NOUVEAUTÉS

PRECISION AGRICULTURE, THE TREND THAT IS REVOLUTIONISING THE SECTOR (ISOBUS)

25 mars 2020

The agricultural sector has undergone vast changes in the last decade due to the importance that digitalisation has acquired in all areas of production. For this reason, today's farming systems, as well as agricultural machinery, are quite different from those existing before this crucial process of technological evolution in agriculture.

The consequence of these technological advances is the so-called Precision Agriculture, a new concept that defines the management of plots and crops using digital techniques to monitor and optimise agricultural production processes. This revolution in the agricultural industry manages to measure the variations of the conditions that exist within a certain plot, acquiring these data and turning them into useful information so that, consequently, it is possible to adopt a certain fertilisation or harvesting strategy.

Precision Agriculture methods aim to increase the quantity and quality of agricultural production while using less raw material (water, energy, fertilisers, pesticides, etc.). In this way, Precision Agriculture not only gives importance to agronomic and economic efficiency but also considers environmental efficiency to be essential.

Nevertheless, the key point of Precision Agriculture lays on the birth of the ISOBUS communication protocol. Traditionally, each manufacturer developed its own patented solutions, which required specific adaptation in order to be able to combine tractors and implements. ISOBUS has been introduced to the market to simplify all methods of connectivity between tractors and implements of different brands and models into a single plug-and-play solution.

The application of ISOBUS standardisation to almost all new agricultural machinery not only allows tractor and implement operation to be unified from a single virtual terminal (screen, monitor or control panel) but also provides a vast amount of information about the tractor and implement tasks, thanks to the digitalisation of all agricultural processes in one single system.

The benefits of precision technology in agriculture include:

• Efficient decision making to identify the optimal harvesting time.
• Obtaining detailed and specific information about each crop.
• Overview of all factors that can influence agricultural processes (weather, market information, etc.).
• Optimisation of resources and maximisation of product quality.

Cojali, in its aim to continue providing the most cutting-edge technology in the sector, has developed Jaltest ISOBUS CONTROL, a set of solutions that, based on ISOBUS technology (ISO 11783), introduces the digitalisation of agricultural production processes to make Precision Agriculture more accessible and easier to use, to successfully and conveniently manage a productive, efficient business adapted to new technologies.

The Jaltest ISOBUS CONTROL solutions provided by Cojali not only offer the possibility of managing agricultural resources using ISOBUS technology, but also go a step further than Precision Agriculture thanks to the integration of telematic solutions that allow the incorporation of networks, intelligent systems and data management tools in order to monitor, in real time, the location of the agricultural machinery, achieving a position at the forefront of the technology demanded by Agriculture 4.0.

Ultimately, Precision Agriculture is here to stay, to facilitate farm management by establishing as its main purpose to achieve a balance between agronomic responsibility and the social, environmental and economic sustainability of global agriculture.