Profile Name: Izhar Gilad (38)
Function: Head of Commercial & Business Development, Digital Farming at Netafim,
an Israeli precision irrigation manufacturer from Tel Aviv. Izhar worked for 10 years in Israel’s high-tech sector be-
fore joining Netafim in 2015. As head of product manage- ment, he helped shape and
develop Netafim NetBeat. He’s one of the speakers at GFIA Europe on 20 & 21 June.
How do you get NetBeat’s brain started? “We can ‘feed’ the brain with 50 years of agronomic and hydraulic experience and know-how in drip irrigation and have 150 in- house agronomists. These helped us build crop growth models for many crops and various geographical locations. The dynamic and automatically calibrated models help us to exactly tune the amount of water and nutrition to the plant growth situation. All information and experience has been put to work to teach the NetBeat platform to calibrate itself.”
How will you convince farmers to buy a digital brain? “I believe that to really get their interest and convince them to make the investment, they need to see proof of four things: 1. Robust tech that can survive on a functioning farm, 2. Agronomic know-how that empowers the farmers (who know their crops better than anyone),
3. Support capabilities to help them make the most of the new tech,
4. A measurable return on investment, through increased yield and produce quality, and decreased use of resources. That last point is the most important.”
So ROI is crucial. How do you manage that with AI? “Let me come back to the required robust tech first. In order to achieve that, we work with two main suppliers and one of them is from the defence industry and that helps us build a reliable
and robust platform. We’ve seen that controlled drip irrigation as a basic level of precision, can save as much as 20 to 50% of water compared to other methods of irrigation including pivots. Another 15-20% can be saved on the monitoring time/work- load. We’ve also seen yield improvements, quantity and quality wise, in various crops including rice where flooding is the com- mon ‘irrigation practice’. An example in sugar cane even showed a double yield quantity. Although we’ve done various trials over the last few years, it’s a bit too early to put numbers on the savings and ROI of the Net- Beat system. I’m convinced it will give bigger savings than our existing drip irrigation systems.”
When and where will NetBeat become available? “It was officially launched two weeks ago at Agritech Israel and we will gradually roll out to India, Brazil, Australia, Europe and the Unit- ed States in 2018. The European launch is at the EIMA in Bologna, Italy from 7-11 November this year.”
What will be the cost of the system? “The system will require an initial investment fee for the hard- ware, sensors and the cloud-based platform. For the data process- ing, the ‘brain’, remote support and updates, we will introduce a basic subscription and an advanced subscription. The price of both subscriptions is not determined yet but will both involve a certain annual fee.”
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