Alvarez Garrido Rafael
| Organization type | Private Sector (Commercial Companies) |
|---|---|
| Pays | Spain |
I have been working for more than 15 years in practical agriculture in the south of Spain, from 1990 to 2002, in very advanced farms of citrus and stone fruits. My perspective is very practical because during those years I did everything, from planting the farms, to work with more than 400 people working in harvest, to be teached by the best consultancy people to manage technically the crops using water and fertilizers and to be in the board of the export company.
Since 12 years ago we created www.verdtech.es , a company focus in how we can use different technologies (sensors, ramote sensing, data from field and weather forecast) to create data from the crop to have the history of the expericence of each year. We have created "Metodo Verdtech",where us and other 6 companies, work together offering our customers and integrated mid-time project to their crop problems.
We are working with top of the spanish citrus, olives and viticulture farms. We are experts to work with research centers (more than 15 in 16 years) to transform the data from this new technologies into information and indicators that used integrated and in an orderly and systematic way could be transformed into value information and knowledge once they solved farmers problems.
We have patented a sensor (Plantsens dendrometer) that explain us how the plant use water and nutrients and we have integrated its indicators with other data form other technologies to solve growers problems.
Since 12 years ago we created www.verdtech.es , a company focus in how we can use different technologies (sensors, ramote sensing, data from field and weather forecast) to create data from the crop to have the history of the expericence of each year. We have created "Metodo Verdtech",where us and other 6 companies, work together offering our customers and integrated mid-time project to their crop problems.
We are working with top of the spanish citrus, olives and viticulture farms. We are experts to work with research centers (more than 15 in 16 years) to transform the data from this new technologies into information and indicators that used integrated and in an orderly and systematic way could be transformed into value information and knowledge once they solved farmers problems.
We have patented a sensor (Plantsens dendrometer) that explain us how the plant use water and nutrients and we have integrated its indicators with other data form other technologies to solve growers problems.
This member participated in the following Forums
Forum e-Agriculture: looking back and moving forward
Question 1 (opens 25 Nov.) What are the main achievements in the area of ICT for agriculture and rural development...
Soumis par Alvarez Garrido Rafael le mar 26/11/2013 - 14:18
Hi again
I think there are two kind of "knowledge" we could use:
I am talking about the second case, where i see the possibilities that we have to improve growers in-puts managements once the local knowledge is achieved based in practical results registered in their conditions. It is a question of mesurement and then solve the scale problem, which is the key question.
rafael
I think there are two kind of "knowledge" we could use:
- basic knowledge of crop management in the area, that could be the case you are talking about with local NGOs.
- Decision-making about the management of in-puts during cultivation. Complex alarms with the adecuate filtering could help in a small and big scale depending of the crop problem
I am talking about the second case, where i see the possibilities that we have to improve growers in-puts managements once the local knowledge is achieved based in practical results registered in their conditions. It is a question of mesurement and then solve the scale problem, which is the key question.
rafael
Soumis par Alvarez Garrido Rafael le mar 26/11/2013 - 12:18
Hi Stephane
With the mobile phone we have the "vehicule" that lets us to reach so many people. This is the only the first step. What we need to know is what is "important" to communicate to a grower in its "own" microclimate conditions to be more efficient to solve its problems. That´s the key question and to do it adapting the available tech to the add value of their problem.
Second we need is a "common objective lenguage" to talk about agriculture, about each experience of failure or succed. Thats our bigger problem since i have been working in practical agriculture since more than 24 years ago. I haven´t find it...
This lenguage does not exit at all... only some indicators, but fails a lot. Thats the biggest disadvantage we have if we compare agriculture with other bussiness were you can measure the processes involved. New technologies are giving us the opportunity to create it and to use it.
As an example, if there is a General Accounting criteria, any enterprise can use it to learn about its profits if they invest on recovering its own data. Thats what we need for agriculture.
From my perspective, in Spain and in most in the advanced countries in the world the so-called precision agriculture in not having succed in a great scale because of this. In Spain and we are promoting this reflexion in different speaches during this year after working the last 14 years trying to implement new technologies in practical agriculture.
We have to move into SMART AGRICULTURE if i want to have smart growers: what does SMART means....??
¨S M A R T.
is it possible to achieve today in agriculture?? If we are not able to measure the factors that affects my plant i have a problem..if i want to be smart....
With the mobile phone we have the "vehicule" that lets us to reach so many people. This is the only the first step. What we need to know is what is "important" to communicate to a grower in its "own" microclimate conditions to be more efficient to solve its problems. That´s the key question and to do it adapting the available tech to the add value of their problem.
Second we need is a "common objective lenguage" to talk about agriculture, about each experience of failure or succed. Thats our bigger problem since i have been working in practical agriculture since more than 24 years ago. I haven´t find it...
This lenguage does not exit at all... only some indicators, but fails a lot. Thats the biggest disadvantage we have if we compare agriculture with other bussiness were you can measure the processes involved. New technologies are giving us the opportunity to create it and to use it.
As an example, if there is a General Accounting criteria, any enterprise can use it to learn about its profits if they invest on recovering its own data. Thats what we need for agriculture.
From my perspective, in Spain and in most in the advanced countries in the world the so-called precision agriculture in not having succed in a great scale because of this. In Spain and we are promoting this reflexion in different speaches during this year after working the last 14 years trying to implement new technologies in practical agriculture.
We have to move into SMART AGRICULTURE if i want to have smart growers: what does SMART means....??
¨S M A R T.
- Specific
- Measurable
- Achievable
- Realistic
- Timed
is it possible to achieve today in agriculture?? If we are not able to measure the factors that affects my plant i have a problem..if i want to be smart....
Soumis par Alvarez Garrido Rafael le mar 26/11/2013 - 07:42
Hi Michael
- Is this something that is already in place and producing results? Or is it a goal that we need to achieve?
I am working for the private sector and we are starting to have succes solving problems in important crops in Spain (like olives, citrus etc) integrating this new technologies. One of the key points is to "go to field" to retrieve data from the plant processes that we would like to control because most of the times the sensors and new technologies as remote sensing etc are not measuring directly our growers problems, so we have designed simple protocols to target data from field to be integrated in our data base. We have done a lot of research during last 8 years to understand the practical perspective of each of this technologies and the utility of the new indicators they are offering us.
But the approach is different if we want to use this new technologies in developing countries to change agriculture with new technologies integrated with mobile phones possibilities. I think there is a big opportunity on that. This is an idea that we have from last 4-5 years and have not developed yet (because of the crisis), but the biggest opportinity is in countries were they still don´t have big network of weather stations: they could develop a new kind of crop characterization points that will impact much more in to help the goberment and the engineers working with growers to solve problems on field.
We are in preliminary talks with an african an south american country to trying develop this idea.
We have finished 3 experiencies in Spain with 14 companies involved and we are starting 3 new projects (in tomato, olive and viticulture) that will complement from a practical point of view the integration of technologies.
In practical agriculture we are like 150 years ago in medicine... we work almost "by guess or based in my experience" without almost any kind of objective information and without any "learning" from the farms past that could guide to define alarms (SMS to growers) or to develop simple App that could use the grower once the alarm is stablished.
At the end the new revolution comes from our ability to register and "create" each microclimate history with new indicators of crops in key areas: we can learn with a "new technical lenguage" from the success and failure experiences and this is a big opportunity for the agriculture engineers (i am) to "learn" from this experience to train growers about the "good practices" that have been able to get positive results in farms similar to them or to avoid the "bad ones".
We could solve the big "gap" among practical agriculture with research centers and transform how education to growers could be developed and adapted to solved their problems working together with them. This is not possible now and we all know that "engineer perspective" in not very well accepted by a grower because he is the whole day in the farm and we go for 30 mit and give him a recomendation only based in experience... it is so easy decide to irrigate.. even a boy can do it.
The preventive agriculture must be the goal to achieve and will start once we develop an easy ability to learn from our experience and we are starting to do so. I see that there are big opportinuties using mobile phones integrated with the learning in crop characterization points.
- Is this something that is already in place and producing results? Or is it a goal that we need to achieve?
I am working for the private sector and we are starting to have succes solving problems in important crops in Spain (like olives, citrus etc) integrating this new technologies. One of the key points is to "go to field" to retrieve data from the plant processes that we would like to control because most of the times the sensors and new technologies as remote sensing etc are not measuring directly our growers problems, so we have designed simple protocols to target data from field to be integrated in our data base. We have done a lot of research during last 8 years to understand the practical perspective of each of this technologies and the utility of the new indicators they are offering us.
But the approach is different if we want to use this new technologies in developing countries to change agriculture with new technologies integrated with mobile phones possibilities. I think there is a big opportunity on that. This is an idea that we have from last 4-5 years and have not developed yet (because of the crisis), but the biggest opportinity is in countries were they still don´t have big network of weather stations: they could develop a new kind of crop characterization points that will impact much more in to help the goberment and the engineers working with growers to solve problems on field.
We are in preliminary talks with an african an south american country to trying develop this idea.
We have finished 3 experiencies in Spain with 14 companies involved and we are starting 3 new projects (in tomato, olive and viticulture) that will complement from a practical point of view the integration of technologies.
In practical agriculture we are like 150 years ago in medicine... we work almost "by guess or based in my experience" without almost any kind of objective information and without any "learning" from the farms past that could guide to define alarms (SMS to growers) or to develop simple App that could use the grower once the alarm is stablished.
At the end the new revolution comes from our ability to register and "create" each microclimate history with new indicators of crops in key areas: we can learn with a "new technical lenguage" from the success and failure experiences and this is a big opportunity for the agriculture engineers (i am) to "learn" from this experience to train growers about the "good practices" that have been able to get positive results in farms similar to them or to avoid the "bad ones".
We could solve the big "gap" among practical agriculture with research centers and transform how education to growers could be developed and adapted to solved their problems working together with them. This is not possible now and we all know that "engineer perspective" in not very well accepted by a grower because he is the whole day in the farm and we go for 30 mit and give him a recomendation only based in experience... it is so easy decide to irrigate.. even a boy can do it.
The preventive agriculture must be the goal to achieve and will start once we develop an easy ability to learn from our experience and we are starting to do so. I see that there are big opportinuties using mobile phones integrated with the learning in crop characterization points.
Soumis par Alvarez Garrido Rafael le lun 25/11/2013 - 18:14
Hi
The opportunity that mobile phones are offering to us have to be complemented with another revolution:
We have to change the low impact created by a network of weather stations to the ICT revolution that can offer mobile phones with a network of monitoring and characterization crops using points with sensors of climate-soil-plant-nutrition and field data in representative agricultural farms with the main crop in the region.
This concept must be based on "sample" and characterize a number of individuals representing a population of plants and get the income of such plants, through technical and economic indicators in real farm practical conditions.
We will learn in real farm conditions cases of succed and failure and will be able to create alarms based in this experience with new different indicators (weather, plant-dendrometer-, soil moisture, soil nutrition and fiel data).
If we develop a weather forecast based in the real farm conditions we will work in a preventive way. For that we only will need weather data from the site and the "standard forecast" for the area.
This is an opportinity for engineers from the state, the minicipalities etc to focus in the new lenguage created by this new technologies based in new indicators that will let them to develop new alarms and App to make this local-knowledge to a bigger scale impact.
-scalability: Shoud be solved using remote sensing and data from field and with alarms created in this points with sensors and data from field from growers used as a crop reference in the micro-climate conditions. Example of one this projects: https://acceso360.acceso.com/cocacola/es-ES/?mod=TrackingAVPlayer&task=openAV&companyNewsId=203034774&mediaType=2&sig=5a2872ead73921f90e5bbc072e79872a61edb3a6020d148296861e4ea799282d
technology: we should work with phone preventive advises or alarms with SMS and easy calculations with Apps derived from the advise adapted to farmer crop and complexity of the problem. The alarm shoud filter the way we use Apps...
-impact: There is not too much impact yet with phone technologies as far as I see in practical agriculture in developed countries. This is the same problem we have using "alone" each new technologie (remote sensing, data from field, sensors, weather forecastetc) . We have to learn how we should integrate phone posibilities with other technologies that are arriving to agriculture.
-partnership: We have been working in precision agriculture in Spain for the last 10 years, with a main focus in tree crops and we have realize that the unique way to solve growers problems using new tecnologies is integrating data from field, sensors, weather forecast and remote sensing. Each technologie solve only "part" of the growers problem, an specific perspective and we have the handicap that agriculture problems are really complex with multiple factors involved. we need to systematize and organize the data collection field to create a common language for each monitoring point. Phone possibilities is "another technologie" that should be integrated.
The opportunity that mobile phones are offering to us have to be complemented with another revolution:
We have to change the low impact created by a network of weather stations to the ICT revolution that can offer mobile phones with a network of monitoring and characterization crops using points with sensors of climate-soil-plant-nutrition and field data in representative agricultural farms with the main crop in the region.
This concept must be based on "sample" and characterize a number of individuals representing a population of plants and get the income of such plants, through technical and economic indicators in real farm practical conditions.
We will learn in real farm conditions cases of succed and failure and will be able to create alarms based in this experience with new different indicators (weather, plant-dendrometer-, soil moisture, soil nutrition and fiel data).
If we develop a weather forecast based in the real farm conditions we will work in a preventive way. For that we only will need weather data from the site and the "standard forecast" for the area.
This is an opportinity for engineers from the state, the minicipalities etc to focus in the new lenguage created by this new technologies based in new indicators that will let them to develop new alarms and App to make this local-knowledge to a bigger scale impact.
-scalability: Shoud be solved using remote sensing and data from field and with alarms created in this points with sensors and data from field from growers used as a crop reference in the micro-climate conditions. Example of one this projects: https://acceso360.acceso.com/cocacola/es-ES/?mod=TrackingAVPlayer&task=openAV&companyNewsId=203034774&mediaType=2&sig=5a2872ead73921f90e5bbc072e79872a61edb3a6020d148296861e4ea799282d
technology: we should work with phone preventive advises or alarms with SMS and easy calculations with Apps derived from the advise adapted to farmer crop and complexity of the problem. The alarm shoud filter the way we use Apps...
-impact: There is not too much impact yet with phone technologies as far as I see in practical agriculture in developed countries. This is the same problem we have using "alone" each new technologie (remote sensing, data from field, sensors, weather forecastetc) . We have to learn how we should integrate phone posibilities with other technologies that are arriving to agriculture.
-partnership: We have been working in precision agriculture in Spain for the last 10 years, with a main focus in tree crops and we have realize that the unique way to solve growers problems using new tecnologies is integrating data from field, sensors, weather forecast and remote sensing. Each technologie solve only "part" of the growers problem, an specific perspective and we have the handicap that agriculture problems are really complex with multiple factors involved. we need to systematize and organize the data collection field to create a common language for each monitoring point. Phone possibilities is "another technologie" that should be integrated.