Green Growth. The company is a developer of real-time yield mapping technology for farmers, with its new innovation being a Green Growth Yield Monitor to make yield monitoring and analysis highly effective and as simple as possible.
The company explains its system provides real-time data analytics on land productivity which can ultimately help farmers reduce fertiliser usage by at least 10%.
It allows farmers to feed more people for less, make additional profit, and save and improve the soil for future generations, and for those who are going to the DLG Feiertage expo in Mannheim, Germany, 14-16 June 2022, this agritech innovation will be showcased, but for those who aren't - reading on will deliver quite the harvest of information.
So, what makes the Green Growth Yield Monitor a new and exciting game changer?
The system collects and analyses crucial harvesting data across every point of the field with minimal interaction from the farmer.
Combining the best practices in telematics, data science, and interface building to make hardware integration and software usage seamless, it seems, to me at least, that this technology really is next-level.
During harvest, yield data is collected directly from harvesting machines and is analysed and presented in real-time as a heat map. Yield maps play a crucial role in farm management processes enabling optimization of farm inputs, such as fertilisers, seeds, and crop protection products, which are very important elements of sustainable farming.
With Green Growth’s solution, farmers can easily and in real-time detect and measure the performance of all their work throughout the season.
Key features and benefits:
- Universal: it can be installed on any age, make, or model of the harvester. The farmer can have a fleet of different machines harvesting the same field, and with Green Growth will get the most accurate yield map;
- Scalable: minimal interaction from end-users. All control is done from the web app, any calibration can be done at any time from anywhere;
- Affordable price: 7-10 times lower than competitors;
- Fast self-installation: under 2 hours;
- High calculation accuracy: 95% or higher.
As populations grow rapidly and global average life expectancy increases, arable land is decreasing.
However, as Green Growth points out, the need to feed a fast-growing population means farmers must increase the intensity, and create more with less, rather than growing the acreage of their operations, which may simply not be possible.
Given yield is the most important indicator of farm efficiency, this is why it is so important to have truly accurate information about land productivity from each sq m of farmland. Moreover, every year farmers experiment with different seeds and fertilisers to find the best combinations, but even when farmers see the total amount of harvested crops that year’s approach produced, that is still not as informative as you’d imagine, as results can vary, even within one field.
This can lead to additional costs for unnecessary fertilisers, seeds, and agrochemical soil analysis. Solving this issue is why Green Growth has developed an affordable hardware/software kit that is easy to install on combine harvesters and measures grain flow through the machine during the harvesting season. Simultaneously, the software creates heat maps, letting the farmer see zones with high and low productivity in real-time while in the office.
GreenGrowth CEO and co-founder Alfiya Kayumova explains, “Agriculture is one of the most dynamically developing industries. It is focused on the global challenge of feeding a growing human population with ever-limited scarce resources. Farmers need to increase intensity rather than focus on extensiveness. Yield monitoring is simply essential as an absolute indicator of farm efficiency.
"This is why it is so important to have accurate and timely information about land productivity from each sq m of farmland. We see our mission as bringing the best cutting-edge technologies to the agri sector. This will ensure farmers have the opportunity to use fewer inputs while generating greater output with the added benefit of respect to long-term soil management and future generations of farmers. We believe we did not inherit the Earth from our parents but are borrowing it from our children.”
Green Growth executive director and co-founder Dr Evgeny Savin with a Ph.D. in particle physics says, “The agricultural market is adapting to new technologies very quickly. Self-driving is already common in agriculture, just as it is in mining, and modern tractors or harvesters can have more technology in them than modern cars. Of course, to manage all this technology and work with the collected data, many software apps are being developed.
"Usually, developers work in big companies with their operation centres, while there are also many great tech startups who create inspiring and impressive solutions. However, the vastness of the solutions can be far too complex for the end-user. One farming season could take a whole year, so there is no time or budget to test every single solution on the market. That’s why we try to work closely with farmers, to study their processes and needs before we sell anything to anyone. We want our solution to be as genuinely helpful as possible.”
Availability
The business model is based on charges for hardware and a yearly subscription for data access. The system is targeted to any size farm that is involved in crop production. Hardware costs US $1990 per harvester, yearly subscription starts from $400 and gives access to data visualisation. The technology works on every combine-harvester - no matter the brand or year of manufacture.
