Farmers are spending over 18 billion dollars a year on pesticides. Most of that cost is baked into the price of doing business. But what if a chunk of it was just waste? Not because the chemicals don't work, but because they are showing up too late.
Spotta, a startup based in the UK, thinks it has a fix. It is not pitching a better spray. It is not selling a new kind of bug trap. What it has built is something closer to a surveillance network. Small Internet of Things sensors powered by image-based AI that sit in the field and watch. Constantly. Quietly. Waiting for the first sign of trouble.
The idea is simple. Catch infestations early and you will not need to drown crops in chemicals later. The tech is doing more than just watching. It is also learning. Weather patterns. Bug life cycles. Local crop data. All of it feeds into a platform that can give farmers a heads up on exactly when and where to act.
Robert Fryers, the company’s CEO, compares it to catching a flea on your dog. You want to know when there is one. Not when they are crawling all over your house. He says farmers using Spotta’s system in the Middle East are catching infestations up to three months earlier than they did before.
This shift toward precision pest control is part of a much bigger story. Agriculture is starting to absorb the tools of real-time data and automation. The results are not just savings. They are safer working conditions for field workers, more stable crop yields, and less chemical runoff in the soil and water.
The concept is not totally new. Other companies like Trapview and FarmSense are building similar platforms. But adoption has been slow. Most growers are still relying on manual inspection and reactive spraying. Part of that is inertia. Part of it is trust. Rivera, a researcher at Cornell Agritech, says that in farming communities, word of mouth is everything. Once one grower sees results, others follow.
Fryers is betting that the old method, walk the rows, look for signs, and then spray, will not last much longer. Not because it is ineffective, but because it is inefficient. He expected to see more big players already moving in. He did not. That has given Spotta room to work.
Right now, the platform is focused on specific crops and pests, like red palm weevils in date palms. But the infrastructure is flexible. The real challenge is not building better sensors. It is building trust in a space where the pace of change has always been slow by design.
But the pressures are mounting. Climate shifts. Labor shortages. Rising costs. And an entire generation of younger farmers more willing to adopt tech that works quietly in the background and delivers clear results.
What Spotta is offering is not just a tool. It is a different mindset. One where the goal is not to fight nature with more force, but to get there before the damage starts. If the data is good and the predictions hold, that might be enough to change how entire regions manage one of their oldest problems.