Infrared Radiometers Cut Water Use & Boost Produce Quality

The Complex Tapestry of Crop Data

In commercial growing, careful crop management is crucial to the success and efficiency of the operation. Without high-quality data about your crops, it can lead to loss of crops, overwatering, overfertilizing, drops in produce quality, missing optimal harvesting dates, and other costly mistakes. There are so many environmental factors that impact your yield quantity and quality: light, temperature, humidity, atmospheric pressure, soil moisture, soil electroconductivity, disease outbreaks, and more. If you can track these factors, you’ll get information about your plants that can be used to manage variables in the growing process. In other words, agriculturalists can control fruit size, taste, color, and postharvest life. However, it can be difficult to know how to measure these parameters, especially in large commercial growing operations; even if you do, it is difficult to make sense of the data. If I collect a data point from one location in my field, how well does that represent the entire field? Especially on a large scale, there are too many aspects of plant health for a grower to keep track of them all!

Turning Data into Decisions

Gradient Crop Yield Solutions is an affiliate of Morning Star Tomatoes, a worldwide provider of tomatoes. Familiar with the demands of high quantity crops, Gradient monitors and analyzes crop and environmental data to drive crop maintenance decisions. Their systems incorporate cutting-edge technologies related to weather, soil, crop, and satellite imagery to build a precision irrigation model. They use this data to help growers in the decision-making process. Smart Farm Management is already being successfully used in almond, pistachio, and tomato production!  

Their system monitors air temperature, relative humidity, barometric pressure, vapor pressure, soil volumetric water content, canopy temperature, and irrigation hours. On top of that, they use satellite imagery to provide a broad view of the crops to compare against the ground data. All these components together create a comprehensive view needed to provide growers with the information needed to make the right decisions for their crops. The numbers obtained through their monitoring is then processed to be easily accessible for their users. They can explain the trends and consult farmers on their decisions, while the farmers can also pull up easy-to-look-at graphs and charts of the data right on their phone. The technology is easy, so any layman grower can use and understand it.  

The First Sign of Stress

Gradient utilizes Apogee’s Infrared Radiometers (SI-1H1-SS) to obtain canopy temperatures, one of the first variables to change when plants are under stress. Infrared radiometers (IRRs) measure surface temperature accurately even at long distances by detecting non-visible infrared radiation. In Morning Star’s tomato fields, Gradient installs one IRR for every 40 acres of crop area. They use a model that works well in agriculture; it has horizontal field of view that can be aligned with the canopy rows to ensure it includes only the plants themselves—rather than the dirt or sky—in the temperature averages.  

One key advantage of this method is the immediate feedback the IRRs provide about plant stress levels. These sensors detect plant stress long before the human eye could see it or other environmental sensors would predict it. Even while measuring other environmental factors, measuring canopy temperature is crucial, because it shows us how the plants themselves are doing. Javier Garrido, Gradient’s Lead Software Engineer, shared an experience that taught him this lesson well. At the end of a growing season, growers may water their plants in deficit to produce higher quality fruit. A colleague was using a soil moisture sensor to protect against plant damage during this period. In just one day, the plants experienced too much stress, and they lost part of their crop that year. According to the soil moisture sensor alone, there was no indication of danger, and the crops looked the exact same. Javier knew they needed a better method to protect against a similar occurrence in the future. He found the IRR would measure the plants’ reaction to the water deficit immediately. Stress levels as measured by the IRR have become a critical driver of irrigation decisions—cutting unnecessary water use and serving as an early warning system when plant stress begins to climb. 

Precision Pays

Gradient uses every component to see the whole picture, and without any piece, the picture would be incomplete. Their systems improve harvest quality, yield, and decrease watering costs. Year after year, they ensure Morning Star Tomatoes produces high quality fruit, supplying around 40 % of the USA's tomatoes and shipping tomatoes worldwide. They have helped many growers save between 10%-20% in watering alone, not to mention increasing yields and quality. One orchard grower shared that Gradient’s data-driven approach has cut their watering costs from $3,000-$4,000 per month to $800-$1,200 per month. Another grower that branched into a crop he was unfamiliar with was able to double his crop yield from the previous year through Gradient. Gradient Crop Yield Solutions lowers the barrier to entry in agriculture commercial space and improves margins for even the biggest operations.

The Future of Agriculture

Gradient is redefining what’s possible in commercial agriculture. With tools that are both powerful and accessible, they’re helping growers maximize production, reduce resource use, and make data-driven decisions with confidence. From water savings to crop breakthroughs, the results speak for themselves—and the future of farming is more sustainable because of it.