Precision agriculture gets a boost for small-scale farms

"Precision agriculture has been around for years, but it remains expensive, complex, and designed for large operations," says Simone Kartsiotis, CEO and CTO of Agrobit. The company, which specializes in digital transformation and integrated management for the agricultural sector, set out to make these tools accessible to growers working just a few hectares, so that growers and agronomists can reduce water and crop protection product use by basing decisions on data.

Pressures on fresh produce businesses

"Energy, fertilizer, and crop protection costs weigh more heavily than they did a few years ago, and they leave less room for error. Skilled labor is also in short supply, especially for seasonal tasks, so every hour spent walking the field is an hour taken away from something else," Kartsiotis explains.

Unpredictable weather, late frosts, heatwaves, and concentrated rainfall, makes it harder to rely on what is actually happening in the field and casts doubt on what the calendar has always promised. Meanwhile, prices, which are frequently set further down the supply chain, make efficiency the only lever growers can control.

At the same time, retailers and overseas buyers are demanding consistent quality, predictable sizing, guaranteed volumes, and increasingly, environmental data. The challenge, Kartsiotis notes, is "holding all of this together with fragmented information and decisions that are often made by gut feeling."

© AgrobitThe sector is moving forward, but at very different speeds. Large companies generally have structured management systems, in-house agronomists, and field sensors in place; their difficulty is not a lack of data but the fact that data sits in systems that do not talk to each other.

Cooperatives occupy a key position, because they can bring tools to many members at once and have a direct interest in planning deliveries, quality, and sizing, provided their agronomist uses them, Kartsiotis adds, "to support members, not to monitor them."

Small and medium-sized growers still often rely on paper field notebooks and WhatsApp. Simone Kartsiotis puts this down not to a lack of interest but to solutions that were for a long time too expensive or required specialist equipment, which is why Agrobit chose the smartphone as its primary tool, "because everyone already has one in their pocket."

From traceability to forecasting

In a short, time-sensitive supply chain like fresh produce, batch traceability is far more than a regulatory requirement. When only days separate harvest from the retail shelf, knowing which field a batch came from, what condition the crop was in, and when it was picked makes it possible to respond immediately to a quality issue and isolate it without halting the entire operation.

That said, Kartsiotis warns that it is often underestimated that the quality of a batch is determined in the field, weeks before harvest. If vigor, fruit load, estimated sizing, and weather trends are linked to each batch, traceability stops being a record of what happened and becomes a forecasting tool. Agrobit works precisely in that pre-harvest window, with georeferenced data that businesses can export or connect to their own systems.

"A few data points, but the right ones at the right time," says Kartsiotis, who identifies four types capable of changing decisions. First, crop vigor and variability, to manage by zone rather than uniformly; second, disease and pest risk, to intervene only when necessary; third, water status, to irrigate where and when the plant needs it; and fourth, fruit load, number and size, to plan harvest, labor, and sales.

ERP integration and environmental footprint

Integrating agronomic management with an ERP system offers, according to Kartsiotis, the advantage of having a single version of the facts. When field data talks to business data, costs, inventory, orders, and deliveries, it becomes possible to calculate the real cost per field, link expected production to sales planning, and avoid entering the same information twice.

"Integration costs and timelines, dependence on suppliers, and the risk of building a system too rigid for an activity that changes every season are some of the drawbacks," says Simone Kartsiotis.

© AgrobitThe most common mistakes start with leading with the software rather than the process, when the first step should be clarifying who uses the data, when, and for what decision. They continue with trying to do everything at once, when integrations that actually work start with one or two data flows, such as expected production and the harvest plan.

Next comes forgetting the people working in the field: if entering data is cumbersome, operators stop doing it and the system empties out. Finally, there is the issue of neglecting data ownership and formats, which is why Kartsiotis recommends tools that allow data export and offer open APIs so the information remains the company's own.

Some of the contributions digital tools make on the environmental side, Kartsiotis explains, begin with measurement: the requirements of retailers, overseas buyers, and certification bodies are based on documented figures, not declarations, and accurately recording where, when, and how much water, fertilizer, and crop protection product was applied is the foundation of any footprint calculation and any audit.

Then there is reduction: precision allows inputs to be applied only where they are needed, with less product, fewer machinery passes, and lower emissions, savings that also show up on the balance sheet.

Finally, there is carbon stored by fruit trees, an area in which the company is working using 3D canopy data. With an eye on export markets, Kartsiotis highlights the advantage of presenting data that is already structured and verifiable, an increasingly common requirement for entering or maintaining a position in certain markets.

For more information:

AgrobitFrancesco Manara

T: +39 3469787298

www.agrobit.ag

[email protected]