Nicolás Hernández is part of the Robotia SL team, a company that has just been presented in Madrid his “Roomba for the Field.” Hernández calls a small robot designed to travel the ranks between the pulling crops of banana, pineapple, avocados or vineyards while registering the state of the harvest, analyzes data and calculates the production that each plant will have at the end of the season. This little robot is also able to clear and also load with 120 kilos of grapes for example, as if it were another worker. «It is an intelligent modular robot. You can go to the field every day, in the weekends, up to three times. It has four hours of autonomy and needs to recharge another four. Use lidar for the recognition of the farm, Know where you have to move and what you have to look for with respect to the patterns indicated. It has different modules such as unbridled, another load and has another automatic sulfatado, which also carries GPS for cases in which it detects pests. Locate the exact point in which the product has to apply and thus saves, ”explains the technician.
The netflix of moisture
It is not the only company that these days has presented its innovations at the Fruit Attraction Fair in Madrid. In fact, this event in the sector has a whole pavilion dedicated to the latest technology in the field and, although it is not the only fair on the R&D applied to crops, it is relevant because the fruit and vegetable sector is the most technified in the Spanish field (and within this, the protected culture of the Spanish southeast stands out by degree of technification and as a pioneer; 20 years ago they had sensors). Just go around the enclosure to find all kinds of robots, drones, sensors, stations meteo or cloud solutions. Hungarian firm Abz Innovation has presented A drone that can fumigate 21 hectares of cultivation from the air in one hour. From the Spanish Plantae, a technician points out the novelty of his humidity sensors: «They are wireless. They can be placed anywhere in the farm because they do not carry cables and the information they record will stop to a receiver (capable of collecting data from up to 20 sensors), ”they say. The data reaches the cloud accessed by the farmer “as in Netflix, through a user and password.” The farmer sees the information, but also receives advice from the technical team of Plantae to save water. “He savings reaches 20% the first year and increases to 25%, while the investment is around 1,200 euros. From the first moment, the farmer sees in his app what happens in his field and how he manages that data that has come to him, because we advise him so he can save. Technology without service is not worth anything and the farmer who installs these sensors has to do what clearly gives him because if not, he will not want the solution, ”they say from the firm.
A “High Tech” banana
Digital Pharms was present with its augmented reality solution to, among others, banana crops. And it is that having glasses and making plots visible and data on the state of crops is another technology that is beginning to be implemented in the field. In the projects that this company has developed, A bar code is assigned to each plant of the crop that can be consulted and that contains all your information, from flowering to pallet already as a final product. The barcode also allows you to consult whether the plant has a cochineal or some other plague, the number of leaves and its status and the production that it will have based on the historical crop of other years. Increased reality glasses are joined by information stored in the cloud and AI tools that analyze the data and allow predictions, to “support the producer in decision making and that the field ceases to be such an uncertain sector », as they say.
And it is that precisely that goes the application of technology in the field, of not leaving anything to chance and controlling from irrigation to future needs of phytosanitary so that production is maximized and costs are saved. «Today in the field we find a lot of heterogeneity in the implementation of digital solutions and the scope of fruits and vegetables is one of the most advanced segments in this regard. We can find sensors, automatic action devices, which can be fertilization machines or robots that water and are fed from the information of sensors and satellite images. We find intelligent machines that are capable of giving much more precise phytosanitary treatments, only in those areas where some type of active matter is required. We find agronomists or farms responsible for farms in mobile or tablets, through which they receive all that information from sensors, satellites. They also receive information from supplies warehouses, if they have seeds or phytosanitary or fertilizers. The apps send slogans to those responsible for the farms to do one treatment or another or to initiate the harvest at a certain moment or bet for certain varieties, ”says Jose Luis Molina, of Hispatec, a company specialized in digitalization of the field.
Until not much all this was done analogically, with people who wrote in paper notebooks now works in digital and real time. “Anyway, one thing is to talk about the” playful “that are used, but the important thing for me is the benefits it generates. For example, in The reduction of food waste. These technologies coordinate actions between the different phases of the production, transformation and marketing chain. Imagine a market situation in which there is an overproduction and in which by low prices it can happen that the second categories do not have a market, that no one wants to buy them. In such a case it would be much more efficient not to collect that harvest and let it become part of an organic subscriber in that field that collect it, clean it, classify it, put it in boxes, so that in the end it ends up throwing because the market does not assimilate it, ”the technician clarifies.
The Spanish field is one of the most technified in Europe. This is stated by the Digitalization Observatory of the Spanish Agrifood Sector promoted by the Ministry of Agriculture, Fisheries and Food in collaboration with Cajamar, which refers to data from the European Commission and the European Bank of Investments (conduct 3,500 surveys only in Spain) “Agricultural farms in Spain have been the seconds that have invested in digitalization, 32 % compared to 20 % of the EU set.” In addition, according to statistics 89.2% of people in the sector want to robotize any of their activities. «We are in an incipient stage of robotization, although data collection is increasingly widespread. The data collection rate is found in 80.4 % in herbaceous crops, in 81.6 % in Viñedo, while in tubers it amounts to 91.3 %, ”says Francisco Castillo, an analyst in Cajamar. However, the technician warns, there is a limitation in many cases due to «the lack of connectivity in certain rural spaces. There are other pending challenges and the first has to do with the overofeta of technologies. Producers really do not know what instrument they have to implement in their exploitation. Some farmers or ranchers may end up using a certain technology that really does not adapt to their cultivation conditions. And it does not mean that it is a bad technology, but maybe it is developed for another crop. Second, there is an obvious generational gap. Most farmers are over 50 years old and sometimes they do not have the necessary skills to be able to interpret a specific digital tool in an adequate enough. So lack of training. And finally, we must take into account, the necessary availability of resources to implement technology ».
Exoesqueletos and virtual shepherds
►The Union of Small Farmers and Livestocks (UPA) participates in the European Agrimate project. The idea is to gather robotics, augmented reality and AI to help in the field work. In this specific case, the idea is to make available to Olivar and Viñedo Kits workers with augmented reality glasses and exoskeletons to facilitate pruning work.
But not all technology goes to the agricultural sector. Livestock has its own solutions, as the Cajamar analyst says. Extensive farm owners can control their animals through an app and thanks to digital necklaces. In this way they can monitor their animals access to new grass areas, delimiting areas through a mobile application. There are even those that are using drones to watch cows from the air. “Extensive livestock is more complex because you don’t have animals in an enclosure, but it is beginning to find their own solutions,” explains the analyst.