Sensors and data are the new players of the world of Agriculture. Do they erode farmers’ already poor margins? Do they make sense in a Country with uneven fields and hundreds of cultivations like Italy? We talked about it with Paolo Traso of Tierra.
Precision Agriculture is growing worldwide because it enables the optimization of resources while improving yield qualitatively and quantitatively, because it allows to save on water, fertilizers and phytosanitary products.
The key element is data collected by sensors placed basically everywhere, by satellites, underground, by drones (even if they are just a few in this area), and the ability to connect and read them, to understand which cultivation is the most profitable.
This is only a part of the issue that obviously involves a production chain (from producers to consumers) too long and too poor and where the insertion of new actors is disliked.
Data and the advantages linked to the spreading of the technologies open new business models that require the use of machinery, be they tractors, seeders and so forth.
Servitization has been making progress also in this sector for a while but there is no doubt that having better and more data available represents a big boost, even if a lot must still be done. Most of all, we must consider that the economy of the algorithm works very well where cultivations are standardized, much less in countries like Italy, where productions are very varied and differentiated from region to region, if not from town to town.
This does not mean that applying the principles of precision agriculture does not make sense, it means that to obtain noteworthy results it is necessary to work with more delicacy, crossing a higher quantity of data.
We discussed this and other subjects with Paolo Traso, CEO of Tierra, who we met to the annual meeting on technological transfer organized by Jacobacci & Partners.
via: triwu.it
