How we created an agriculture solution for solving food problems

According to the United Nations, the world’s population will grow up to 9.6 billion by 2050. It means that food production should increase by about 70%. According to the Food and Agriculture Organization report, the number of fertile fields reduces, and 70% of freshwater is already being used by the agriculture industry, which makes the task even more complicated. Smart farming technologies can tackle these challenges. 

In 2018, at the WORLD GOVERNMENT SUMMIT, the AGRICULTURE 4.0 report was presented. It highlighted the IoT technologies penetrating agriculture to enhance its effectiveness.

Seeing how the world’s situation is evolving, Gurtam released Hecterra, a product for agribusiness. It helps to monitor the accuracy of field works and driver performance.

Product Manager Katerina Aleksandrova shares what agribusiness needs from IT systems, how to track the efficiency of field cultivation using GPS, what amount of fuel can the worker steal in Eastern Europe, and what challenges the IT-business can face after deciding to work with the agricultural sector.

Hecterra is an agricultural application for Wialon, the popular GPS monitoring system. Using telematics data, it helps track the amount of work performed in the fields and fertilizers used. In fact, it increases the accuracy and quality of agricultural land cultivations.

For example, the application calculates the cultivation area and fuel consumption, special machinery speed, mileage, etc. One of the main product ‘features' is the option to monitor field works within the accuracy of one meter: Hecterra calculates area that has been actually cultivated, taking into account the width of implements (for example, a reaper or fertilizer sprinkler). Thus, agribusiness can find out if there are “omissions” in the field or whether the fertilizer has been applied twice at the same place, which leads to financial and crop losses.

Using this type of system allows reducing the water, fertilizers, and other supplies expenses by 30-40%.

Hecterra is the product created in response to market requests. Wialon partners have been asking for an agricultural solution for a long time. Initially, we tried adding the necessary functionality to Wialon, but with time we understood we needed to create a specialized solution. 

As mentioned above, we were getting constant requests from the market, so we knew Hecterra's target audience. Users from Eastern Europe were the most active. So, when starting the development, we were focused on the requests from this region, although they were pretty similar to the ones from farmers around the world.

Having analyzed the agribusiness requirements, we realized that two groups of users would take advantage of a smart farming system.

The primary product audience is its direct users: agronomists, engineers, agricultural dispatchers, and their managers.

The pass-along audience is the management and administrative staff: accountants, machine operators, financial experts, and other specialists who need data to plan the fuel, repairs, fertilizer expenses, etc. 

We started the development with the agribusiness demands analysis and collecting requirements. We were lucky as the users often addressed us with the requests that we could explore and analyze/ It means we had the information to start with. All knowledge gaps were closed during meetings with our partners. 

Finally, we managed to collect a list of farmer’s requests to IT systems: 

Сreating the system corresponding to all the requirements needs enormous resources and expertise in every aspect of the agricultural business from working with weather station data and calculating soil vegetation index to knowing the land law of a particular country. So we decided to focus on our strong point – telematics. 

It is telematics that helps to automate the farmer's work: all the data is collected from the installed GPS trackers and other sensors, and then transferred to the system for further analysis and processing. And all this fits into the Agriculture 4.0 model presented in 2018 at WORLD GOVERNMENT SUMMIT. This model implies the penetration of IT-solutions (and not just them) into agriculture.

Wialon users typically work with a standard set of telematics services: fuel control and vehicle location monitoring. But it is not enough to know the current field's state, the volume and the quality of their cultivations as well as agricultural machinery and driver’s performance.

That’s why we included the following positions to the list of what should be released in the first product version:

Options to work with fields. Polygon fields creating and editing, including the ones of complex shapes (for example, it is possible to leave out trees or marshes in the field), storing the cultivation history, viewing them on a map, marking different crops with different colors, etc.

Units. The option to get information on machinery from Wialon. For example, data on tractors and combine harvesters.

Importing data from Wialon on available resources and their characteristics.  For example, you can specify the harvester reaper's width to track the area of the cultivated field within the accuracy of a meter.

Catalogue of crops. Users can create and edit the catalogue of crops growing at the time, specify their names and colors to mark them on the map. 

In early 2019, we launched Hecterra beta-testing. In May 2019, we released the first fully-featured version of the platform (many users started its commercial service way before it). 

Working with the agricultural sector, our partners encountered some difficulties when implementing the product. These are the following:

Farmers doubt the necessity of such solutions considering them to be a hype and tribute to fashion.

Massive fuel thefts in the markets of some countries - It is normal for some workers to steal 500 liters of fuel per month. This is particularly true for Eastern Europe and Latin America. That’s why the employees are highly against the implementation of monitoring technologies.

Employees training challenges - Sometimes it is difficult to train a dispatcher to work with new software. Normally they have only basic computer skills.

As expected, the primary markets are the Eastern European countries. In 2019, Hecterra registered 80,000 field cultivations (we set it as the key metric), which is about 1,5 million hectares (more than the area of Montenegro). This year, we plan on increasing this number up to 200,000 cultivations, but the coronavirus pandemic will definitely affect our plans.

Over the last year, the interest in the product in Latin America has become a nice surprise to us. Hecterra is popular there with the manufacturers of coffee, soy, maize, and sugar cane. For example, one of our Honduras partners monitors over 1,000 units of special machinery working with the cane. There were also some very exotic ways of using the solution. One of our partners reported that Hecterra was used to monitor the cultivation of eucalyptus trees. The result is still unclear, though.

People in this region typically focus on growing one or two crops (compared to Eastern Europe where the cultivation of 10-20 crops every season is a usual thing).

Right now, we are focused on the development of the functionality that was not included in the first release. We have already implemented the option of registering compound cultivations. They are necessary when several tractors cultivate one field, and their tracks overlap. Now Hecterra considers these overlaps when evaluating the performance.

Despite the global challenges caused by COVID-19, agriculture will work as we always need food, coffee, and sugar to add to coffee. And with the growth of the world’s population, the demand will only go up. So humanity will have to search for solutions to increase agricultural productivity. Maybe systems for precision agriculture are one of them?

Hecterra is the Wialon-based solution for agro-industry designed to monitor field works with the help of telematics data.