SeeTree: Helping create carbon credits with rapid machine learning insights
About SeeTree
SeeTree offers farmers complete transparency into the health and production of each of their trees by leveraging powerful innovations in machine learning and human intelligence. The company's end-to-end intelligence network provides visibility, monitoring, and actionable analytics to optimize farming for the good of growers, consumers, and the planet.
Tell us your challenge. We're here to help.
Contact usSeeTree's combined use of human intelligence with machine learning helps farmers to care for crops on a one to one basis, improve crop yields at a lower cost, and reduce their carbon footprint.
Google Cloud results
- Automating analysis of hundreds of thousands of hectares for carbon credit transparency
- Decreasing carbon credit analysis and verification time to a matter of weeks (reduced from nine months)
- Processing hundreds of millions of data points in seconds
- Providing customers with new features in a matter of weeks (reduced from one year, on average)
Providing carbon offset insights and solutions in a fraction of the time
Agriculture is an industry facing rapid change due to climate change, technological advances, extreme weather events, and the growing global population. Strong infrastructure, software, and artificial intelligence processes are essential if farmers are going to face these challenges. That's why some farmers are taking a holistic approach to data-driven agriculture, enabling them to analyze supply chains, fields, and equipment — even autonomous machinery.
"It's not a zero sum game. We need to win as a society and not just make farmers grow more with less."
—Uri Rosenzweig, Chief Product Officer, SeeTreeSeeTree is an end-to-end service created in 2017 to help farmers gain insight into the health and productivity of whole forests by combining machine learning (ML) and human intelligence. Until now, agriculture has relied on manual labor and partial data, resulting in lower yields, higher costs, and huge challenges for the environment. But SeeTree's background in data and intelligence, combined with cloud tech, is giving farmers the ability to diagnose and treat trees on a one-to-one basis. This gives growers a "health profile" for their trees, helping them save on operational costs, produce higher yields, and contribute to sustainability at the same time. "Caring for the environment is not a zero sum game," says Uri Rosenzweig, Chief Product Officer, SeeTree. "We need to win as a planet and not just make farmers grow more with less."
SeeTree's customers include large-scale farmers, packing houses, food companies, and the forestry industry. Using Google Cloud products, such as BigQuery, equips SeeTree customers with a digital framework that parallels the farms they already work on, like a digital twin. This allows them to examine their crops on a per-tree level exactly as they would if they were on the ground, but at a higher volume and with greater accuracy.
This is also better for the environment. By working with SeeTree, farmers can understand trees' actual size and needs, configuring sprayers to use fewer materials and spray more effectively.
Leading the latest generation of agriculture with MyFarm Platform
Ensuring data's validity is one challenge, but storing and scaling it is another. In many of its projects, SeeTree stores tens or thousands of terabytes of raw, pre-processed data. The data is initially processed at its core with Airflow using Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE) and later, during analysis, intermediate and tabular data in Firestore and BigQuery. As SeeTree starts using LIDAR data (enabling them to survey and analyze high-resolution maps of a particular area), this data will only become denser.
"Without Google Cloud, there is no SeeTree. We have hundreds of millions of data points that need to be translated into features in a split second. The ability to have BigQuery as the core database is critical."
—Guy Morgenstern, Founder, SeeTree"Without Google Cloud, there is no SeeTree," says Guy Morgenstern, Founder, SeeTree. "We have hundreds of millions of data points that need to be translated into features in a split second. The ability to have BigQuery as the core database is critical."
SeeTree's hundreds of millions of data points are processed on the same day, so the company's ability to scale is critical. For example, introducing GKE allowed them to batch processes manually, like taking images and creating a map. When an extreme weather event takes place, SeeTree works with its customers to analyze several tens of thousands of hectares of land with a variety of different rootstock and irrigation practices. They help growers quantify the impact of the weather event, which varieties, practices, and rootstocks were most resilient to it, and provide recommendations for improvement. This analysis provided in SeeTree's MyFarm Platform helps growers make better decisions, like whether to invest in a new irrigation system.
Equipping project developers to offset carbon with MyForest Platform
BigQuery is SeeTree's main tool to create sophisticated insights for its customers, allowing them to easily extract, analyze, and scale information on hundreds of thousands of hectares in a very short time. This is especially useful for carbon credit transparency. Carbon credits are difficult to trace, so companies that buy them to offset their contributions to pollution may struggle to verify the credits or validate their association with real carbon captured from the atmosphere. Reforestation credits are particularly valuable, since reforestry projects plant forests on arid or unused land. But measuring the amount of carbon stored in those trees is a manual process. Performing this task on vast numbers of trees globally is impossible to do in a reasonable time, creating a backlog of reforestation credits' certification.
SeeTree partnered with reforestry companies to measure trees' aboveground biomass, and convert that growth into C02 equivalents. Through its MyForest Platform, SeeTree provides reforestation project managers and carbon credit verifiers with virtual tours of the forests to verify the carbon credit claim based on real data. This process was done in a matter of weeks for wall to wall measurement and analysis of every hectare rather than the nine months it usually takes for manual end-to-end estimations based on a very small sample of 0.1% out of the entire forested area. SeeTree is also helping farmers measure the exact amount of carbon their trees are storing, helping farmers even offset some of the credits they might be losing due to their greenhouse gas emissions.
AI meets agriculture
With Vertex AI, SeeTree can gather and label data, build initial models for production, and get them into continuous learning mode in a matter of days, rather than a year, which is the more common timeline in the agricultural industry. Managing hundreds of highly accurate models at once allows SeeTree to produce new features quickly and at a low cost for their customers, for example, if growers identify a new disease or need new imagery to verify carbon credits.
"As we continue to scale and grow, we need an extremely robust platform with a full suite of solutions that support both data collection and analysis. And, after five years working with their solutions, it's clear that Google Cloud is the platform that can make it happen."
—Uri Rosenzweig, Chief Product Officer, SeeTreeSeeTree is at the forefront of innovation in the agricultural industry, embracing cutting-edge tech, from basic IT and DLP systems to drone tech, autonomous vehicles and AI. "As we continue to scale and grow, we need an extremely robust platform with a full suite of solutions that support both data collection and analysis," says Rosenzweig. "And, after five years working with their solutions, it's clear that Google Cloud is the platform that can make it happen."
Tell us your challenge. We're here to help.
Contact us
About SeeTree
SeeTree offers farmers complete transparency into the health and production of each of their trees by leveraging powerful innovations in machine learning and human intelligence. The company's end-to-end intelligence network provides visibility, monitoring, and actionable analytics to optimize farming for the good of growers, consumers, and the planet.