Industries
Agriculture and agri-food
Connected agriculture is only useful when the measurement changes a practice: starting irrigation, bringing a harvest forward, adjusting a treatment. Otherwise it is a sensor producing a graph.
Stakes
What weighs on the trade
- Water resource and the cost of irrigation
- Climate variability and yield loss
- Traceability required by buyers and for export
- Storage conditions after harvest
Critical operations
What must not stop
- Field preparation and monitoring
- Irrigation and fertilisation
- Harvest and post-harvest
- Storage and processing
- Sale and traceability
Why digitalise
What technology changes here
Driving irrigation from real soil moisture rather than a calendar cuts water and energy use while steadying yield. It is measurable from the first season.
What can be automated
- Irrigation triggered on a moisture threshold
- Weather, frost and heat alerts
- Automatic recording of operations by field
- Monitoring of storage conditions
- Generation of traceability documents
Capabilities
What we put in place
Software
- Field monitoring and crop-management records
- Irrigation control
- Traceability from harvest to the batch sold
- Stock and processing management
- Yield and cost dashboards
Data
- Yield per field relative to inputs
- Water and energy consumption per hectare
- Local weather history and its correlation with yield
- Post-harvest losses per batch
IoT
- Soil moisture and temperature sensors at several depths
- Local weather station (rainfall, temperature, humidity, wind)
- Control of irrigation valves and pumps
- Monitoring of storage conditions (temperature, humidity)
- Levels in water tanks and reservoirs
- A LoRaWAN network suited to large areas with poor coverage
Artificial intelligence
- Forecasting water needs from the weather and from history
- Early detection of water stress
- Yield estimation from the season's data
Integrations
- Weather services
- Cooperatives and buyers for traceability
- ERP for stock and sales
Security
- A unique identity per sensor to prevent falsified readings
- Gateways that keep working without a network
- Protection of farm data, which has competitive value
- Tamper-evident traceability of regulatory records
Our approach
A typical path in this sector
Pilot field
One field instrumented over a full season, with an uninstrumented control.
Irrigation control
Moving from a calendar to threshold-based triggering, with the saving measured.
Traceability
Recording of operations and assembly of batches.
Extension
Rollout to the other fields and integration with processing.
Related services
The services we bring in
Africa Tech Services
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