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Ortomad a company of the La Linea Verde group specializing in the production and marketing of I and IV range fruit and vegetable products, has decided to entrust the tech company xFarm Technologies the extensive digitization project of the entire production chain in the field.
Driving the operation is the desire to improve and facilitate the operations of its technicians in the field, for even more efficient and sustainable horticulture. The cultivation of the fourth range, i.e., fresh, packaged and ready-to-eat horticultural products, in fact requires a great deal of management effort. From planting, treatments, irrigation to harvesting, the rhythms are very intense, a lot of manpower is required, and the crop cycles are very fast, even a few tens of days.
xFarm Technologies, starting from Ortomad's specific needs, then developed a new function that can optimize processes for more efficient and automated production management.
"We are convinced that in order to continue to raise the bar on the quality of our products, an element of fundamental importance to us, it is necessary to embrace innovation. For this reason we have chosen to integrate xFarm Technologies within our reality. Our goal, in fact, is to make business processes more efficient, benefiting both the daily activities of our operators but also the overall quality level of our production," - commentsEng. Vincenzo Nicolino Chief Information Officerof La Linea Verde Spa.
Ortomad, with its 327 employees and a total of 670 hectares for the production of horticultural products, 100 of which are covered by greenhouses, produces 13,500 tons of agricultural products each year , which are delivered to major retailers in the large-scale retail trade (GDO). For this project, xFarm has enriched its platform with the "Crop Planning" module specifically for the cultivation of fourth-range products, such as arugula, lettuce, spinach... Through this function it is possible to plan a customized production cycle for each culture on the farm, standardizing and simplifying the planning of the cultivation operations to be carried out. In fact, given the brevity and intensity of crop cycles (more than three thousand activities are generated each month), this operation would otherwise be very time-consuming.
Given the total absence of connection in the production area, a'app mobile was also developed ad hocfor Ortomad technicians to work offline. In this way, Ortomad's agronomists have the ability to make use ofapp in the field, save locally what they record, and then automatically migrate the collected data to the cloud once they return to their offices, through the wifi network present in the office.
"Ortomad is a historical partner for xFarm Technologies and it is a pleasure to finally be able to share the fruits of this project that began in 2020. It has been a development stitched on the needs not only of the company but more generally on the needs of fourth-range crops, which due to their very short crop cycle present different complexities compared to field crops. This was an important first step in bringing Agriculture 4.0 to an industry characterized by high intensity and where there is no margin for error. The goal going forward is to bring more and more of our technology to the world of horticulture as well, especially from the perspective of resource-conscious use and management efficiency." comments Daniele Sacco, Head of IT at xFarm Technologies.
Within Ortomad's grounds, in order to have capillary monitoring of all environmental parameters, IoT (Internet of Things) devices have been installed that allow data visualization directly from the platform. In addition to traditional sensors such as the weather station and soil moisture sensor, the company had the opportunity to test the xProbe sensor, which is capable of detecting soil moisture in a georeferenced manner. These devices, combined with predictive models from the xFarm platform, will provide additional decision support in optimizing the use of agronomic inputs. Finally, some of the agricultural machinery used within Ortomad, has been connected. This will enable visualization of telemetry data in the xFarm platform by the farm team for better management of the farm fleet.
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