Awarded as Best Innovative Solution for Climate Change at the Malta Business Awards 2022, the Maltese company Wes Trade rose to European prominence with Irrigoptimal solution, an innovative integrated solution built on Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning algorithms to reduce water consumption during irrigation process and to support farmers with a decision support system monitoring crops and potential early trends to recognise possible disease.
Funded by the Malta Council for Science and Technology under the R&I Fusion Program, Irrigoptimal was successfully tested in Malta and Gozo for different type of crops while intensive experimentations conducted in Sicily on orange trees fields resulted on very attractive results such as 52,42 per cent water savings compared on equivalent irrigation tests with standard irrigation. In particular more than 5,000 litres of water was saved in the period August- November 2022 per irrigation row (each row covering 100 square metres approximately).
This excellent result was brought to the attention of the Italian local press and the regional organisation UNICOOP Sicily, the regional Cooperative of Farmers decided to call for a Regional workshop involving the local administration, the president of the Consorzio Arance Rosse di Sicilia and the Group of Local Farmers to illustrate the results of this experimentation that will be replicated in 2023 at Regional Level.
Wes Trade designed and implemented an innovative algorithm with the support of the Institute of Earth Systems, Division of Rural Sciences and Food Systems of the University of Malta (UoM) in order to predict the optimised water value needed by the crop in the incoming days mixing up information coming from grounded sensors, historical and agronomic data including weather forecast information. This algorithm was compared during the experimentation phase with alternative algorithms present in the market resulting in a better improved result. The experimentation included quality checks on the crop to verify that reduced amount of water did not impact in the flavour of the final product.
A dashboard including crop monitoring features gives a valid support to farmers.A dashboard including crop monitoring features gives a valid support to farmers including a decision support system able to recommend specific actions to the farmers at the verification of specific trends calculated and predicted by Irrigoptimal through specific Artificial Intelligence features and provide early alerts to prevent disease.
“I am glad to raise our Maltese flag in Europe as a result of an advanced research and innovation,” said Alessio Bucaioni, CEO of Wes Trade “the results we have reached for several crops and soil is really attractive. We are currently installing Irrigoptimal in Italy and in Turkey where we are starting a new project with the Bahçeşehir University Istanbul for a joint experimentation on olive trees using IRRIGOPTIMAL. We have requests from Spain and Greece and through the collaboration of our local representative office in Kenya and Tanzania. Happy to say also that our Maltese NGO partner organisation of the Kingdom of Saints Peter & Paul contacted us to promote and bring the solution in sub-saharian African countries were water scarcity is not an economic but a social challenge”.
“The solution has also been proven being efficient for water saving in green urban areas and is a valid support to farmers not an alternative to standard techniques,” said Daniele Rosa, co-founder of the company. “The innovation relies on the capability of the system to learn by itself and adapt existing models on the basis of the experience without human intervention. We are now running new research connected to Irrigoptimal which is now configured as one of the leading European innovation in the sector.”