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I grew up in a family of farmers: ever since we were little, my brother Alessandro and I, under the watchful eye of our father Roberto, would play among the machinery parked in the courtyard of the Benedictine courtyard, the central body of our company. Today Gobbo Ag-Service spreads over 75 ha cultivated with a purely cereal orientation (corn, soybean, soft wheat, beet, rapeseed, barley), however our main activity is contracting: we work 750 ha and manage a portfolio of more than 100 clients.
To carry out these activities we have a very large fleet of machinery, consisting of tractors, harvesting machines, and cereal crop management equipment. Until recently, managing customers, employees, and working equipment was complicated: we could not track the operations performed and had no control over the machinery. During periods with the greatest workload, such as harvesting, it was difficult to know the exact location of the equipment and, as a result, it was complex to coordinate work. This led us to waste time and, moreover, we could not provide complete transparency to our customers.
For some time I had been looking for a system that would allow us to start the digital transformation of the company. After a period of research, I came across one of the first webinars of xFarm , which, at that very time, had also started working on the machinery part, the one we were most interested in. So it was that, after trying out the xFarm platform, I decided to install telemetry sensors on all our machinery. In addition, for the management part, I purchased the Operational Management and Multiagency modules.
Since I installed the telemetry kit, I have much more information about the machinery at my disposal. From location, to fuel consumption, through many other engine parameters-everything is tracked automatically. This allows us to know in real time where a machine is, so we can coordinate during work. In addition, we are able to automatically record all the operations performed, including for our customers. In this way they, too, can view at any time what has been done in their fields. By doing this we are able to be much more transparent, and on the other hand, we are able to historicize a lot of data that allows us to enhance our fleet and save money.
Another crucial aspect for us is personnel management. Thanks to Operations Management, we have greatly improved communication with employees: we can now plan the week's activities, and all our employees are able to view the tasks to be done on their smartphones. Also for the reporting of hours having this functionality is very useful: at the end of the month we automatically display the hours and activities performed by each employee.
We are very pleased to have embarked on this digitalization path with xFarm, we are now much more organized, transparent to our customers and have 360° control over our vehicles. But we don't want to stop here; the next step will be to enter precision agriculture as well. I believe that in the future we will make much more use of sensors for environmental monitoring, as well as Satellite and Prescription Maps: in fact, we will soon start variable rate fertilization. Our goal is to increase economic and environmental sustainability; we are convinced that digital from xFarm will continue to be an important ally of ours in achieving these goals.
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