Formant + Bitwise Bring Actionable Crop Yield Insights to Farmers

We’re excited to announce our partnership and integration with Bitwise Agronomy.

Bitwise is a computer vision company focused on helping farmers improve the yield and profitability of their crops through optimized crop yield insights. Their core product, GreenView, uses machine learning to count and analyze the different growth stages of vines and berries, giving growers actionable, real-time insight around crop health and projected yield.

The Formant + Bitwise integration pushes Formant device data (video streams collected in the field) to GreenView for computer vision analysis, then ingests that data back into Formant, all in real time. This gives farmers actual count imagery and crop analysis, giving them the data they need to make important decisions.

“Farmers still need the ability to have eyes on their crops, so by doing this integration with Formant farms can see their whole crop at a glance. Not only can they see what their crop looks like now but also what it was like in the past, which helps manage variability and drive decisions about the future. ,” says Fiona Turner, CEO & Founder at Bitwise Agronomy. “With the affects we are seeing on crops due to climate change and labor shortages due to Covid this is becoming critical for farmers. By integrating our analytics with Formant we can highlight areas so the farmer is focusing on problem areas and making operational decisions that can increase the quality of their fruit, their yield and drive down labor costs all from the comfort of their home.” 

By partnering with Formant, Bitwise will potentially have access to large-scale robotic fleets in the agriculture space, which gives them more real-world data to improve their machine learning algorithms. And with Formant’s infrastructure and Bitwise’s computer vision, robotics companies in the agriculture space can offer a solution to their customers that makes the most of devices deployed in the field.

Three reasons we’re especially excited about this integration:

1. Better autonomy solutions for agriculture

We have a number of customers and partners in the agriculture space, including Burro, Blue River Technologies, and more. By partnering with Bitwise, our customers in the ag space are able to offer even more solutions to their end customers, all within the Formant platform. For example, a robots-as-a-service company providing weeding for vineyards could easily offer Greenview as an additional solution, analyzing crop yield while devices are moving through the field performing other tasks.

2. Formant APIs in action

At its core, Formant is a data platform that customers and partners can build on top of using our APIs. Bitwise is a great example of that. Their integration takes real-time telemetry data coming into Formant from devices in the field, pushes it to their servers for analysis, then sends that back to Formant. This all happens in close to real time, meaning that end customers can use Formant’s observability platform to browse through this analyzed data using the timeline scrubber.

3. Data flexibility

If you’ve been following us for the last couple of months, you know that data flexibility is top of mind for the team here at Formant. We’re committed to allowing customers to seamlessly push their data to any tool they want for analysis and visualization.

The Bitwise integration does just that, streaming data from Formant into Greenview’s Report Dashboard, which can be viewed directly inside Formant (or accessed via the Greenview app).

Bitwise is a Formant marketplace partner. If you’re interested in exploring how Bitwise can help you or your customers with crop yield insights and analysis, request a demo.