A virtual assistant developed in Chile can help farmers make their operations more efficient, including in the use of water.

"It's like a doctor checking the performance of your body every five minutes," according to Instacrops CEO Mario Bustamante.

Instacrops, through the Internet of Things (IoT), provides a set of technological solutions and services to help farmers produce food more efficiently, but with the necessary resources, amid the water crisis that is affecting many Latin American countries.

Bustamante said that the results obtained by Instacrops users in terms of water efficiency are very positive.

"An agricultural company we work with confirmed that after two seasons working with Instacrops they reduced the 47 annual irrigations they previously had to just 32 today. In other words, in two seasons the use of water fell by 32%,” he explained.

He also commented that efficient use and good management of water can lead to better sizes and quality of fruit production.

"Even if you have plenty of water, but you don't manage it well, you won't have a good harvest,” he said.

Bustamante says that another benefit of Instacrops is that it delivers real and objective data.

“We can, through this application or virtual assistant that you can have on your smartphone, inform you about the millimeters of water that your plant consumed in certain hours," he said.

"That, plus other parameters, allows you to define an irrigation strategy with a very high level of precision."

This information can be updated every five minutes and viewed anywhere, so the farmer does not have to be in the field to monitor his crops.

“You will have information regarding irrigation, nutrition and fertilization in a single platform. That is why we say that it is a comprehensive virtual agricultural advisor,” he explained.

The information is collected by the equipment installed in the crops as well as high-resolution images captured by drones, field sensors, satellites, and intelligent irrigation controllers.

All the data captured by the equipment is processed by a powerful software in the cloud developed by Instacrops to later display objective and concrete information to any farmer profile.

Instacrops has its headquarters in Chile and has offices in Mexico and Colombia, with partners in several countries in the region. 

The company will participate in the inaugural Agricultural Water Summit, which will take place on April 20, 2021, in San Francisco de Mostazal, Chile.

Organized by Yentzen Group, the Agricultural Water Summit will be a meeting point not only for the agricultural industry and related entities in Chile but also for international experts, who will come together to share their experience with using innovative techniques and farm management styles to limit the impacts of drought on horticultural operations.

Speaking about the event, Bustamante said: "In the post-Covid-19 world we will have to be more conscientious about natural resources. The Agricultural Water Summit will be an event that will have a broad reach in Latin America and will in a transversal way address the drought and how best to manage water resources."

For more information on the Agricultural Water Summit, click here.