Agricultural analytics company CropX has announced a partnership with Costa Rican agroforestry equipment vendor FarmAgro to provide satellite-powered precision agriculture tools to farmers in Central America.
The partners say they will deploy applications such as automated irrigation, soil and crop-specific management, and geotagging to more than 205 million hectares of banana, coffee, sugarcane, pineapple, melon, and mango plots. The services will be based on the CropX farm management platform, which integrates data from its proprietary soil sensors with above-ground data layers, weather forecasting, satellite imagery, and crop models.
CropX has a very diverse focus, one that includes farm management, irrigation management and nitrogen management, crop protection, and sustainability, much of which is supported by telecommunications. As this alliance indicates, the company’s offering includes integrating soil data with crop models and satellite imagery to provide crop-specific recommendations adjusted to the crop’s growth stage, helping to achieve maximal yield.
But satellite isn’t the only sort of wireless communications technology used. For example, efficiently collecting, packing and transmitting data directly to the cloud takes place even in remote areas, for which satellite, LoRaWan and cellular connectivity all have a role.
Its perhaps no surprise that after deployment in Central America reaches critical mass, FarmAgro plans to expand CropX distribution to the entire Latin American region. Nor is CropX the only company bringing wireless communications to farming. It’s not often that we cover agriculture in these pages but that may change as the use of satellites and IoT brings agriculture and telecommunications ever closer together.
