Advantages of precision agriculture

Precision Agriculture reaches surprising heights and its adoption by many farmers has spread relatively quickly in the agricultural sector.

With the modernization of the sector, the productivity achieved has been decisive in crops and encouraged the search for technical resources, whether mechanical, engineering, which involves constant research and studies, or technological, which, when combined, makes our production grow. year after year, become more and more sophisticated and mitigate risks and low results.

The production of grains (soy, corn, sorghum, rice, coffee, sugar, among many others) has the great challenge of living with fluctuating prices typical of commodities that operate in large-scale world markets. In this environment, precision in reading various variables and well-positioned decisions translates into success or failure, and can even compromise the stability of companies and the value of their assets. The constant need to seek quality and productivity guarantees, impacted even by environmental influences El Niño, encourages farmers to equip themselves with all types of tools to obtain results.

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With the vision of saving on inputs, investments and adopting a rationalized workforce, there is a funnel that must be carefully studied, so that the measures and decisions to be taken are no longer about total planted areas, but are already limited to smaller spaces. , such as plots, making productivity and product quality greater and business risks lower or at least under control. In this growth of alternatives, helicopters are being used to apply better-addressed inputs based on studies that examine the crop and delimit it into plots that will receive precise applications and correct compositions. Comparing results between harvests is no longer the best measure, the important thing is to measure production capacity and have mastery of techniques that indicate exact procedures for continuous productivity growth of the same plot and crop, avoiding stress.

Maintain professionals, technicians and engineers, who seek uniformity in crops for greater productivity, operating controls, carrying out planning and adopting technical and human resource management systems, which detect, for example, pests, read the soil of its physical and chemical characteristics and compaction, diseases, weeds, etc., in addition to applying the right fertilizers, in the right quantities, in practice it still requires a lot of learning, trial and error. Maintaining a committed workforce, who understands its importance from planting planning to harvesting, only happens when leaders (from the president to the frontline leader) are speaking the same language. Here is another huge challenge.

Companies have difficulty finding qualified professionals with the skills needed for the work they will perform. Performance is another hardship for the employer. Our rates of rework and raw material losses are very high, making products more expensive and making us less competitive when seeking markets led by excellence. Two other factors also sacrifice the quality of the workforce: first, the level of performance of leaders is below what is required, since their qualifications are based, due to a bias in vision, on being the best performer. Secondly, they did not receive training to become leaders, therefore, from this perspective, they are far from leading efficiently, so they act on instinct, being able to be a facilitator, when it works (rare cases), or be a collector, which does not master techniques for guiding and minimally providing feedback on each subordinate’s performance (known as “feedback”). As subordinates do not know where they have deficiencies (also known as “gaps”), they always continue to do more of the same until they are replaced or passed over for a promotion when the company fills the position with someone from the market.

Leaders who do not lead, they also do not delegate, but rather “delegate”, an expression used that reflects a leader who is absent or unaware of their real role, so that the intended results of the work teams are achieved.

Constant changes of employees cause losses, low productivity and discourage the behavior of belonging to the company to value it, an old expression of “wearing the shirt”. This turnover costs companies a lot and if we consider that for each employee change, when we add up the average costs of hiring and dismissal in less than 12 months, we will have:

If we multiply the number of vacancies caused by turnover, the value will certainly be quite significant, going unnoticed by the company, which often understands that this cost is part of the business. This cost should certainly be seen as a loss of results and being able to reduce it will make a big difference in the company's results.

It is important to understand that investing in people can be a saving factor in the adoption of HR management practices, such as: adequate salary policies, internal career possibilities, tools for evaluating the performance and skills of each employee, variable remuneration, such as incentive to obtain better results for the employee and the company. Training leaders is another aspect that must be viewed appropriately as a strategy for controlling labor costs, which we cannot forget is one of the most expensive in the world, when salary + social charges are added, which adds approximately from 50% to 70% in agricultural companies and around 100% in industrial sectors.

It is common to find companies in this market that do not see viability for this area, understanding that it only applies to large organizations. This is a bias that needs to be reconsidered and corrected, especially given the amounts involved with the payroll, which is certainly not low. With correct HR management policies and tools, for example, mistakes can be avoided even when defining a job title. If, through carelessness, we use the nomenclature of assistant in which that of assistant fits, we will be pushing the salary up, meaning more expenses of around 20%.

Adopting appropriate HR policies and structure is becoming important, as much as infrastructure and equipment investments. Without people, the best processes, equipment and resources are nothing. The area needs to have a proactive stance, interacting with managers and acting as a facilitator between them and employees in the joint search for results. Poorly directed and stressed people produce less, cause damage to the pace of operations, become susceptible to risks and accidents, increase the company's costs, including drops in results.

Precision agriculture requires compounds with a clear vision of the business and a level of specialization that will result in technical training for agricultural culture, as if they were doctors who “sliced” the human body and promoted specialists in each part, so that the diagnosis was accurate, avoiding patient deaths. If we extrapolate to agriculture, lethality can occur in a bad harvest or worse in a sequence of harvests with negative results, compromising the existence of the operation and sustainability of the company.

Other resources, which have already been incorporated by companies in addition to management and control systems, refer to processes and development of their leadership.

Processes, as a management factor, have the power to evaluate workflows, shorten them and rationalize tasks for productivity gains. Assumptions such as determining the right amount of resources to be allocated to each operation, relating to raw materials, infrastructure, IT systems to the appropriate number of people in each position, make a difference in results. Mapping all administrative and operational operations and managing these processes means doing more with less. Companies that have been adopting these paths have reaped savings that are directly reflected in their business. Inputs and labor have a significant impact on profits, therefore, adopting knowledge to keep equipment operating at the limit of its efficiency and capacity and, with trained labor, aware of its goals, makes a difference and generates average gains of 10%, 15%, up to 20% higher performance, as shown in various studies and technical publications.

For these management resources to work, another important element comes into play, but often relegated to the background, whose position can be that of a facilitator or even a disruptor for what is planned to happen, which is the leader.

For this strategic position, whether at the lowest or highest hierarchical level, the right choice will make a total difference, however, if you live with an old vice, that of choosing the best coach or even the oldest on the team to occupy the position, such as If this criterion guaranteed a safe passage to being a good leader. A big mistake that should not be made, which invariably leads companies to not achieve the expected performance and have difficulties in detecting where the problem lies. Another concept that must be abolished is that the leader is born ready-made, as if it were a genetic factor, a personality variable. This rarely happens and yet the leader always needs to be developed and trained so that he knows how to understand, work and act on the behavior of his team, since it is through this team that he will also achieve the results delegated to him.

Knowing how to deal with human diversities, their psychological aspects, behaviors and general view of the world is learned and practiced, seeking to obtain the best result from each person. Using the expression “feedback” when talking to a leader about what he does well is easy, what is necessary is to correctly address those “gaps” he has and need to be encouraged to repair, this is the difficult part and which almost always is relegated to the self-understanding of the employee, who, when he does not understand that he has deficiencies or does not yet know how to correct them due to lack of observation and support, is sent away, generating expenses for the company such as turnover, already mentioned.

Precision Agriculture Management translates into a set of variables and movements that are constantly changing in the face of specializations and challenges that are being demanded, in one of the sectors that have most transformed Brazil, placing it among the largest producers of food and also renewable fuel of the world.

Jorge Ruivo, President of Wiabiliza Consultoria Empresarial

Article published in issue 159 of Cultivar Máquinas.