Offering agricultural machinery with increasingly sophisticated technology is not enough for manufacturers to take advantage of the sector’s potential in Brazil: it is also necessary to be able to instantly transmit data to the control center, which is not possible in most properties Brazilian rural areas.
Internet connection in the countryside has advanced in recent years — the manufacturers themselves have joined together and created an association to take the signal to rural areas and remote areas — but 73% of properties are still not connected, according to the Ministry of Agriculture and the association. ConnectAgro.
Where there is no connection available, managers lose efficiency, time and money, as they are unable to make more qualified decisions immediately — current technology allows real-time access to all information about equipment operation and soil and climate conditions. .
Investing in connectivity aims to sell more, from phone plans to machines, but also to allow the buyer to enjoy what he actually purchased.
“[O setor] was at a very strong crossroads, with increasingly digital machines, but inserted in agricultural environments where connectivity did not exist. From 22% to 23% of the agricultural area was covered [em 2019] with connectivity not suited to what we need to do,” said Gregory Riordan, president of ConectarAgro association and director of digital technologies at CNH Industrial for Latin America.
“These are machines capable of diagnosing everything, and their features require at least the 4G that we have in big cities.”
ConectarAgro was born in 2019 in a partnership between companies that, even competing in some segments, aim to bring open connection to rural areas. Any user who passes through rural roads covered by the TIM signal, which is part of the group, will be able to use their smartphone for connection, which benefits communities around the antennas.
Administrator of two farms in Mato Grosso do Sul, Carlos Alberto Mendonça was observing the association’s stand at Agrishow and said he wanted to take the system to the grain crops where he works.
“It’s hard not to get data from the field at the same time they are collected. There’s even internet at one point or another on the farms, but when you go into a place with no signal, we’re left in the dark.
“The cost, for him, is consistent with the benefit. “The idea is for us to buy in partnership with neighbors, suddenly some costs are lower. It would be right not to have that cost.”
Initially formed by AGCO (Massey Ferguson and Valtra, for example), TIM, Bayer, CNH Industrial (New Holland and Case), Jacto, Nokia, Solinftec and Trimble, now ConectarAgro also has 22 other associates, such as Basf, Energisa, Yara, Agrotower and Farmers Edge.
The format to try to solve the problem in the field was to take advantage of the shutdown of the analog TV signal in the country. The companies developed a 4G connection system in a frequency band of 700 MHz, which was used by the TV.
The frequency has the advantage of not having geographical restrictions, which allows the signal to reach an area of up to 35 thousand hectares with a single antenna. The cost for installation varies due to the terrain, for example, but ranges from a quarter to half a sack of soybeans per hectare — from R$45 to R$95, on average.
Since the program’s launch, 6.2 million hectares have been connected, bringing the country’s total to 27%. The initial goal was to reach 13 million hectares, but the Covid-19 pandemic made expansion difficult.
As the planted area in the country reaches 83.4 million hectares, according to the IBGE (Brazilian Institute of Geography and Statistics), there is still a long way to go.
The most covered rural areas are in the states with the most telephone subscribers, but even São Paulo, the most populous, still has places with no connection.
The 700 MHz frequency is not exclusive to TIM. When the 4G internet auction took place in 2014, Claro, Vivo and Algar also obtained the right to operate the band.
“In recent years, our tractors, harvesters, sprayers and other equipment have started to incorporate connectivity and automation features, but we know that there is still a long way to go in this direction,” said Alexandre Vinicius de Assis, Valtra’s sales director.
ConectarAgro’s open signal, according to the association, benefited more than 600,000 people from 220 cities in eight states.
The project is not the only one in progress to make the data obtained in the field with the machines be analyzed in real time by the producers.
John Deere commercially presented in 2019 a program that consists of installing transmission towers according to the needs of each producer, which allows connection even in places where mobile operators do not reach.
The proposal was followed by a partnership with Trópico, a company dedicated to the development, production and distribution of telecommunications equipment.
At the end of 2020, the operator Claro and the manufacturer announced a collaboration to bring connectivity and agriculture 5.0 to the Brazilian countryside, based on a model in which the producer does not need to make his own investments in telecommunications infrastructure.
According to John Deere, around 200,000 hectares are connected through the partnership, with 1.5 million hectares in the installation process and another 6 million hectares prospected.
“Digital and environmental transformations need to be encouraged to increase the productivity of Brazilian agribusiness and, therefore, generate employment and open a huge space for innovation and entrepreneurship”, said the director of sales of John Deere Brazil, Marcelo Lopes.
The solution, called Campo Conectado, allows you to generate, cross-reference and process data through analysis, machine learning and artificial intelligence for real-time decision making.
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