Predicts blister blight and plans spraying for tea estates using low-cost leaf-wetness sensors
Blister blight, a fungal disease that thrives in mist and wet leaves, can cut a tea estate's yield by a third during the monsoon. Estates spray copper fungicide on fixed calendars because they cannot tell which fields are at risk this week, so they overspray some fields and miss others. Spraying a 400-hectare estate costs millions of rupees a season, and buyers increasingly ask for lower residues.
Mistline places solar-powered leaf-wetness, humidity and light sensors every 20 hectares and combines them with weather forecasts to score blister blight risk for each field every morning. Field officers get a spray list in Sinhala, Tamil or English with fields, dose and the best window, and log each round in the app. Photos from field officers confirm where infection actually appeared, improving the next forecast.
Tea estates and smallholder collectives in Sri Lanka and South India, with around 200,000 hectares of tea in Sri Lanka alone; the same approach applies to coffee and rubber diseases.
Per-hectare annual subscription (about US$9 per hectare) including sensors, with a lower rate for smallholder collectives sold through tea factories.
Dilini PereraCEO and co-founder
Kavin RajendranCTO and co-founder
Suranga WickramasingheHead of Field OperationsSuranga managed estates for fifteen years, and the product reflects it: spray plans by gang, a dry window, a dose per field. Two paid pilots before a priced round is a good start. Hardware is the risk here; sensor maintenance in the hills could eat the margin at US$9 per hectare.
Leaf-wetness hours are a well-understood driver of blister blight, and Mistline does not overcomplicate it. Using field officers' photos to confirm where infection appeared gives them labels most agritech teams lack. The same setup should work for coffee leaf rust with modest changes.
Blister blight spraying is a recurring cost every estate manager understands, so the value is easy to explain. The 22% reduction in spray rounds comes from one monsoon season, so I would wait for the north-east monsoon results before calling it proven. The season report showing sensor downtime next to results is a sign of honest reporting.
Reply from Dilini Perera, CEO
The north-east monsoon results come out in February, and we will publish them in the same format, sensor gaps included.
Coming soon. Testimonials are invited by the founder and shown separately from open reviews.
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