Israeli artificial pollination agtech startup Edete Precision Technologies is expanding its services to wind-pollinated crops, starting with pistachios, the company announced this week.
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Thus far, Edete has focused on insect-pollinated crops.
Wind pollination is a natural process for many plants: Cereals and grasses, as well as olives, dates, pistachios, walnuts, and some vegetable seeds. The effectiveness of natural wind pollination is dependent on the synchronization of the bloom of male and female plants or of different cultivars, meteorological conditions such as temperature, day length, intensity of winds and other environmental conditions including water and soil quality.
Commercial pistachio orchards in the world have only one male tree for every nine to 24 female trees. Male trees do not bear fruit and are planted solely for pollination purposes. Given appropriate pollination conditions, female trees will yield a commercial crop from the age of seven and for decades to come.
In recent years, growers have noted increasing asynchrony between the flowering of male and female trees. One hypothesis attributes this change to the impact of climate change and global warning, as it is not unique to pistachios and occurs in other crops, such as hazelnuts.
Edete conducted a first pilot of artificial pollination on 80 acres of pistachio orchards in California, over the course of a week. One of the points of the pilot was to explore the possibility of increasing the yield of young female trees and of securing and increasing the yield of mature orchards.
"After testing our unique automated pollination technology on insect-pollinated crops such as almonds, Edete is bringing its capabilities to the massive market of wind-pollinated crops," said Keren Mimran, co-founder and VP for Business Development and Marketing at Edete.
"In recent years, growers have been confronted by an increased asynchrony between the bloom timing of male and female trees. As a result, the yield is reduced, and in extreme cases even result in lack of yield in entire plots. Our technology can and will solve this problem in a manner that helps growers feed the world in the most economical and effective way possible," Mimran explained.
The global pistachio market generates $6 billion to $9 billion a year. The world's leading growers are the United States, Turkey, and Iran. Greece, Italy, Spain, Afghanistan, Syria, China, and Australia are also major producers.
Edete's artificial pollination solution starts with the mechanical collection of flowers, from which pollen is separated. The best genetically fit pollen is then applied on the target trees using the company's unique autonomous 2BeTM pollinators, which employ a combination of technologies to disperse an optimal dosage of pollen on targeted flowers. The 2BeTM mechanical pollinators can work during the day or night and independent of ambient temperature.
The company's proprietary method enables maintenance of good viability rates of pollen stored for over two years.
Edete's artificial pollination service has been implemented in the almond sector in Israel and a pollen bank was produced in Australia, using prototypes of mechanical pollinators developed by the company. The company's technology can also be used to pollinate cherries, apples, and other crops.
Founded in 2016, Edete's team is multidisciplinary and includes highly skilled researchers and engineers. Co-founder and CEO Eylam Ran served as a VP of engineering and R&D at Plasan, a global leader in vehicle protection for security forces. Since its establishment, Edete has raised around $6.2 million in pre-seed and seed funding, including $2.2 million from the Israel Innovation Authority. The company intends to raise additional funds in a Series A round during 2021, to support its scale up plans and entry into the US market.
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