xarvio, BASF's digital solutions brand, is present at Agrishow 2023

BASF's global brand of digital solutions, the xarvio Digital Farming Solutions will be at Agrishow for another year, bringing visitors news and solutions designed to make the farmer's daily life easier, with optimization of resources, sustainability, greater productivity, simple, practical and direct way, from pre-planting to post-harvest.

The xarvio FIELD MANAGER platform takes map-based tools to the field every day, which enable more strategic agronomic decision-making throughout the harvest and positive returns that can increase the profitability of the agricultural business. In the last harvest, for example, the Variable Rate Seeding maps brought greater efficiency for planting and an increase in productivity of between 2% and 5% in soybean, corn and cotton crops. Digital Weed Mapping resulted in an average resource optimization of 61% due to the localized application of herbicides.

For the Variable Rate solutions, the Desiccation maps (soy and wheat) returned less variability in crop maturation and a consequent increase in harvest quality, with an average product optimization of around 30%, and the maps for Application of Growth Regulator, in addition to the standardization of cotton farming and improvement in fiber quality, farmers achieved an average optimization of 25% in product.

Now, xarvio innovates and launches Application Timing at Agrishow 2023, a solution that will help with more accurate decision-making. The new feature is now available on the FIELD MANAGER platform for corn cultivation. The Application Timing analyzes a series of data relevant to the farmer, including weather conditions, tolerance and susceptibility of hybrids to diseases, place and date of planting, previous management and whether the area is irrigated. The recommendation made by the solution for the best time to apply fungicide offers more than 70% accuracy on the occurrence of diseases, enabling preventive action, and more than 92% effectiveness on the crop's plant development and growth model.

Ricardo Arruda, Technical Manager at xarvio, explains that many farmers schedule the application of fungicides, but this prior scheduling does not always provide the best result in disease control. “We know that the right time to apply fungicides to crops is among the dozens of decisions that farmers need to make during the harvest. In a tropical country like Brazil, temperature and humidity are factors that increase the presence and severity of diseases. Application Timing comes to help apply fungicides at the best possible time, to protect the crop's potential. We are not going to change how the farmer manages or indicate which product should be used, but rather optimize it, based on data, in order to obtain better results for each plot”, says Arruda.

For better data collection, the xarvio FIELD MANAGER platform can be integrated with a local weather station from the Metos Brasil and Arable brands. In addition to corn cultivation, the xarvio team is working to launch the solution for soybeans and cotton from 2024 onwards.

Expansion of cultivation for weed management

An already consolidated xarvio FIELD MANAGER solution, the Digital Mapping of Weeds, now also includes sugarcane cultivation. The algorithm has the same technological basis already used in soybean and cotton crops, but adapted to the agronomic characteristics of the new crop. The model was trained to map weeds from the renovation area, through planting, ratoon cane and reaching the canes with closed rows.

“Weed plants, by competing directly for light, water and nutrients, directly affect sugarcane productivity, reducing the TCH (tons of sugarcane per hectare) considerably and in a short space of time. The presence of large plant infestations at the time of harvest results in mechanical damage, often making the activity unfeasible, and also impacts the quality of the final product due to the high level of vegetable impurities that will reach the industry”, concludes Arruda.