Mt Elgon Orchards runs 110 hectares of avocado orchards across 19 fields, all monitored with CropVision. One block of 527 trees, followed for a full season, shows what the data delivers on the ground — and the return it creates across the whole farm.
“Stress was flagged weeks before we could see it in the field, and every treatment was targeted — we stopped firefighting and started managing”
The situation
It is impossible to walk 110 hectares frequently enough to find the issues early enough to act — that's more than 300 km of rows to walk. With stress invisible to the eye until it is well established, the team was always reacting to what had already spread.
The challenge
At farm scale, spot-checks could only ever cover a fraction of the trees, so early stress went unseen and treatments were applied across whole fields whether they needed them or not — costing input, time and fruit quality, block after block.
How Lima came in
CropVision now monitors the whole farm — 110 hectares over 19 fields — with weekly drone flights counting every tree and classifying stress tree by tree. One 527-tree block was followed closely for 12 months as a worked example of the value: stress seen weeks early, and each treatment aimed only at the trees that needed it.
The results — across the farm, after 12 months
- 110 ha monitored across 19 fields, with 10,000s of treatments and recovering trees
- 30% reduction in tree stress
- 18% estimated yield increase
- Improved quality and price per kg
- 25% lower spray and input cost during flowering
- The example block: healthy trees up from 368 to 505 — stressed trees down from 37 to 6
The same picture repeats across the farm: stress flagged weeks early and every treatment targeted. The example block shows the pattern — reactive management replaced by uniform, data-driven care.
