The GreenSight Agronomics is only 3-years old but already made its first acquisition. GreenSight has just acquired the digital-transformation firm Turf Cloud. Inc. The main motivation was to be able to provide more actionable insights for turf managers, but also to improve efficiency across North America.
Let me give for those of you who are not familiar with GreenSight services a brief summary of GreenSight’s services. By using daily drone flights (deploying thermal and multispectral cameras) they are providing data for golf course superintendents to be able to:
- optimize water consumption,
- fertilizer and pesticide application,
- turf and soil monitoring, reduce operating costs.
In short, to help optimize turf management decisions. The firm’s proprietary software also interprets drone-gathered data relating to thermal mapping and soil temperature.
I also have to add that the Toro Company has announced a strategic minority equity investment in GreenSight in February 2018. The very same Toro is already involved in the usage of IoT technologies (e.g. The Internet of Turf™, a virtual ecosystem of Toro® products and services: The Toro® Lynx® Central Control System).
Philip Burkart, vice president of The Toro Company’s Irrigation and Lighting Businesses said in February: “We look forward to working with the GreenSight team on ways to integrate their technologies into our Lynx Central Control system, with the intent of expanding the capabilities and access to timely course information so customers can address problems quickly and more precisely.”
All-in drone service packages from GreenSight start at $500 per month, with lease commitments ranging from 3 months to 12 months.
As a result of the acquisition of TurfCloud, GreenSight users will be able to store, organize, analyze and apply their data in one place.
GreenSight & IoT
I think not just Google, but also other companies and industries have to realize that we are using our mobiles much more than our PCs. (For the same reason, Google ranks higher those websites that are mobile friendly.)
It can easily happen the mobile-only phenomenon will grow and mobile platforms will become the de facto management system for IoT devices.
We are just before the data tsunami. Golf clubs that want to benefit from IoT must start thinking about data analytics solutions that offer flexibility. Without it is like trying to hear a single voice in a huge crowd.
How can golf clubs harness all the inherent power of so much data on the turf condition by having an analytics feature? We need analytics solutions that can show trends and enable us to create customized reports.
Please, correct me if I am wrong, but I really miss a complex data analytics solutions of GreenSight. I neither found complex data analytics solution in RainBird’s Central Control Systems or in Hunter or in Toro‘s Lynx Central Control System.
