Valmont Technologies Acquires Israel Based Prospera Technologies For $300 Million
US-based agricultural products and services company Valmont Industries (NYSE: VMI) announced the signing of a definitive agreement to acquire Israel-based Prospera technologies for $300 million. The acquisition will result in a global, vertically integrated artificial intelligence (AI) company serving the agricultural industry.
Prospera develops machine vision technologies that continuously monitor the development, health and stress level of crops for farmers to grow crops more efficiently. It also offers real-time crop analysis and solutions to detect anomalies in irrigation with the help of Valmont Technologies Aibased 300msolomon The.
Prospera’s Artificial Intelligence (AI) Technology
Prospera’s AI technology uses in-field cameras and climatic sensors to create remote agronomy solutions that help farmers understand their crops from a leaf by leaf basis to a multi-field, multi crop basis. It provides real-time insights that empower farmers to grow better crops, deliver more food to market, produce less waste and conserve water, pesticides and fertilizers.
The field of AI is growing rapidly as organizations increasingly recognize its ability to drive business innovation and competitive advantage. Companies that adopt and apply AI technologies to their operations can gain insights about customers, processes, products and more — improving their business agility and lowering costs.
AI can be used to perform tasks that would require human intervention, such as predicting disease in patients or identifying potential customer pain points. It also can be used to communicate with customers through chatbots, or to automate business processes.
As AI-powered solutions and tools are becoming more affordable, more organizations can deploy them to solve problems quickly and efficiently. These include software that provides built-in AI capabilities, AI-powered analytics platforms and AI-powered applications that can be used to analyze data for insight and solve complex problems.
For example, the Deep Patient tool from Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai predicts almost 80 diseases up to one year before they occur. The technology is built on machine learning and computer vision.
While the field of AI is growing rapidly, there are several important things to know before implementing it in your organization. For one, AI needs to be trained on a large volume of data. Another key factor is the availability of cheap, high-performance computing power in the cloud.
Lastly, it’s critical to create efficient workflows and processes that allow AI to work its best for your company. Inefficient work flows can slow the adoption of new solutions and prevent businesses from achieving their full potential with AI.
To accelerate the development of AI, many organizations are focusing on creating a data science team with experts in fields such as statistics and computer science as well as business knowledge. This enables an organization to build AI models from the ground up or to train existing models with large amounts of data.
The Future of Irrigation
In the world of irrigation, water is a finite but important resource. It is a crucial input to production and is essential to sustaining wetlands and other natural ecosystems. Its use for industrial, municipal and domestic purposes is also significant.
But in the face of arid climate conditions, water limitations and climate change impacts, the world is now facing a freshwater crisis. To meet global food demand, more land must be cultivated and more water must be diverted for farming.
To address this challenge, new cost sharing policies offer federal or state funding opportunities that can help growers implement smarter systems. These initiatives include the Environmental Quality Incentives Program (EQIP) from the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Natural Resources Conservation Service.
These policies can make a big difference for farmers in the long run, helping them get better and more efficient systems that will last. In addition, they can be used to motivate growers to be more conservation-minded by providing them with incentives for adopting the latest technologies.
One of these strategies, called groundwater recharge, uses a technique to pump treated irrigation water back into the aquifer. It may be an effective way to help growers conserve water as the climate becomes more arid, said John Ossa, business development manager for Jensen Landscape Services in Cupertino, Calif.
Another strategy to mitigate water limitations is to increase crop yields by increasing irrigated area. This strategy requires more research, but the results could have a significant impact on future food production.
This strategy could also have a negative impact on the environment, causing waterlogging and salinization of soils. It may also affect local populations by encouraging resettlement or a shift in lifestyle.
In addition, the expansion of irrigation can deplete aquifers and lead to other problems such as deteriorated water quality. This is why it’s so important to monitor irrigation practices and use water rights systems that convey both rights and responsibilities.
In summary, our findings show that a conversion of rainfed cropland to irrigated land will be insufficient to compensate for adverse climate change impacts on current agricultural productivity, even under the most optimistic projections of water availability and climate change effects. This is because the most arid regions will not have enough water to support a net expansion of irrigated cropland.
Real-Time Crop Analysis and Anomaly Detection
Valmont Technologies and Prospera have teamed up to develop a global AI based solution to monitor crop health, plant development and stress. Through the use of machine vision and a cloud-based platform, growers can receive real-time insights on their crops, including temperature, humidity and water levels.
In addition to a comprehensive crop monitoring platform, the companies have developed a machine learning model that is able to identify anomalies within an agricultural environment, such as drought conditions or irrigation problems. These insights are delivered through a mobile app and dashboard, allowing growers to take immediate action to address issues that could impact their crop.
The model is based on generative adversarial networks (GAN), which are designed to learn distribution patterns of normal data and capture the temporal dependence of time series data features through learning. This process also enables it to handle multidimensional time series data, which can be challenging for traditional anomaly detection models.
During the training phase, the models were evaluated using a wide range of data. Results show that the ELSCP approach is able to identify anomalies with a high accuracy and sensitivity.
Furthermore, the model was able to perform better than its counterpart models. In terms of precision and recall, it achieved an F1 score of 0.343 and 0.1404, respectively.
Anomaly detection is a critical component of a fully autonomous crop management system. It can detect issues in the field and provide growers with essential insights to help mitigate risks, resulting in proper water, fertigation and chemigation.
As the world’s leading center pivot irrigation provider, Valmont is a leader in providing real-time crop analysis and anomaly detection solutions. The company’s omnipresent presence on the field and global reach make it an ideal partner to integrate AI technology with center pivots.
Smart agriculture technology is a crucial tool for increasing farm sustainability and production, but it generates many spatial, temporal and time-series data streams that require sophisticated analytics. Anomaly detection is a common method for detecting abnormal data readings and can help reduce errors that can occur in the analysis of these data streams. However, some existing approaches require significant training and computational resources to achieve good performance.
Valmont’s Vertical Integration
Valmont Industries, a leading global provider of engineered products and services for infrastructure and irrigation equipment and services for agriculture, has entered an agreement to acquire Prospera Technologies, a private agricultural artificial intelligence (AI) company focused on machine learning (ML) and computer vision (CV) in agriculture, for approximately $300 million. This acquisition will combine Valmont’s industry leading engineering, manufacturing and distribution capabilities in irrigation systems, solar, engineered support structures and coatings with Prospera’s AI technology to create the largest global, vertically integrated AI company in agriculture.
Founded in 2014 and backed by strategic investors including Bessemer, Qualcomm, Cisco, More and Tekfen, Prospera has been listed among the World Economic Forum Technology Pioneers and CB Insights Top 100 AI Companies, Frost & Sullivan New Product Innovation and Fast Company World Changing Ideas, as well as received the AgFunder Innovation Award. The company’s solutions have already been proven to increase crop yields and improve the health, vigor and stress levels of crops in real-time.
Through the combination of Valmont’s industry leading center pivot technology and Prospera’s intelligent solutions, growers will have unprecedented visibility to their crop data on a digital hub – allowing them to take immediate action to reduce costs, optimize harvesting and maximize returns in season. In addition, the transaction will expand Valmont’s market leadership and expertise in irrigation and produce an innovative subscription model that is unique and disruptive in the agricultural space.
The combined company will continue to be headquartered in Omaha, Nebraska with offices across the United States, Europe and Asia, and is expected to achieve double-digit percentage growth in each of its segments in the near term. The company has a strong track record of delivering profitable growth for its shareholders.
As the world continues to move towards an industrialized society, the need for more reliable and efficient infrastructure is growing. Across its business, Valmont has developed a number of unique and innovative solutions to support this shift in the marketplace.
Specifically, the company’s utility arm is a leading manufacturer of custom-engineered transmission and distribution (T&D) poles. With the use of drones to make powerline inspections safer, more efficient and cost-effective, the company is able to provide customers with the most advanced, highest quality poles available. To know more about “Valmont Technologies Aibased 300msolomon The” just follow us.
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