The Packer
Imagine a service that will text message or e-mail a grower when his crops are in danger — for free.
Stress from the sun can take away half of a crop’s yield, according to Purfresh, which has introduced the Plant Performance Almanac. The solar stress monitor is available free on the Internet.
The program will even shoot you a message, specific to location, if bad conditions are headed your way.
“Our product is a dashboard that gives you insight into one of the biggest factors of crop quality and yield,” said Dave Cope, CEO of the Fremont, Calif., company.
The almanac tracks global conditions such as temperature, radiant heat and ultraviolet stress indexes. Users have access to historical, current and forecasted information. And location-specific messages can remind a grower to apply preventative protection.
Purfresh can help there, too. In 2008, Time magazine called Purfresh's spray sunscreen for plants, Purshade, one of the 50 best inventions of the year.
But solar stress isn’t the only thing in the company’s crosshairs.
“Soil type, slope direction, wind, rain, all of that stuff — it’s easy to imagine how all of those interplay,” Cope said. “What we have is a simple, very powerful application. But going forward, you’ll see us adding layers to that.”
The company may enrich the application for paying subscribers but plans to keep the currently offered services free, Cope said.
He added that the company understands agriculture and has a good relationship with growers, expertise with software, and one of the world’s leading experts in climatology, Eric Wood of Princeton University, as head of the company’s scientific advisory board.
Go to https://www.intellipur.com/plant-performance.jsp for more information.
