In a remote Swartland wheat field near Piketberg, a man operating a giant combine harvester feels the call of nature. He halts the machine, clambers to the ground and empties a copious stream of nitrogen-rich urea onto the wheat stubble. About 1,200km away in Isando, Gauteng, an alert registers on a computer monitor — the operator forgot to engage the parking brake when he left the harvester cab.
There is not much that misses the control centre in Isando, where real-time data from about 450 Case IH agricultural machines around Southern Africa is monitored day and night.
“We can see every machine across the world,” says Schalk Oosthuizen, precision farming specialist at Case, one of the exhibitors at the Nampo Cape agricultural expo in Bredasdorp this month. “We can see how it’s performing, everything about it, except we can’t see the customer’s private information. We can see oil temperature, water temperature ... In the past year, by monitoring these machines, we have prevented failures that would have cost farmers millions. We can see something is wrong before the farmer knows it.”
Technological advances have been transforming agriculture since before the invention of the wheel, but in recent years the introduction of GPS and its smarter cousin, real-time kinematic (RTK), has revolutionised automation by allowing a machine or device to know exactly, to within 1cm, where on Earth it is. And now there is AI.
“Technology-wise we are going AI, definitely,” Oosthuizen says. “It’s going to help performance, optimise yield and result in better profits.”
Of the dozen or so sensors that the driver of a big combine harvester used to have to continuously monitor, most are now taken care of by AI, which improves the human operator’s efficiency.
AI is also used in the video cameras that can be installed on mechanised chemical-spraying booms, some of which are nearly 40m long. The French Hawkeye system, which tells the nozzles on the boom when, where and what to spray, was being promoted at Nampo by the Omnia Group, whose products include fertilisers.
We can see something is wrong before the farmer knows it
— Schalk Oosthuizen
“While you’re driving, it recognises your weeds, so you only spray [herbicide] on that,” says Coenie Malan of Omnia. “If there’s a small weed, the size of a 50c coin, it sprays that. That’s driving at up to 15km/h, 18km/h.”
For herbicide application, the farmer selects the “stubble” setting on the system. Stubble is brown, so anything green will be an unwanted invader and gets a shot of weedkiller. “Select ‘corn’, and it sprays everything else,” Malan says.
If a farmer is spreading fertiliser, “you select ‘maize’, then it only sprays the maize, not the bare ground. You use a lot less chemicals.”
In the past two years farmers in South Africa have installed about 30 of the systems, Malan tells the FM.
Tertia van Bosch, an agronomist at Omnia, says systems such as Hawkeye allow farmers to vary their fertiliser application metre by metre, so they don’t use more than they need to on rich soil, or less than they need to on poor soil. “This works amazingly well with maize, sunflowers — we’re trying to push it in the Western Cape too. Case and John Deere already have the technology built in. It’s all GPS co-ordinated.”
But sometimes persuading the older generation of farmers to change their ways can be a challenge.
“Farmers, especially old-school farmers, are overwhelmed,” Van Bosch says. “Everything has an app and a thing you have to log onto; it’s too much. You get a lot of information, but you don’t know what to do with it. You need experts to come and guide you ... And it’s not simplified. About 95% of the farmers are Afrikaans and now you give them this highly technical stuff in English.”
Oosthuizen echoes the point. “Most of the older farmers are scared even to use a cellphone. They don’t want to adopt new technology; they didn’t need it in the past, so ‘why do I need it now?’ But 90% of farmers are getting onto the bandwagon.”
He says self-drive technology is already available for agricultural machines. “You press one button, the tractor drives by itself. The operator is sitting there, not touching the steering wheel. But he needs to know when to press the button, how to use the system.”
The boom in new technology has created an urgent need to train farm workers how to use it, Oosthuizen says. “We need to upskill the operators. They get into this machine, it’s worth R10m; they’re not allowed to drive the farmer’s Land Cruiser that’s worth R700,000, but they can drive a R10m machine.”
Farmers looking for hi-tech help that comes with a lower price tag can consider drones, which do the same job as crop dusters but without the expensive pilot, aircraft and high-octane fuel.
Rovan Liebenberg, a sales executive for Nik drones, says the machines — which are guided by an RTK system — operate at 50km/h, at a height of about 3.5m.
“In the Free State they spray 150ha-160ha a day, with 1cm accuracy. It’s amazing.”
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