(Expansion) – One of the sectors that has not stopped its dynamics despite the onslaught of COVID-19 is primary production. Its workers were considered part of the essential critical infrastructure in all countries. The generation of food and inputs provided by the agricultural sector are essential for human subsistence, so stopping it is not and will not be a viable alternative.
However, the evolution of the agricultural sector is an unresolved issue given the highly heterogeneous nature of the industry. The range can range from so-called agriculture 4.0 with all the use of the most advanced technology today to rainfed agriculture, which in Mexico represents around three-quarters of the total area planted.
One of the most important factors to consider is climate change. The dramatic variation in temperatures has come to represent a major challenge, especially to the sown area that does not have some type of control over its processes.
This element has also come to affect one of the crucial elements of the process: access to water sources. Water stress is already a crisis in various regions of the country and despite the fact that there are technologies that allow the use of reclaimed water for agricultural purposes, the investment in many cases is considerable and decision makers are not always sensitive to the consequences of not have a constant and safe source of water supply.
Companies with financial capacity have at their disposal a number of technologies that they can use to optimize their yields: greenhouses, controlled irrigation systems, sensors, RFID’s , among many others that allow them, through digitization, to plan, control and predict throughout the value chain process.
Thus, frontier technologies such as the internet of things (IoT), drones, machine learning and big data are elements that have a direct application in the agribusiness sector. Thus, information is the necessary complement to intuition or experience in decision-making.
Another important trend is Business Intelligence or Business Intelligence (BI) that allows us to generate data systems that through analysis are translated into relevant business information and that has a positive impact on the growth of the companies that comprise it.
BI tools promote the optimization of business areas, from internal departments such as sales, production levels, resource and expense management, to the commercial analysis of competitors, the market and their trends.
By collecting the information, reports can be generated according to the needs of the organization and formulate the most assertive strategies and actions to achieve the objectives. In this way, generating an alliance between innovation and tradition represents a window of opportunity for the growth of production, specialization and competitiveness of Mexican agriculture.
Frontier technology has been seen as a cost that should be avoided in SMEs since the high prices involved in acquiring or developing this type of tools weigh heavily. But it has not been considered that, thanks to technological development, they are becoming more accessible and should be seen as an investment to promote efficiency and business development.
However, it is clear that this technification scenario cannot be built from a single actor in the process. The public sector must invest decisively in generating adequate information at the macro level that serves as a starting point to characterize at the micro level the most critical variables that translate into higher crop yields.
The academy also has an extremely important role in training and empowering producers through the analysis of information, in such a way that it contributes to strategic planning, but also to decision-making in the daily operation.
A shift to the use of these tools will allow a more competent and resilient industry, with innovations such as more precise surveillance of crops in real time through Big Data , better control through process automation, early detection of pests reducing the risk of a crop loss, among many other advantages that can lead Mexican agriculture as a whole to successfully compete globally.
Editor’s note: Eduardo Durazo Watanabe works at the Baja California Center for Wine Studies, CETYS University. Follow him on. The opinions published in this column belong exclusively to the author.
