Catch a Glimpse of LATAM’s Fast Precision Ag Evolution
There are few segments of agriculture growing as quickly or garnering as much attention as precision technology, writes Jackie Pucci at AgriBusiness Global. Remarkable people are doing extraordinary work all over the world. One such individual is Lais Braido, Chief Financial Officer at Brazilian precision ag powerhouse Solinftec in São Paulo, Brazil, about Solix Ag Robotics. It’s a new device that acts as the eyes and arms of its ALICE AI platform, which is helping producers halve their chemical inputs, reduce soil compaction, and deliver a lower carbon footprint for farm operations of every size worldwide. By the end of this year, Solinftec expects to cover 33 million acres.
The company is in final testing of two Solix models in the United States. At ag cooperative GROWMARK, it’s testing the sprayer version, which sprays deep into the plant instead of from above, eliminating drift and soil compaction issues posed by much larger machines. At Purdue University, it is testing the scouting model, which has taken off in Brazil — where beating pests takes priority over weeds — since launching commercially in April 2021.
Solix Ag Robotics from Solinftec helps producers halve their chemical inputs, reduce soil compaction, and deliver a lower carbon footprint for farm operations of every size worldwide.
Each robot rolls through fields 24-7, covering 400 acres per week, scanning the field plant by plant, identifying pests and generating a variable rate map, which is fed to traditional machines that then spray trouble spots.
“We don’t use data to tell you, ‘This is the prescription,’ and what you did wrong in the past — it won’t help farmers,” Braido says. “You need to adjust in real time, as it’s happening, and to collect results and reduce inputs, avoiding losses because of inefficient application. We transform the data into action.”
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The immediate results have kept farmers coming back. The average contract length is five years, and the annual growth rate for revenue is an impressive 60%.
“Sustainability is a key mission for us. By adopting best practices, agriculture has the potential to save us from climate change,” Braido says. “We are already starting that with real solutions that are working inside the farm. What other companies are doing — giving suggestions, prescriptions, measurements, certifications — is fine, but they’re not changing what farmers are doing in a transformative way. We say we are going from precision agriculture to decision agriculture — we need to decide things using better data. This is what ALICE AI is doing on a daily basis on the farm.”
Read more at AgriBusiness Global.
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