Coopercitrus develops project to optimize pesticide mixture mixture

With the aim of improving the safety of rural workers and the environment, optimizing the preparation of chemical pesticide mixtures and ensuring the best product performance, Coopercitrus developed the Smart Mix project. The initiative envisages the creation of a mechanical device to mix pesticide syrups in an automated manner, with the aim of avoiding human contact with the chemical product in all stages of dosing, mixing and cleaning the packaging.

The device communicates wirelessly with an application that presents the recipe with dosages per product and the appropriate mixing order of the chemicals. The equipment now transfers the products directly to the sprayer without any human contact.

The solution will facilitate the control and traceability of substances added to spray tanks based on recommended agronomic prescriptions.

“It will be a new era in agriculture, with the accuracy of using agrochemicals as they were designed. On the one hand we have cutting-edge products with the development of complex molecules and on the other machines advanced in technology and data management. The bottleneck of the mixing operation, which supplies these products to the machines in a manual and error-prone manner, remained to be resolved”, explains Marcelo Henrique Bassi, Superintendent of Coopercitrus Agricultural Technology.

The cooperative's agronomic manager, André Rossi, adds that “the expected results are efficiency in the process so that there are no cases of undue mixtures of products, presenting a reduction in risks related to human and soil contamination, causing a positive impact on socio-environmental protection and improving work performance.”

The project was awarded by the Bayer Coopera+ Impulsion Program, in the Sustainability axis, an initiative that is part of Bayer's relationship program with the cooperative system. The other winning project in the program, in the Innovation category, is “Sustenta Mais: Regenerative Agriculture”, created by the Cooxupé cooperative, in partnership with the startup Quanticum and the EMBRAPPI research hub at IFSul de Minas.

Each of the two winning projects will receive a contribution of R＄ 1,5 million to help with implementation, in addition to specialized consultancy. Those selected underwent a period of immersion at LifeHub, Bayer's open innovation hub, with eight other finalist cooperatives. All of them presented their projects for evaluation by a panel of market experts.

For Laura Deus, market access manager at Bayer Brasil for Cooperatives, the journey towards digital transformation in agribusiness requires collaboration. “Innovating through co-creation is an inevitable path and we are seeing an increasing mobilization of cooperatives and companies in search of impactful solutions in the sector”, she says.

“For Bayer, it is a great satisfaction to be able to support different stages of the process of enabling new ideas, always with the aim of making agriculture more efficient and sustainable”, says Laura. “Cooperativism is fundamental for creating an innovation ecosystem in the sector and for bringing knowledge to rural producers. Without a doubt, we see a lot of potential for transformative initiatives.”