE, combines UAVs and Artificial Intelligence to offer farmers a solution, available on their cell phone, to geolocate weeds in their plots and enable them to take the necessary precautions to eradicate them before harvest.
The success of this campaign is the result of a collaboration that began in 2018 between Nataïs, the European leader in popcorn, and Telespazio France, the French subsidiary of the international Telespazio group, a major player in the space industry providing satellite solutions and services. This partnership aims to address the growing problem of weeds in crops. Indeed, some of these weeds can, like datura, prove to be toxic.
Since its creation, Nataïs has built its development on the implementation of sustainable and regenerative agriculture, customer excellence through quality popcorn and the economic and social development of an entire region. It is therefore quite natural that this company turned to Telespazio and its GEOADVENTICE solution to continue to promote environmentally friendly agriculture and ensure better control of crops, while meeting the requirements and needs of its customers in Europe and elsewhere.
GEOADVENTICE is an innovative solution that meets the demand of agricultural cooperatives, seed companies, producers and the food industry, which are increasingly concerned by the weeds that proliferate throughout France and the world. The development of this solution is the fruit of many years of work, combining technical expertise, UAV technology, Artificial Intelligence and cell phone applications.
"The sustainable and environmentally friendly management of weeds is a key issue for Nataïs as well as for our customers. The GEOADVENTICE solution makes possible the fast and efficient detection of datura in the fields, which allows us to ensure quality popcorn production and time optimisation for our partner producers," underlines Michael Ehmann, President and founder of Nataïs."
"The implementation of Telespazio's technology is a good example of synergy between Artificial Intelligence and the agricultural world. It enables us to move forward in our Natural Popcorn approach and to build and sustain tomorrow's agriculture in France," says Melanie Bayard, Agricultural Partnership Manager at Nataïs.
"We are proud to collaborate with Nataïs, a proactive and pioneering company on the issue of datura, by implementing our GEOADVENTICE service, which is in line with the vision of modern agriculture and uses new technologies such as Artificial Intelligence. GEOADVENTICE benefits from space expertise in the analysis, observation and protection of our planet," adds Lilian Valette, Head of the Bordeaux site and of the GEOADVENTICE service at Telespazio.