UK-based agri-tech firm AgriSound has launched a European field trial with international food group Importaco that seeks to make pollination a visible, actionable driver of orchard performance in commercial almond production.
The pilot, running during the 2026 bloom season, will deploy AgriSound’s Polly™ pollination monitoring technology across two Importaco-operated almond orchards in Spain and Portugal, capturing continuous, real-time data on bee activity, pollination dynamics and downstream crop outcomes.
More than 120 field sensors will be installed across the sites, making it one of the most detailed pollination monitoring programmes currently underway in European almond production.
From hive numbers to pollination performance
Pollination is widely recognised as fundamental to almond yields, but it is still typically managed via proxies such as hive counts or occasional field observations – approaches that often fail to capture how pollinators behave across an orchard during bloom.
“Pollination is one of the most important, yet least measured, drivers of crop performance,” said Casey Woodward, founder and CEO of AgriSound. “A grower may know how many hives were placed in the orchard, but that does not tell them how pollinators are actually behaving and whether they are meeting the pollination requirements for the orchard.”
Polly is designed to close that gap by delivering continuous, orchard-scale visibility of pollinator activity. It tracks when bees are active, how activity varies spatially, and how those patterns shift across the bloom window.
“That allows us to distinguish between pollination provision on paper and pollination performance in reality,” Woodward said. “Two orchards with the same hive density can behave very differently. Even within a single orchard, some areas may be highly active while others remain relatively quiet.”
A large-scale regenerative trial in commercial almonds
The project will deploy monitoring devices at Importaco’s Zurria site in Spain (50 hectares) and Freixo in Portugal (23 hectares). Sensor placement has been customised to orchard geometry to ensure full spatial coverage and avoid microclimatic bias.
The trial’s objective is to directly link pollinator activity with nut set, yield and kernel quality, generating large-scale commercial evidence of how regenerative farming practices influence both biodiversity and productivity in tree nut systems.
Importaco said the project aligns with its broader commitments to biodiversity protection and value-chain decarbonisation.
Measuring how regenerative systems change pollination behaviour
According to Woodward, the regenerative practices being evaluated focus less on pollination as a standalone input and more on orchard ecosystem health.
“That includes improved habitat quality within and around the orchard, reduced ecological disturbance, and management approaches designed to support pollinator diversity and stability over time,” he said.
He expects these systems to influence pollination in several ways: supporting more stable foraging behaviour, reducing ecological stressors that can suppress pollinator activity, and improving consistency across orchard blocks.
“Consistency is often just as important as peak pollinator numbers,” Woodward noted. “The opportunity for us is to move beyond assumptions and measure whether those differences are actually visible in-field. That is where Polly comes in.”
Linking pollination data to ROI and capital allocation
While the biological link between effective pollination and almond yield is well established, Woodward said the commercial challenge has been making that link measurable and actionable at orchard scale.
“We’d be cautious about claiming a simple one-to-one relationship between pollinator counts and yield,” he said. “But we are increasingly confident that pollination performance explains a meaningful share of performance variation – especially where there are clear differences between blocks or management systems.”
That insight has implications beyond agronomic optimisation. Making pollination visible can inform where capital is deployed, which orchard blocks justify additional investment, and where regenerative interventions are most likely to deliver returns.
“Once pollination is measured properly, it becomes easier to make better decisions about orchard design, management strategy and investment priority,” Woodward said.
Casey Woodward, founder and CEO of AgriSound: “Pollination is one of the most commercially important, but also most under-measured, drivers of orchard performance.”
From in-season decisions to long-term resilience
The value of pollination monitoring extends across both in-season operations and long-term strategy, Woodward said.
During bloom, uneven activity or delayed pollinator build-up can inform immediate actions such as hive movement, tactical management changes or targeted interventions. Over multiple seasons, consistent data builds a clearer understanding of what drives orchard performance year to year.
“Resilience starts with visibility,” he said. “Climate volatility, compressed bloom windows and biological stress all create uncertainty. Continuous pollination monitoring helps detect problems early enough to respond – which matters in perennial systems where small disruptions during bloom can have large economic consequences later.”
Why pollination visibility matters for sourcing confidence
For Importaco, Woodward argues, the project sits at the intersection of productivity, resilience and sustainability.
“Pollination monitoring can help generate value in several ways: improving yield outcomes, reducing hidden risk, informing better management decisions, and creating stronger evidence around sustainable production practices,” he said.
“It is not just about whether one intervention increases output in one season, but whether better pollination visibility leads to more reliable orchard performance, better capital allocation, and stronger sourcing confidence over time.”
Woodward therefore believes the project will have both a direct, measurable impact on Importaco’s P&L and provide longer-term resilience, risk reduction and more stable sourcing economics.
“In the near term, the most obvious value is often around insight, risk reduction and better decision-making,” he said. “That alone can be highly valuable in a crop where pollination performance has such an important bearing on final outcomes.”
Over time, if the data supports better management and more consistent orchard performance, he believes that should translate into direct economic value through stronger yields, improved quality consistency and more stable sourcing.
“I would not frame this as a choice between P&L impact and resilience,” he said. “In our view, resilience and better sourcing economics are part of the route to long-term P&L value.”
Scaling pollination monitoring beyond pilot projects
Looking beyond the 2026 bloom, Woodward said success will be measured not only by yield or quality outcomes, but by whether pollination can be measured in a way that is commercially meaningful and operationally scalable.
“The technology itself is designed to work at orchard scale and beyond, but successful scaling depends on more than sensor deployment,” he said. That means knowing where to monitor, how to interpret the data, and how to act on it.
“If those pieces are in place, then precision pollination monitoring can move from being an interesting trial tool to a genuine commercial capability across larger sourcing networks.”
