Agricultural technology capabilities continue to grow. Modern data management and record keeping software platforms allow planting dispatchers to automatically plan tasks related to planting to harvesting to ensure the smooth flow of products. Photo by Frank Giles
During the Virtual UF/IFAS Agricultural Technology Expo in May, five well-known agricultural companies from Florida participated in the panel discussion. Jamie Williams, Director of Operations at Lipman Family Farms; Chuck Obern, owner of C&B Farms; Paul Meador, owner of Everglades Harvesting; Charlie Lucas, President of Consolidated Citrus; United States Ken McDuffie, senior vice president of sugarcane operations at the sugar company, shared how they use technology and understand its role in their operations.
These farms have used production-related tools to gain a foothold in the agricultural technology game for the longest time. Most of them take grid sampling of their fields for fertilization, and use soil moisture detectors and weather stations to more accurately and efficiently schedule irrigation.
“We have been sampling GPS soils for about 10 years,” Obern points out. “We have installed GPS rate controllers on the fumigation equipment, fertilizer applicators and sprayers. We have weather stations on every farm, so as long as we want to visit it, they can provide us with living conditions.”
“I think the Tree-See technology, which has been around for a long time, is a major breakthrough for citrus,” he said. “We use it in a variety of applications, whether it is spraying, soil watering or fertilizing. We have seen a reduction of about 20% in the materials used in Tree-See applications. This is not only conducive to saving investment, but also has a greater impact on the environment. small.
“Now, we are also using lidar technology on several sprayers. They will not only detect the size of the trees, but also the density of the trees. The detection density will allow the number of applications to be adjusted. We hope that based on some preliminary work, we can save another 20 % To 30%. You add these two technologies together and we might see savings of 40% to 50%. That’s huge.”
“We use GPS references to spray all the bugs in order to be able to determine how bad they are and where they are,” Williams said.
Panelists all pointed out that they see great prospects for the long-term ability to collect and manage data to improve sustainability and make more informed decisions on the farm.
C&B Farms has been implementing these types of technologies since the early 2000s. It establishes multiple layers of information, enabling them to become more complex in the planning and execution of more than 30 specialty crops grown on the farm.
The farm uses the data to look at each field and determine the expected input and the expected yield per acre/week. Then they match it with the product sold to the customer. Based on this information, their software management program developed a planting plan to ensure a stable flow of demanded products during the harvest window.
“Once we have a map of our planting location and time, we have a [software] task manager that can spit out work for every production function, such as disks, bedding, fertilizer, herbicides, seeding, irrigation Wait. It’s all automated.”
Williams pointed out that as layers of information are collected year by year, data can provide insights down to the row level.
“One of the ideas we focused on ten years ago was that technology will collect a lot of information and use it to predict fertility, output results, labor demand, etc., so as to bring us into the future.” He said. “We can do anything to stay ahead through technology.”
Lipman uses the CropTrak platform, which is an integrated record keeping system that collects data on almost all functions of the farm. In the field, all data generated by Lipman is based on GPS. Williams pointed out that every row has a number, and some people’s performance has been tracked for ten years. This data can then be mined by artificial intelligence (AI) to evaluate the performance or expected performance of the farm.
“We ran some models a few months ago and found that when you plug in all the historical data about weather, blocks, varieties, etc., our ability to predict farm yield results is not as good as artificial intelligence,” Williams said. “This is related to our sales and gives us a certain sense of security about the returns that can be expected this season. We know that there will be some episodes in the process, but it is good to be able to identify them and stay ahead of them to prevent overproduction. Tool of.”
Paul Meador of Everglades Harvesting suggested that at some point the citrus industry may consider a forest structure that will be used exclusively for overharvesting citrus to reduce labor and cost. Photo courtesy of Oxbo International
Another area of agricultural technology prospects that the panelists saw was labor record keeping. This is especially important in a state that is increasingly dependent on H-2A labor and has high record-keeping requirements. However, being able to monitor the labor productivity of the farm has other benefits, which are allowed by many current software platforms.
The US sugar industry occupies a large area and employs many people. The company has invested in software development to manage its workforce. The system can even monitor equipment performance. It enables the company to proactively maintain tractors and harvesters to avoid downtime for maintenance during critical production windows.
“Recently, we have implemented so-called operational excellence,” McDuffie pointed out. “The system monitors our machine health and operator productivity, as well as all timekeeping tasks.”
As the two biggest challenges currently facing growers, the lack of labor and its cost are particularly prominent. This forces them to find ways to reduce labor demand. Agricultural technology still has a long way to go, but it is catching up.
Although the mechanical harvesting of citrus encountered obstacles when the HLB arrived, it has been rejuvenated today after a hurricane in the mid-2000s.
“Unfortunately, there is currently no mechanical harvesting in Florida, but the technology exists in other tree crops, such as coffee and olives using trellis and interrow harvesters. I believe that at some point, our citrus industry will begin. Focus on forest structures, new rootstocks, and technologies that may make this type of harvester possible,” Meador said.
King Ranch recently invested in the Global Unmanned Spray System (GUSS). Autonomous robots use lidar vision to move in the woods, reducing the need for human operators. One person can operate four machines with one laptop in his or her pickup cab.
The low front profile of GUSS is designed for easy driving in the orchard, with branches flowing over the top of the sprayer. (Photo by David Eddie)
“Through this technology, we can reduce the demand for 12 tractors and 12 sprayers to 4 GUSS units,” Lucas points out. “We will be able to reduce the number of people by 8 people and cover more land because we can run the machine all the time. Now, it’s just spraying, but we hope we can increase work such as herbicide application and mowing. This is not a cheap system. But we know the state of the workforce and are willing to invest even if there is no immediate return. We are very excited about this technology.”
Food safety and traceability have become critical in the daily and even hourly operations of specialty crop farms. C&B Farms recently installed a new barcode system that can track labor harvests and packaged items-down to the field level. This is not only useful for food safety, but also applies to piece-rate wages for harvest labor.
“We have tablets and printers on site,” Obern pointed out. “We print the stickers on site. The information is transmitted from the office to the field, and the stickers are assigned a PTI (Agricultural Product Traceability Initiative) number.
“We even track the products we ship to our customers. We have GPS temperature trackers in our shipments that provide us with real-time information [site and production cooling] every 10 minutes, and let our customers know how their loads reach them of.”
Although agricultural technology requires a learning curve and expense, the team members agreed that it will be necessary in the evolving competitive landscape of their farms. The ability to improve production efficiency, reduce labor, and increase farm labor productivity will be the key to the future.
“We must find ways to compete with foreign competitors,” Obern pointed out. “They will not change and will continue to appear. Their costs are much lower than ours, so we must adopt technologies that can increase efficiency and reduce costs.”
Although the growers of the UF/IFAS agricultural technology expo group believe in the adoption and commitment of agricultural technology, they acknowledge that there are challenges in its implementation. Here are some of the things they outlined.
Frank Giles is the editor of Florida Growers and Cotton Growers Magazine, both of which are Meister Media Worldwide publications. View all author stories here.
Post time: Aug-31-2021
