Introduction:
Recently, we discussed here on the SciCrop Blog how climate change causes yield gap, impacts agriculture, and the importance of analytics techniques to help producers prepare for these changes.
To illustrate the effectiveness of climate data management in preventing productivity losses and maintaining the health of crops, we will tell a case study in this article.
We will see how a Brazilian family office active in the real estate, chemical, and agribusiness sectors (especially citrus) improved its productivity levels through the improvement of climate control with our weather analytics platform, Pluvio (formerly SciCrop Clima).
The work:
The work, which began about 4 years ago, has turned into a partnership that continues to this day.
The challenge: “Adding climate control knowledge to a qualified IT team.”
Right from the first contacts, we noticed that the company had a philosophy of turning to technology. Especially in the IT area, we found an extremely qualified team, which in a way facilitated the relationship between the parties.
At the time, our challenge was to show in practice how the application of IT knowledge to IoT devices, such as weather stations and other climate sensors, could provide a complete hyperlocal overview of the agroclimatic conditions on the properties where they cultivated citrus fruits (especially oranges).
In addition to helping the teams acquire this “climate perception,” we also proposed to point out other ways to automate processes through #analytics in the activities carried out on the properties.
The SciCrop solution: “Installation of stations and integration of our weather analytics platform, Pluvio, into the customer’s systems.”
The hyperlocalization of climate data passes directly through local sensing. To promote it, we installed sensors and weather stations on the customer’s farms. To give you an idea of the amount of data captured by the set of IoT devices allocated, the annual data generation is around 6 million.
To convert all this volume of data into reliable information, it is necessary to store and process it. Here at SciCrop, we always care for user autonomy, at the customer’s request, we integrated our weather analytics platform, Pluvio, in the form of an API into the company’s ERP systems that were already being used.
In our systems, we perform interpolated forecasts with 3 reliability scenarios. To leave no doubt in terms of accuracy, we also cross-reference this data with other public sources of climate data. After this series of calculations, tables are generated, which are sent to the customer every day at 9:00 am.
We also contributed to the construction of a small system, also based on analytics, to control the working hours of employees on the farms (restricted by law due to the strong heat incident in these areas).
The result: “Optimization of climate control and the establishment of a trusted partnership”
As mentioned, the receipt of the report containing information about the local climate with high precision allowed the client’s teams to plan, in the best possible way, all the daily productive activities related to cultivation.
Building a relationship of trust was also an important result of this work.
In the beginning, the reports were triggered manually, and if there was a delay in delivery, a domino effect was triggered, precisely because the entire day’s operation was based on the climatic information contained in the report.
In all these years of partnership, the reports have been sent calculatedly at 9:00 am. All these necessary adjustments contributed to making the optimization and quality of delivery the difference. As a result, we had the synergistic alignment of both purposes.
The intelligence work in conjunction with the company’s IT teams was also essential to automate the counting of working time on the farms. This increment was important to give more agility to the routine and transparency in labor issues.
Conclusion:
SciCrop will not let “bad weather” hinder your production, in addition to expanding the knowledge of your teams in analytics, we will provide all the support in your digital transformation journey.
Call to action:
Click here and learn about Pluvio, our weather analytics platform, with it, you will be ahead of any climate change in your region.
