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It was 2006, when, to fulfill a lifelong dream, I decided to invest the earnings from my years of work as an IT consultant to build my own farm. Initially I was alone, today Azienda Vitivinicola Enrico Crola covers 4 ha in the Novara hills of Mezzomerico (NO) and has a team of 5 people, including Davide, our winemaker. Our main activity is the cultivation of vines (Nebbiolo variety) with a Guyot training system and the processing of grapes: in the winery, thanks also to the subcontracting activity, we reach the production of 70,000 bottles a year.
In a reality like ours, there are several critical issues: from inventory management, to compiling the field notebook, through treatment planning and machinery control. Until some time ago we had no digital platform on the farm, this meant wasting time in data storage and inefficiency from an agronomic point of view. In fact, having no decision support tools meant that treatments were mostly done on a calendar basis, to the detriment of the environment and costs.
After abandoning the paper method, we tried several systems for digitizing the company. However, none of them completely met our needs. In 2019, partly due to Enrico's IT knowledge, we came across xFarm and started using it. From that moment on, we began to understand the potential of technology applied to agriculture and have not abandoned it since.
The main benefit we have found is in the agronomic management of the vineyard. Through the sensors in the field we have constant monitoring of the weather, we know in real time how much it has rained, temperatures, and, most importantly, we can visualize leaf moisture data. These values, in addition to being directly viewable on all devices, are exploited by forecast models to make recommendations. In this way, we can visualize the degree to which the vineyard is protected from fungal diseases (such as downy mildew and powdery mildew) and, through defense alerts, we understand the most appropriate time to carry out treatments. It is also thanks to the Defense module of xFarm that today we have been able to decrease the use of plant protection products, benefiting the environment and our pockets.
Other aspects we really like about xFarm are the ability to control warehouse movements, as well as the fact that we can search for plant protection products available for each adversity and the function that allows us to plan jobs. Having all these possibilities in one platform greatly simplifies organization, streamlines processes and gives us 360-degree, real-time control of everything that is happening on the farm.
We have recently installed telemetry on our vehicles, now we can view all the telemetry data of the tractors and, again through the sensors, the compilation of the activity log automatically. These devices have enabled us to understand not only where the company's efforts are concentrated, but also the costs of each operation.
Ours is a young company so, no doubt, the next goal will be to expand. In this path of expansion we will continue to use xFarm to understand how to make the best use of investments. We are confident that by taking advantage of technology we will be able to produce grapes and an ever better end product, all with a view to sustainability, both environmental and economic.
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