How the use of technology helps in collaborative agriculture

In recent years, we have seen consecutive records for grain production in Brazil. But, in such a competitive agriculture, many are just looking at the numbers and forgetting that the activity also needs to be collaborative. After all, collaborative work allows you to exchange ideas, optimize resources, share information and data and also minimizes the risk of threats such as pests, diseases and other invaders. To encourage producers in the same regions to have more local information and data, SIMA - AG Tech leader in Latin America, provides yet another new function within its application, making decision-making in the field even more assertive.

According to Mauricio Varela, Co-founder and Country Manager Brazil and Latam at SIMA, the new feature allows georeferenced field monitoring and mapping of pests and diseases to generate information and work orders. With the collaborative tool, neighboring producers, when sharing data and information, can have different approaches and solutions to a problem. These new approaches can help optimize resources or increase productivity, valuing the results obtained. “This way, we will be able to identify opportunities for improvement, providing our decision-making with much more solid arguments,” he says.

Thousands of cell phones are monitored daily with SIMA. The data is anonymously combined using several algorithms adapted from internationally approved scientific publications. This data, once processed, ordered and combined with satellite images, makes it possible to predict and model crop behavior and productivity.

The company's team is also in charge of identifying and prioritizing adversities and finding the complex causes that determine them with the help of models. In this way, it is possible to develop functionalities that allow us to anticipate these potentially unfavorable situations, providing alerts so that we can make informed decisions in time. “Neighbor warning gives us a margin of action that will allow us to prevent any “pandemic” of pests or diseases from spreading to our crops. The health of crops depends on all of us, and together we will work to take care of our fields. If we can learn anything from the context in which we live, it is to start taking this type of attitude”, highlights Varela.

Solution in practice

SIMA allows producers to receive notifications about regional alerts. In other words, someone within a 20 km radius of your field has activated an alert about weeds, pests or diseases and automatically notifies you of the severity of this. “The functionality is now available in all countries where SIMA operates, including Brazil”, says the executive

However, it is important to highlight that the tool focuses on monitoring crops. In other words, the tool was not designed for the producer to apply some pesticide on his own because a neighbor raised an alert. On the contrary, the user must monitor to verify that this damage is not also affecting his crop, identifying it in advance buys time to better manage it.

With this collaborative agriculture, more and more information is shared by producers in the same region, not only with numerical data, but also audio files, photos, satellite images, productivity maps, soil maps, among others simultaneously, a increasingly rich database. “To have Big Data it is necessary to have volumes of data, varied information and speed. Therefore, the larger and more varied what we use, the better its performance and the higher quality of information to be shared”, concludes Varela.