During the first episode of the new season of African Farming, we get to know Hlobisile Yende, a young farmer from Heidelberg in Gauteng, who farms with cattle, maize, soya, and butternut. During this episode, Stehan Cloete, AFGRI’s precision technology manager took some time to tell viewers more about how to incorporate technology into your farming practices.
Technology is one of the tools that helps farmers overcome challenges and ensure sustainable growth of their operation. Current technology available on small- to medium-sized tractors, harvesters and planters can help farmers achieve better efficiency and therefore better yields.
Cloete explains that productivity and support are the advantages that technology on these machines can offer the farmer during the season.
“When you hear about technology on a farm, everybody immediately thinks software and phone or computer applications. However, technology on a machine also makes it more fuel efficient and limit stoppage due to maintenance.”
He further states that they, along with the farmer, needs to look beyond the machine if he wants to improve his productivity.
“We have to look at his practices, and make sure we have the right technology available to support him.”
Mechanisation monitoring
Every farmer, regardless of the size of his business, has access to a cell phone. What does the future look like in terms of app-driven technology for mechanisation monitoring?
With this in mind, John Deere focusses on unlocking business value for the new-era farmer. The company is privileged to have a team of engineers that can ascertain what a customer needs and in what form they must provide it in order to unlock his farm’s potential. This could be anything from understanding his fuel limit to knowing what size his field is.
However, often times these machines are in the hands of contractors and not in the farmer’s hands, or it could be a farmer-contractor hybrid model. But you want to know what your machine is doing, how much fuel it’s using and how many hectares it covered by making use of AFGRI’s operation centre platform. Whether on your own farm or that of a customer.
“We are committed to adding more market segments and becoming more market appropriate for this specific segment,” Cloete said.
Access to money
Technology helps farmers by giving them better access to financing. Cloete says there are some exciting things happening in the background when it comes to asset financing.
“With the data that you have and that you can collect with today’s technology and telematics via a connected machine, you can now see the amount of work that is being done in the field and you can also plan ahead.
“With the knowledge we have, we can also underwrite the machine instead of underwriting the farmer. We have faced issues with underwriting farmers when the farmer does not necessarily own his land, and has no collateral or bank statements.
“Thanks to its collaboration with Hello Tractor in other African countries, John Deere is excited to hopefully bring a pay-as-you-go service or rent-to-own agreement to its South African clients as well.”
For more information, visit afgri.co.za
