South African town where Appletiser was born is using drones and AI to supercharge farms
The Western Cape town of Grabouw is a major playing field for innovative agricultural technologies, including drone-based spectral imaging and artificial intelligence-driven irrigation.
About 65km east of Cape Town, Grabouw is the commercial hub of the Elgin Valley, the largest single source of exported fruits in Southern Africa.
The area in which the town is located was originally inhabited by the Khoi pastoralists and San hunter-gatherers.
In the years after Dutch settlement, the region became a stopping point for wagons travelling eastwards out of Cape Town along what would become the N2 highway.
Grabouw itself was established on the farm Grietjiesgat, which was bought by Cape Town painter Wilhelm Langschmidt in 1856.
Langschmidt’s wife operated a small trading store on the farm, which was the beginning of its conversion into a village. He renamed the settlement Grabow, the town of his birth in Germany.
The region first began seeing deciduous fruit farming in the early 1900s, starting with farm workers of suffragist farmer Antonie Viljoen cultivating apple trees in their own plots.
Other major early contributors to its agricultural expansion were the Italian-South African Molteno family and Franco-Italian immigrant Edmond Joseph Lombardi, who settled in the Elgin Valley in the 1930s.
Lombardi created the Appletiser soft drink, a blend of Apple juice and carbonated water, on his farm, Applethwaite. He introduced the product to the market in 1966.
Since the early 2000s, the region has seen an increase in viticulture farming and has become more tourism-oriented.
According to official census data, its population more than doubled from 21,595 in 2001 to 44,593 by 2019.
While the latest census data is widely considered unreliable, estimates suggest Grabouw’s population exceeded 160,000 in 2026.
Grabouw’s farming community has embraced technology to optimise their operations and product yields, stimulating substantial agricultural and viticultural growth.
Among the companies that have contributed technology used in the region is Aerobotics, founded in 2014 by Benji Meltzer and James Paterson.
AI-enhanced farming
The company initially made a name for itself with its AI-based analysis of multispectral imaging and thermal sensors data captured by drones.
Aerobotics’ Drone Scan technology can assess the health of individual trees and detect a wide range of potential problems at an early stage.
To conduct the analysis, the drone positions itself about a metre above a tree and takes a high-resolution image to capture specific leaf details.
The system saves farmers and agricultural businesses valuable time and effort spent analysing crop health manually.
Over the years, Aerobotics has expanded its product offering with various features on a mobile app:
- TrueFruit Size turns farmers’ smartphones into digital callipers for real-time forecasted fruit size distribution.
- TrueFruit Grade uses AI to analyse photos of fruit to automate sizing and grading processes.
- TrueFruit Bin Scan uses AI to analyse the top layer of packaged fruit to provide a quick overview of size, blemish, and colour distribution.
- Digital Pest and Disease system for monitoring of pest traps to monitor pest pressure and record pest and disease incidences.
According to Nedbank, which is one of its investors, Aerobotics’ technology was deployed across 60,000 hectares of arable land in South Africa, Australia, France, Spain, and the US by 2019.
The company’s website stated that it employed over 50 people and operated in 18 countries as of April 2026.
Several other government or industry-run programmes were using advanced tech to make farming in the Grabouw region easier and more productive.
The Western Cape Department of Agriculture, eLEAF, and Blue North Sustainability offered farmers a remote-sensing system called FruitLook, which primarily drew data from satellites.
The data can be integrated with drone and AI system measurements to provide insights into information like evapotranspiration and crop water requirements.
One of the largest industry representative bodies of deciduous fruit producers — Hortgro — was also funding multiple research projects exploring how tech could benefit the industry.
Aerobotics
Grabouw town and surroundings
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