Streamline Canopy for greenhouse and indoor growers
Canopy uses the LiDAR scanner in an iPhone Pro to record each plant’s height and growth rate. After every walk it shows you the plants falling behind and the spots that need replanting, while there’s still time to act.
Walked 12.4 m · Cover 41%
Nobody measures 400 plants by hand. You check a few with a tape when there’s time and judge the rest by eye. A plant growing at half the rate of its neighbors looks normal for weeks, and an empty slot hides under the leaves next to it. By harvest, the gap shows up on the scale.
Canopy measures every plant on every walk and tracks each one week to week. Stragglers, gaps and uneven beds show up early, when you can still do something about them.
Measured by hand on a busy morning: 5 of 66 plants
Measured with Canopy: 66 of 66, on every walk
40¢
of every expense dollar on U.S. fruit, nut, vegetable and greenhouse farms goes to labor. Across all farms it’s 15%.
Source 1: USDA Economic Research Service$18.58
an hour, the average U.S. field worker’s pay in April 2025, before payroll taxes and benefits.
Source 2: USDA National Agricultural Statistics Service53%
of the cost of greenhouse lettuce is labor in Cornell’s model. Each head sells for $1.35 and clears 26¢.
Source 3: Cornell University56%
of the cost of an acre of field romaine is harvest, packing, cooling and selling. At $24 a carton the acre clears $3,595; at $20, $195.
Source 4: UC Cooperative Extension and UC Davis Agricultural and Resource EconomicsCornell’s greenhouse model budgets 32 hours of work for every 1,000 heads, about 2 minutes a head from seeding to the box. A 20% rise in labor cost cuts that farm’s yearly profit by 42%, from $33,333 to $19,382. In UC’s field romaine study, hand harvesting and packing alone run $8.00 for a carton of 36 hearts.
With margins that thin, an hour spent counting heads, or guessing what will be ready for a buyer, comes straight out of profit. Nobody publishes how long that takes the average grower, so the calculator uses your numbers.
Canopy won’t cut a single head. It gives you the count of record for every bed and how fast it’s growing, so the harvest crew and the buyer get a number instead of a guess.
Example numbers to start. Put in your own beds, your pace and your labor cost.
By hand
234 hours a year
4.5 hours a week to get through 5,400 heads, or $4,348 a year in labor. At Cornell’s 26¢ profit a head, that’s the profit on 16,722 heads.
With Canopy
20 minutes a week
Walking time for the same beds at Canopy’s pace of about 1 foot a second, not counting the walk between beds. You get every plant’s height, growth rate and the empty slots, not just a count.
Walk the house and mark where each bed starts and ends, and where its soil is. The phone remembers the room, so you don’t need QR codes, stakes or printed markers. From then on it knows which bed you’re standing at.
Hold the phone over the bed, or sideways along a tall row, and walk at a slow, steady pace. The plants nearest you show their height as you pass. Go too fast and the phone buzzes.
Tap Save. Each bed gets a plant count, median height and growth rate, plus a list of slow growers, missing plants and empty slots, with the exact spot for each.
Every iPhone Pro since the 12 Pro has a LiDAR scanner. Canopy combines it with Apple’s AR tools and on-device processing to measure plants while you walk.
LiDAR scanner and ARKit depth
The LiDAR scanner, the small dark circle next to the cameras, times pulses of light as they bounce off leaves and soil. Canopy turns that into each plant’s height above the soil, shown to the nearest half centimeter, and its canopy area.
A slow plant isn’t “somewhere in Bed 4.” It’s slot 12, 3.3 meters from the start.
ARKit world maps
Map a house once. After that the phone recognizes it by its walls, posts and pipes and knows which bed it’s over. No QR codes or stakes.
3-D scene reconstruction
When you map a house, you mark the soil at each bed. On every walk the phone checks that level against the soil the LiDAR sees between plants. Where leaves hide it, Canopy uses your mark and says so.
Haptics and on-device speech
The phone buzzes if you walk too fast and again when a bed is done. Press the Action button (iPhone 15 Pro and later) or tell Siri “Talk to Canopy,” then say “start walk.” Your words are turned into text on the phone.
Camera control
Canopy locks white balance and exposure for each walk, so grow lights don’t throw off the camera and this week’s walk compares cleanly with last week’s.
On-device storage
Measuring, storage, charts and answers all run on the iPhone, so a metal greenhouse with no bars is fine. A full season of walks opens instantly.
Requirements
An iPhone 12 Pro or a later Pro model, on iOS 17 or later. No drones, rail cameras, sensor networks or servers. iPhones without LiDAR can view history and use Ask, but can’t measure.
Row 4
House 2 · 64 plants · walked today
Growth
1.3cm/day+0.1 since Oct 24
Flags
Slot 17 · 9.9 m
0.4 cm/daySlow grower · bed 1.3 cm/day (cutoff 0.8)
Slot 41 · 24.3 m
0.5 cm/daySlow grower · bed 1.3 cm/day (cutoff 0.8)
Empty slots · 2 to replant
Slot 29 · 17.1 mSlot 60 · 35.7 m
Growth rate by slot
slow below 0.8 cm/day
Median height · 4 walks
121.5 → 139.5 cm
Example data from a demo farm
Centimeters per day for side-on rows in flower, or canopy spread per day for beds and plants still growing out, each with a ± range. See which beds are pulling ahead and which are stalling.
Plants growing well behind the rest of their bed, each with where to stand: “Slot 17 · 9.9 m from start.” A plant is only judged after 3 walks over a week, and Low-confidence readings never count, so one bad reading can’t flag it.
A plant count from every walk, every empty spot with its distance from the start of the bed, and flags for plants that went missing or are new. Built for running the farm, not for compliance reporting.
Median height over time, stretch at day 21 of flower, the date a bed should reach your target height (“reaches 60 cm on Nov 3”) and how even the canopy is. Spin any bed in 3-D and tap a plant.
Type or tap a question and Canopy answers right away with a short summary and a table from your own walks, plus a line saying which house or bed it covers and the date of the walk. It reports measurements. It doesn’t guess at causes or give growing advice.
Each week Canopy writes a short summary of the week’s figures from your walks. On an iPhone with Apple Intelligence (iOS 26 or later), tap Reword with Apple Intelligence to put it in plainer words, on the phone. Canopy fills in every number itself and keeps its own summary if a rewording changes one.
AskAnswers from your walks
Example data
| Row | cm/day | Slow growers |
|---|---|---|
| Row 6 | 0.9 | 3 |
| Row 4 | 1.3 | 2 |
| Row 5 | 1.4 | 0 |
From your walks · House 2 · last walk today
Each plant is rated High, Medium or Low. Low readings are counted but never used for growth rates or flags. Check 3 to 5 random plants with a tape after a walk, and Canopy shows you its own error on your farm.
Canopy doesn’t touch irrigation, climate or lights. It measures and reports, and your team makes every change.
There’s no server, no account and no tracking. Walks and measurements stay on the iPhone and in your iPhone backup. They leave only when you share, AirDrop or send them, or choose to send a week’s figures to Apple’s cloud model or ChatGPT, and Canopy shows you the exact text and asks every time. Photos are never sent to those. The app goes online for one thing only: an optional plant-outline model you can download once, which sends nothing about your farm.
Canopy’s plant count is for running the farm. Your seed-to-sale system stays the record for regulators.
Growers shouldn’t need a lab, a drone program or a data team to know how their crop is doing. Canopy starts with the phone already in the greenhouse. The same plant-level data is what a neighborhood farm would plan from: what’s growing, what’s ready and where hands are needed.
Height, growth and slow growers for every bed and row, from one phone.
Every walk adds to each plant’s history, so growth, counts and gaps are one question away.
Neighborhood farms and kitchens that grow for what people will actually eat. In development, starting in Bozeman.
From every plant to the next meal.
Read the vision for neighborhood farms and kitchensAn iPhone 12 Pro or a later Pro model, on iOS 17 or later. Those models have the LiDAR scanner Canopy measures with. Canopy is field-tested on the iPhone 18 Pro. Other iPhones can view history and use Ask, but can’t measure.
Nothing. There’s no server, account or monthly bill, and no sensors, cameras or drones to install. A tape measure helps when you set up your beds and for occasional spot checks.
Yes. Measuring, storage, charts and Ask all run on the phone, so it works in a greenhouse with no bars. The only download is an optional plant-outline model, fetched once on Wi-Fi if you choose to.
Canopy is built for anything grown in beds or rows: leafy greens, fruiting vegetables, herbs, seedling trays and, where legal, cannabis. You tell each bed what grows in it. Walk beds and trays from above, and tall or trellised rows from the side. Early-access field testing is under way.
Heights are shown to the nearest half centimeter, measured from the soil. That is a display step, not an accuracy promise. After a walk, Canopy picks 3 to 5 plants at random for you to check with a tape, then shows its own error on your farm. Low-confidence readings never trigger a flag. We are validating accuracy against tape measurements in the field now and will publish the results; until then, treat the numbers as early-access measurements.
A plant growing at less than 60% of its bed’s median rate, and further below the median than the normal spread between plants and its own measuring range. A plant needs 3 walks over at least 7 days before it’s judged, a bed needs 6 such plants before it flags anything, and nothing is flagged on the first walk after topping or training.
Not in this version. Canopy measures height, growth, counts and empty slots. Keep scouting as you do today; Canopy tells you which plants are falling behind, so you know where to look first.
No. Canopy is an operating tool. Its plant count is for running the farm, and your seed-to-sale system stays the record of truth.
Never. Canopy is read-only. It measures and reports; people make every change.
No. Early-access growers get a setup guide written for growers, not programmers. You map each greenhouse once, and after that you just walk.
Canopy is in early access for greenhouse and indoor growers with an iPhone Pro. Tell us what you grow and roughly how many beds, and we’ll get you set up.
