New perspectives in agriculture!

COVID-19 reshapes agriculture with digital tools, remote work, and automation, ensuring efficiency and future-proofing the industry.
Miklos Ervin
10 October 2024
Vedere de sus a unei combine agricole în acțiune, recoltând culturile, cu date monitorizate prin aplicația AgroMonitoring.

Coronavirus pandemic (COVID-19) is forcing new perspectives on working in agriculture.

Social distancing can be applied, and with the right tools they CAN BE EVEN MORE PRODUCTIVE. A different way of working in this moment is essential for business continuity, and after the crisis will be a TOOL FOR INCREASING EFFICIENCY (saving time from the inefficient long discussions and preparation).

1. #STAYATHOME IS NOT AN OPTION, field works are essential for agriculture.

Logistics, seeds and input materials are at least same important like food for the citizens. Still there are some activities, areas of the farming business which can be done remotely, and the social distancing concept can be implemented.

a.  Planning is essential and can be done from the distance using digital solutions. Planning the works, communication with the drivers can be done remotely.

b. Organizing the work can be changed from classical meetings in the farmyard to one-to-one discussion and personalized working program for every employee.

c. Field activity linked to the weather data will help to avoid unnecessary traveling

d. Controlling the quality from the distance. One of the key issues are the working speed. Seeding, fertilizing has optimal speed for every machine, or type of the material used. The speed can be set and controlled from the distance using digital solutions.

e. Satellites, images, monitoring, there are a lot of solutions available for crop monitoring, and these can help for a better monitoring remotely the fields and making more efficient diagnose the areas with problems

2. CHANCE TO #CHANGE THE WORKING METHODS in order to increase efficiency.

Change now and after the crisis the new way of working will become routines.

a. Eliminate the paper-based based administration
b. Eliminate multiple excel tables
c.  Eliminate local solutions, installed on one calculator where collaborative and work from distance is not allowed. Use instead cloud based solutions.
d. Eliminate gut-based decision making and introduce decision making based on data

 3. #AUTOMATIZATION

a.  Collecting data directly from the tractors is essential, will eliminate paper-based data exchange and human contacts, and brings two important benefits:

  • Increase the quality of data
  • Eliminating human errors, data will be much more reliable

b. Which data should be collected?

  • Data related the jobs: field, worked surface, tractor driver, tractor, machine
  • Yield maps
  • Weather and NDVI data on fields

4.  #BIGDATA

a. We make the best decisions possible with the information we have at the time, therefore:

  • Collect as much information as you can gather
  • Gather it from as many sources as possible

b. Don’t rely on average. Average lie
c. Combine all the info into useful information
d. Predictions in software intelligence will be based on data

5. #CHANCE TO PREPARE FOR MORE AUTONOMOUS FUTURE

a. Maps & data, will help prepared for the future
b. In 5-6 years, robots, AI, drones will take over the agriculture industry