Precision Agriculture

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By Peter Keen

Precision agriculture is the emerging mainstream of farming. It uses technology to focus, zero in on, and narrow down, for example, land mapping, soil sampling, fertilization, pest, and disease control, with highly localized weather alerts. “Precision” means right down to the tightest degree of control and minimization of resource usage. 

Just one striking instance is the ability to apply fertilizer, pesticide, and water to a single plant, delivered from a drone or an internet connected tractor. Forty percent of commercial drones in Brazil are used in agribusiness.

Edgard Bressani former c.e.o. of Brazil’s O’Coffee in Pedregulho, São Paulo, now a partner at Capricornio Coffees, was an early adopter. He reports that aerial high-resolution satellite mapping and interpretive geospatial software have cut overall production costs by up to 30%. The drone is a flying farmhand that, according to many reports, so accurately focuses spraying that it cuts water use by 30 to 50% and chemicals by 90%. Planting costs are decreased by as much as 90% and weeding time sped up by a factor of 5 with labor savings cut by a factor of 10.

Brazil coffee growing is well advanced in many areas of precision agriculture (PA) but pace and penetration are fragmented. It’s a general management discipline not a specific technology. There are wide variations in global applications and adoption. In Europe there is an emphasis on livestock farming, for instance, but not in Brazil, a diverse crop economy. Surveys show Brazil overall as very receptive to PA, somewhat lagging in areas of application such as artificial intelligence (AI), and marked by many startups that are expanding into foreign markets.

Here are a few examples of precision in Brazil that either are specific to coffee farming or that apply generic tools to it.

XMobots is Brazil’s leading developer and operator of a wide range of UAVs (unmanned aerial vehicles). It was founded in 2007 and grew out of r&d and incubation projects at the University of Sao Paolo. Brazil has many strong university and trade associations to draw from in both technology, engineering and application expertise. XMobot’s strength is in UAVs for aerial mapping and inspection. Its cameras provide an image resolution of up to 2.5 centimeters per pixel: 18 mb. They are increasingly being applied to hyperspectral – invisible light – imaging to detect incipient plant disease and pest infection. O’Coffee has used XMobot UAVs in its continuous mapping of 3,000 hectares on six of its farms, for four harvests.

Stara: A fast-growing Brazilian producer of seed spreading and planter equipment, Stara was early in applying PA on the ground to help small farmers improve their core operations. It added real-time telemetry and GPS-guided autosteering sensors to its machines. These sensors turn a tractor or spreader into an intelligent device via IoT: The internet of things. IoT makes anything an internet address to link to images, applications and databases. Star’s high-end seed spreaders have 20 IOT sensors, amounting to one-third of the cost. The sensors adjust the rate and amount of the seed dispensed to take into account the exact soil conditions, location, seed quality (measured in size and shape) and crop status.

Strider is focused on coffee disease monitoring, via software on mobile tablets that access satellite images and decision support systems, including heat maps. Its strategy emphasizes working closely with farmers in their fields to educate them and build confidence in embedding technology in their operations. Strider Protector provides “phytosanitary control”, monitoring and responding quickly to pest threats. Base tracks operations from soil preparation to storage. Space identifies abnormalities in planting areas, however small, using satellite imaging and data on the crop’s history. Tracker monitors equipment and machinery: where it is, its movement history, breakdowns, etc. Strider’s growth reflects its success in reaching new users. Close to 80% of its customers have been new to technology in the field. It has expanded internationally and is used on round 120 Texas farms. 

Strider was acquired in mid-2018 by the large agribusiness multinational, Syngenta.

Adama is an Israeli crop protection product maker acquired by a China company. It now has revenues of over $3 billion. It has targeted Brazil as a major market for many reasons: the size and variety of its crops, its productivity and increasing sophistication, and the challenges and hence opportunities of its logistical problems:  physical distribution and digital coverage across such vast areas, terrain and crops.

Adama recognizes that sellers of just agrochemical products face a limited chance of survival. These must be complemented with information that helps understand how the crop grows, the climate and weather patterns and sustainable development. The combination of satellites and drones for information collection, the Internet and GPS for communicating it and tablets, sensors, smartphones and other wireless devices add that dimension to precision agriculture, in the widest sense of the term.

Adama Alvo provides a database used by 75,000 customers. This includes an image bank of crop pest diseases to enable diagnosis anywhere in the field. A network of 299 ground stations link growers to real-time localized weather forecasts and issue alerts.

Falker is a Brazilian firm with a strong track record in using GPS satellite services and sensors for crop sampling, soil conductivity and compaction meters, variable rate fertilization and pest control and irrigation control.

These companies make different uses of the same basic technology building blocks of PA: image capture, both visual and multispectral; satellite and drone eyes in the sky; drone, ground station and tractor Internet access, software and physical carrying capacity.

The Brazil coffee market is wide open for innovation in agriculture. There are of course many blockages. Those include literacy – half of rural landowners have only an elementary school education – price and market volatility and uncertainty, cash pressures, the lack of skill in interpreting the massive volumes of data that PA generates, and regional differences in farm size, income, yield etc. One of the strengths of the nation is its strong PA research and training in universities, improved government policy to support innovation, and well-established research and information institutions.

PA points towards an internet of food and drink that will have the same impact on world business as the internet of e-commerce.