Elements goes agriculture! (II)
Earlier this year in March I reported in a blog post about our agricultural adventures and attending the SmartAgriFood (SAF) kickoff at the Net Futures 2015 conference in Brussels. Briefly put, SmartAgriFood is a business accelerator program focused on the agricultural sector, funded by the European Union. The proposal Elements submitted for the program and 49 others were selected as the best out of a total of over 175 submissions.
The past months we at Elements have worked behind the scenes on a smartphone app prototype named Mixing Ratio App for iOS. During the development we partnered up with Kverneland, manufacturer of agricultural equipment, and Bayer CropScience, manufacturer of crop protection chemicals. Kverneland kindly provided us with their sprayer equipment data and Bayer helped us with getting their chemicals database available.
The Mixing Ratio App assists farmers in finding the optimal mixing proportions of water and a chemical product to use with their sprayer equipment to optimize effectiveness in spraying their farm fields. The app is able to scan a barcode on a chemical container’s label using the phone’s camera and lookup the properties of the chemical product. The user can input additional information like the amount of hectare of the field to be sprayed, the amount of liters in the sprayer tank, the kind of crop, and other information to get the most precise advise.
The prototype app not only presents the optimal mixing ratio and number of runs to the farmer, but also the chemical product’s safety instructions applicable in the farmer’s region. The advise can subsequently be sent to an email address as an XML attachment or stored in the cloud, which results in a unique ID. This unique ID can later be used to load the advise in external applications, such as a Farm Management Information System (FMIS) or the tractor’s on-board console, for example Kverneland’s Tellus terminal. This unique ID will be replaced by a user management system in later versions of the app.
On Wednesday September 16th Gert and I were in The Hague at Wageningen University’s offices to pitch our prototype app and business case in front of a SmartAgriFood panel of experts. Unfortunately, the competition of the 49 other projects was fierce and our project was not selected to move on to the next phase of the SmartAgriFood program. We congratulate the 18 winning project teams and wish them the best of luck in bringing their products to the market.
Originally published at www.elements.nl on September 17, 2015.
