Pulverizadores Fede is dedicated to the development, design and manufacture of air blast sprayers and trailed mist blowers since more than fifty years, being specialists in the precision agriculture sector at an international level.
With their R&D projects, in active collaboration with European research centres and universities, they promote the digitization of the field. Their goal is to make agriculture a more sustainable and environmentally friendly activity and to help agricultural companies to achieve maximum profitability by offering healthy products to fruits and vegetables consumers.
They have been using EGNOS since 2019 and it is automatically configured in H3O technology (Healthy crop, Healthy environment, Healthy finances through Optimization) and SCG system (Specialty Crops Gateway), both agronomic management tools, outstanding in the high-value crops sector.
H3O technology is incorporated into the spray equipment, being part of their Smartomizer, a smart atomizer connected to a digital platform to manage the treatments. Following the instructions from this platform, the device performs precision spraying according to the vegetable mass and records the treatment data for a later visualization and analysis on a map, allowing a real traceability of the treatments. On the other hand, the SCG is a device installed on the tractor that allows recording on a map all the tasks carried out to have valuable integrated information to track the field´s work and its costs.
Dr. Lars T. Berger, Chief Technology Officer, explains that they use EGNOS because “it improves the positioning of their solutions which involves precision spraying, traceability, technology proactivity as well as data collection for visualization and analysis. The value of these digitization solutions relies on the precision and integration of the IoT (Internet of Things) applied to the tasks carried out in the field”.
Thanks to the precision provided by EGNOS, the machinery guidance and tracking of treatments are improved. It makes then possible to carry out Zone Spray treatments to automatically adapt the spraying parameters to the plant density of each field´s area to be treated. This entails a notable reduction in the environmental impact due to the decrease of agricultural chemicals sprayed, an improvement in agri-food safety and savings in production costs.
The users from Pulverizadores Fede experienced a high level of satisfaction with H3O and SCG technology and as expressed by Mr. Berger: “part of this success is thanks to the benefits provided by EGNOS”, which is currently present in more than 400 devices. Some of this equipment has been used during the pandemic to disinfect public spaces against COVID-19. EGNOS supported a precise spraying of disinfecting product, which was afterwards visualized and analysed in a digital platform to ensure an optimal disinfection.
The solutions using EGNOS service have been developed in the FieldCompanion project (E! 118844), which has received funding from Eurostars-2 Programme and co-funding from CDTI and Horizon 2020 Programme.